Group Threat and the Policing of Mobility: Neighborhood Visiting Patterns and Racial Disparities in Arrest Rates

Research on group threat has identified the racial composition of neighborhoods as significant for understanding spatial variation in racial bias and discrimination. A distinct but related strand of research has found disproportionate rates of arrests of non-Whites in predominantly White neighborhoods. This past work has generally operationalized racial composition in residential terms. Here, I explore the role of the racial composition of everyday mobility patterns in predicting racial threat. I propose that just as White neighborhoods experiencing growing non-White residential populations exhibit patterns of group threat, the same dynamic may occur in White neighborhoods experiencing large influxes of non-White everyday visitors. Drawing on arrests and cell phone mobility data from New York City, I find that in predominantly White neighborhoods, Black arrest rates are 150 percent higher when the share of Black visitors exceeds the share of Black residents by 10 percentage points. Similar but smaller patterns also appear for Hispanic visitors and Hispanic arrests. These heightened inflows of non-White visitors into these predominantly White “threatened” neighborhoods help explain why predominantly White neighborhoods sometimes exhibit especially elevated non-White arrest rates. Overall, this study offers a novel perspective on how policing practices intersect with the racialized control of space in urban environments.