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Research Summary: Place‐based conditions are well‐established predictors of police behavior, but the literature lacks nuanced examinations of how place‐based factors influence officer decision making, especially by citizen race/ethnicity and from officers' perspectives. We investigate officers' accounts regarding how they weigh place‐based factors into their arrest decisions of Black, Hispanic, and White drug suspects in Newark, New Jersey from 2011 to 2016. Our analysis of 438 filed drug arrest reports revealed that most arrestees, especially Black Americans, became susceptible to heightened police scrutiny because of their presence in stigmatized, criminalized areas. Although place‐based stigma and individualized prohibited behavior coalesced to guide police contacts with Hispanic and White residents, officers made contacts with Black Americans based on a lower legal basis, often irrespective of their individualized behavior in stigmatized places. Policy Implications: Officers' differential, racialized reliance on place‐based conditions supports the need for effective, evidence‐based, community‐centered social services that reduce crime, overreliance on police, and opportunities for discriminatory policing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research Summary: In response to highly publicized, controversial police killings of Black Americans, policymakers and advocates have proposed several police reforms, including a recurrent, decades‐long demand for police departments to diversify their forces to better match the racial composition of the communities they serve. We draw on a unique police agency‐level dataset comprising 1,988 local police agencies and regress measures of police killings of Black, Hispanic, and White Americans from 2013 to 2018 onto racial congruence ratios and other theoretically relevant predictors. The results provide support for the hypothesis, revealing a negative association between racial congruence and police killings among Black and Hispanic victims. Policy Implications: Our results suggest that for at least some local police departments, increasing the racial/ethnic representation of officers might lower police killings of people of color. This implication offers some optimism amid impassioned demands to decrease police killings of Black Americans, specifically, and reform policing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigate macrolevel sources of police use of fatal force at the intersection of race, ethnicity, and gender. Focusing on 580 U.S. counties from 2013 to 2018, we build a unique dataset and analyze whether violent crime, social disorganization, and racial conflict indicators predict police killings among six victim subgroups of Black, Hispanic, and White men and women. Regression results show that violent crime—and social disorganization, albeit less consistently—is positively associated with police killings of men, irrespective of race/ethnicity, and Hispanic women while having no significant impact on Black or White women. We find nuanced evidence that racial conflict shapes police use of fatal force across all six racial-ethnic-gender subgroups. We conclude by discussing the implications of our findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]