Objectives. To estimate the association between rates of police-related deaths and neighborhood residential segregation (by income, race/ethnicity, or both combined) in the United States.
Methods. We identified police-related deaths that occurred in the United States (2015–2016) using a data set from the Guardian newspaper. We used census data to estimate expected police-related death counts for all US census tracts and to calculate the Index of Concentration at the Extremes as a segregation measure. We used multilevel negative binomial models for the analyses.
Results. Overall, police-related death rates were highest in neighborhoods with the greatest concentrations of low-income residents (vs high-income residents) and residents of color (vs non-Hispanic White residents). For non-Hispanic Blacks, however, the risk was greater in the quintile of neighborhoods with the highest concentration of non-Hispanic White residents than in certain neighborhoods with relatively higher concentrations of residents of color (the third and fourth quintiles).
Conclusions. Neighborhood context matters—beyond individual race/ethnicity—for understanding, preventing, and responding to the occurrence of police-related deaths.
Public Health Implications. Efforts to monitor, prevent, and respond to police-related deaths should consider neighborhood context, including levels of segregation by income and race/ethnicity.
- At the time of the study, Justin M. Feldman was with and Nancy Krieger is with the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences and Brent A. Coull is with the Department of Biostatistics, Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston, MA. Sofia Gruskin is with the Program on Global Health and Human Rights, Institute for Global Health, University of Southern California, Los Angeles.
