“Policing Gentrification: Stops and Low-Level Arrests during Demographic Change and Real Estate Reinvestment”

Does low-level policing increase during gentrification? If so, are police responding to increased crime, increased demand by new residents, or are they attempting to “clean up” neighborhoods marked for economic redevelopment? To address these questions, this article constructs a longitudinal dataset of New York City neighborhoods from 2009 to 2015. I compile data on neighborhoods’ demographics, street stops, low–level arrests, crimes, 311 calls to the police, and—using a novel measure—property values. Maps, spatiotemporal modeling, and fixed effects regressions compare changes in stops and low-level arrests to changes in several measures of gentrification.