Effects of New York City’s Neighborhood Policing Policy

• Author: Brenden Beck,Joseph Antonelli,Gabriela Piñeros
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/10986111211046991
• Published date: 01 December 2022
• Date: 01 December 2022
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article

Police Quarterly

2022, Vol. 25(4) 470–496

© The Author(s) 2022

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DOI: 10.1177/10986111211046991

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Effects of New York City’s

Neighborhood Policing Policy

Brenden Beck

1

, Joseph Antonelli

2

, and Gabriela Piñeros

3

Abstract

Between 2015 and 2018, New York City adopted “neighborhood policing,”an ex-

pansive policy to encourage interactions between police off‌icers and community

members. Among other changes, the initiative established hundreds of new

“neighborhood-coordination”off‌icers and gave “steady-sector”off‌icers time away

from 911 response to dedicate to resident interactions. This study evaluates the

initiative’s effects on crime, complaints of police misconduct, racial disparities, and

arrests. Using monthly data on New York City’s 76 police precincts between 2006 and

2019, we estimate the policy’s causal effect using high-dimensional time series models.

This approach accounts for the policy’s staggered adoption, addresses potential

correlation among outcomes and between precincts, and controls for unobserved

precinct characteristics. We f‌ind neighborhood policing reduced misdemeanor and

proactive arrests, especially in higher-poverty precincts outside of Manhattan, though it

did not change the racial disparities of such arrests. The policy did not affect crime. It

brief‌ly increased complaints against police.

Keywords

community engagement, misdemeanor arrests, staggered policy adoption,

heterogeneous treatment effects; community policing

1

Department of Sociology, University of Colorado Denver, Denver, CO, USA

2

Department of Statistics, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, USA

3

Department of Sociology and Criminology & Law, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, USA

Corresponding Author:

Brenden Beck, Department of Sociology, University of Colorado Denver, Campus Box 105, Denver, CO

80204, USA.

Email: Brenden.Beck@ucdenver.edu

Introduction

In 2015, the New York Police Department (NYPD) began a new program called

“neighborhood policing”aimed at reducing crime and improving police–community

relations. At the launch event for the policy, Mayor Bill de Blasio said the “truly

transformative”program was being applied “to ensure the people of this city have a

police force that is deeply connected at the neighborhood level…to build relationships

and deepen trust”(NYPD, 2015b). The City’s police commissioner and an architect of

the policy, Bill Bratton, characterized neighborhood policing as “a new era”(NYPD,

2015b). By 2018, the initiative had restructured each of the NYPD’s precincts into

smaller sectors; it appointed hundreds of new “neighborhood-coordination”off‌icers

whose training and primary duties were in community engagement; and it established

“steady-sector”off‌icers who walked a consistent beat and had a third of their shift away

from emergency response to devote to problem-solving work and resident interaction

(NYPD, 2018). The policy is spreading beyond New York. Chicago announced in 2020

that it was adopting a neighborhood policing initiative modeled on New York City’s

(Off‌ice of the Mayor of Chicago, 2020).

In this study, we evaluate neighborhood policing’s impacts on reported crime,

civilian complaints of police misconduct, low-level arrests, and racial disparities in

low-level arrests. The study is, to our knowledge, the f‌irst systematic assessment of

New York City’s neighborhood policing program. To perform the analysis, we gather

monthly data on New York City’s 76 police precincts from 2006 to 2019 and estimate

high-dimensional time series models. We validate our approach using the data from

before the initiation of neighborhood policing. We propose policy recommendations

and address methodological challenges in evaluating initiatives that, like this one, have

precincts adopt the policy at different times, have correlated outcomes, and have effects

that vary by unit-level characteristics (treatment effect heterogeneity).

New York’s neighborhood policing both draws on and departs from past community

policing initiatives (Bratton, 2015;Oliver, 2000;Reisig, 2010). The wide variety of

interventions that have been labeled “community policing”has sometimes muddled the

concept (Connell et al., 2008), but there are common elements the “ideal”program

should have: “community partnerships, organizational transformation, and problem

solving”(Cordner, 1997;Gill et al., 2014, p. 410; Weisburd & Eck 2004). In this

respect, New York’s version is typical. It promotes off‌icer liaisons with civilians, it

reorganized the city’s precincts, and it appointed off‌icers who specialize in problem

solving (Bratton, 2015;NYPD, 2018). Several elements, however, distinguish New

York’s neighborhood policing from many previous community policing initiatives.

First, it enlists specialized teams of “neighborhood-coordination”and “steady-sector”

off‌icers as well as traditional patrol off‌icers in community engagement. This eliminates

the typical “bifurcation”between community police who solve problems and patrol

police who answer calls for service (Bratton, 2015,p.2;Gill et al., 2014). A second

distinguishing feature is neighborhood policing’s scale. It was not deployed only to

crime hot-spots, only in communities with strained police–community relations, or

Beck et al. 471