Study explores educational, social consequences of aggressive policing
Assistant Professor in Sociology Joscha Legewie takes a big-data approach to his inequality research. His most recent scholarship, published in American Sociological Review, found that aggressive policing in New York City had significant educational and social consequences for African American boys. Researched with Columbia Law School’s Jeffrey Fagan, the study credits New York City’s Operation Impact — a program that added police officers to high-crime neighborhoods — with temporarily lowering crime rates in the impacted neighborhoods. However, linking information about Operation Impact with a quarter of a million teens shows that the program led to significantly lower test scores for African American boys. Legewie, who joined Harvard’s faculty last year, spoke to the Gazette about the work. Q&A Joscha Legewie GAZETTE: How did this research bubble up? LEGEWIE: For more than 10 years, I’ve been working on racial bias in policing. I was mainly interested in spatial and temporal patterns of policing, so I...