MINORITY THREAT AND POLICE STRENGTH FROM 1980 TO 2000: A FIXED‐EFFECTS ANALYSIS OF NONLINEAR AND INTERACTIVE EFFECTS IN LARGE U.S. CITIES* |
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| Authors: | STEPHANIE L KENT DAVID JACOBS |
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| Institution: | 1. Assistant professor of sociology at University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Her research agenda focuses on conflict and political explanations for social control outcomes. Topics of interest include police use of lethal force, violence against the police, and the death penalty. Current projects include a cross‐national investigation of the legality of capital punishment and an individual and state level analysis of what happens to death row inmates.;2. Professor of sociology and political science at Ohio State. He uses a political economy approach to study the political and conflict determinants of criminal justice outcomes and crime. Recent publications include a cross‐national study of police strength, the factors that account for U.S. death sentences, and a longitudinal analysis of civil rights protests. Current projects include additional studies of capital punishment including a publication on the connections between lynchings and recent death sentences, and an investigation of slander based only on suspicion when exculpatory evidence is readily available. |
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| Abstract: | Many studies have assessed threat theory by investigating the relationships between the size of minority populations and police strength. Yet these investigations analyzed older data with cross‐sectional designs. This study uses a fixed‐effects panel design to detect nonlinear and interactive relationships between minority presence and the per capita number of police in large U.S. cities in the last three census years. The findings show that the relationship between racial threat and the population‐corrected number of police officers has recently become considerably stronger. In accord with theoretically based expectations, tests for interactions show that segregated cities with larger African American populations have smaller departments. The coefficients on another interaction effect suggest that racial segregation leads to reductions in police strength in the South perhaps because officers are less likely to intervene in residentially isolated black neighborhoods in this region. |
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| Keywords: | minority threat police per capita city level trends interactions nonlinear relationships |
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