Policing and Real Estate Development

Does order maintenance policing increase in areas experiencing real estate investment? I construct a dataset of policing and development data for census tracts in New York City from 2009 to 2019 to explore the changes in low-level order maintenance policing in areas with increasing development permits for new buildings and major alterations. I find that increases in real estate investment are positively associated with increased disorder policing. This relationship persists in models with year fixed effects but not two-way fixed effects, indicating strong cross-sectional variation. Segmenting the city by income and race shows that this relationship is strongest in wealthier and whiter tracts, suggesting that development-directed order maintenance policing functions to protect increasing capital investment in areas that are already heavily invested. Titled “To Protect and Serve Capital: Policing, Real Estate Development, and the Regulation of Wealthy Spaces in New York City”, this work has been presented at the American Sociological Association Annual Meeting and is currently a working paper.

Criminal Legal Algorithms, Technology, and Expertise (CLATE)

This project is part of the Trust Collaboratory. Carceral algorithms encompass the broad category of algorithmic, automated, and data-driven practices employed in the criminal legal system. While often introduced as part of an “objectivity campaign” that positions the technology as more impartial, objective, and scientific than human decision-making, in practice these algorithms rely on human decision-makers in ways that can create tensions in established regulatory structures, reinforce or obfuscate existing biases, and expand the scope of carceral systems. Drawing on a combination of interviews, legal analysis, and quantitative data, this project explores how algorithms challenge decision-making processes in policing, prosecution, and how expertise gets wielded.

My recent published paper, coauthored with Gil Eyal and Amy Weissenbach, examines these expertise tensions in probabilistic DNA profiling. Work in progress compares how these dynamics unfold across international contexts and different technological interventions such as facial recognition technology, risk assessment instruments, and predictive policing. Work from this project has been presented at the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S) Annual Conference, Barnard College, and the University of Pittsburgh.

Development Regulation and Landlord Power

Landlords play an active role in development, but their relationship to regulatory bodies is not well understood. How does the permit process for new building developments unfold across space and over time in NYC? How is the permitting process related to patterns of ownership, wealth concentration, gentrification, and public and rent-stabilized housing? I focus on types of ownership and neighborhood characteristics to study where landlords, corporate or individual, site development projects for new buildings, and the ways development is regulated (or not) by the state. In particular, I explore how landlords and developers in New York City mask ownership and plans for neighboring building redevelopment and hypothesize relationships to evictions, housing complaints, and gentrification. This project builds on work by Josh Whitford and Kristen Akey at the Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy (ISERP) that maps new building filings in New York City. This analysis is currently in progress.

Racial Capitalism, Protests, and Economic Crisis

This paper received the 2023 ASA Section on Collective Behavior and Social Movements’ Mayer N. Zald Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship Student Paper Award.

The Black Lives Matter protests following George Floyd’s murder during the summer of 2020 demonstrated an unprecedented scale of mobilization against police violence. What made the response to this killing larger than past incidents of police brutality? In this paper, Katy Habr and I explore how the rapid and severe economic recession created by the COVID-19 pandemic related to protest participation. We collect data on protest attendance and sudden employment loss in 491 commuting zones in the United States and find that employment loss is positively and significantly associated with greater rates of BLM protest attendance. This relationship is not observed for other protests during the pandemic, indicating a specific relationship between police brutality and economic shock. These findings expand the social movement literature on how political and economic systems interact, contextualizing police violence as one dimension of a broader systemic failure of racial capitalism. This paper, titled “A Convergence of Crises: Sudden Employment Loss and Protest Attendance During the Covid-19 Pandemic”, is currently under review.

Racial Disparity in Incarceration, Solitary, and Risk Scoring

This work is part of the Pennsylvania Solitary Study at the Columbia Justice Lab. The Pennsylvania Solitary Study (PASS) is a mixed methods study that aims to understand how harsh conditions of confinement may affect health and well-being for incarcerated populations, identify the effects of solitary confinement on social and economic outcomes after prison release, and describe the conditions of living and working in high levels of custody in a large U.S. prison system.

My paper with the study, coauthored with Jessica T. Simes and Bruce Western, estimates the population prevalence of solitary confinement. We find that 11% of all black men in Pennsylvania, born 1986 to 1989, were incarcerated in solitary confinement by age 32. Reflecting large racial disparities, the population prevalence is only 3.4% for Latinos and 1.4% for white men. About 9% of black men in the state cohort were held in solitary for more than 15 consecutive days, violating the United Nations standards for minimum treatment of incarcerated people. Findings suggest that harsh conditions of U.S. incarceration have population-level effects on black men’s well-being. This paper has been presented at the American Society of Criminology Annual Meeting and Jay College of Criminal Justice.

Work in progress examines the impact of risk assessment instruments used at prison intake on incarceration, punishment, and parole decisions.