| The Research Alliance for New York City Schools |
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Which NYC Youth Are Coming Into Contact with the Police? And How Does Aggressive Policing in Communities Affect Students’ Outcomes?
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Over the last three decades, cities across the United States have adopted strategies known as “proactive” or “broken windows” policing, with a focus on strict law enforcement for low-level crimes and extensive pedestrian stops. The initiatives have occurred disproportionately in poor communities of color, and an increasing number of students of color—particularly young men and boys—have come into contact with the criminal justice system. In New York City alone, for example, the police conducted more than 4 million pedestrian stops between 2004 and 2012; most of those stopped were Black or Latino and under age 25. Our new Spotlight post examines how the rate of police stops varied, based on race, gender and age, during this time period.
While the City’s approach to policing has changed since 2012—including the end of “stop and frisk” policies deemed racially discriminatory by the courts—many young people of color, in NYC and across the country, continue to live in communities with a heavy police presence. Yet, to date, there has been relatively little research on how this impacts students’ educational outcomes.
Our new brief, Aggressive Policing and Academic Outcomes, examines the impact of police “surges” in NYC students’ home neighborhoods. The study focuses on the NYPD’s Operation Impact—a policing program that was implemented from 2004 to 2014 and increased the intensity of broken windows policing in selected NYC neighborhoods.
Our findings show that Operation Impact resulted in a modest reduction in violent crime in the neighborhoods where it was being implemented. This might be expected to improve students’ academic performance, given past research indicating that violent crime in a student’s community can impede cognitive development, school performance, and mental health. We found the opposite, however. For Black boys who happened to live in a targeted neighborhood, police surges had a substantial negative influence on their state test scores. The effect became more pronounced as boys got older.
The brief and Spotlight post present our findings in more detail and highlight several important questions raised for policy and practice. |
| The Research Alliance for New York City Schools is a nonpartisan research center housed at the New York University Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development. The Research Alliance conducts rigorous studies on topics that matter to the city’s public schools. The organization strives to advance equity and excellence in education by providing evidence about policies and practices that promote students' development and academic success.
Learn More at Our Website |
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