April 24, 2019
Chris Dawes (New York Univ.)
Recent scholarship has documented the negative effect of incarceration on political engagement. However, there has been relatively little research on the effect of more common forms of contact with the criminal justice system. In this paper, we test whether neighborhood police stops depress the political engagement. To do so, we combine individual electoral participation in the 2010 and 2014 federal midterm elections with records of “Stop, Question and Frisk” (SQF) in New York City. These two elections allow us to take advantage of a change in New York Police Department (NYPD) policy that dramatically reduced the number of stops. Our results show that overall, SQF reduced turnout. Further, the effect of SQF was strongest among Black registered voters, the racial group disproportionately stopped by the NYPD. Consistent with our proposed mechanism that SQF demobilizes voters by creating a negative orientation towards the police and government more generally, we find that the effect of SQF is weaker in low crime neighborhoods where stops would likely be viewed as harassment or racial profiling compared to high crime neighborhoods where they are more likely to be considered a legitimate tool to reduce crime. Taken together, our results suggest that crime prevention strategies may have negative consequences for civic engagement and may exacerbate inequality in representation.