Allocating Police Resources While Limiting Racial Inequality

Police targeting hot spots of crime tends to disproportionately burden minorities via stops and arrests. This work attempts to reduce disproportionate minority contact by formulating a crime hot spots spatial allocation strategy for police that prioritizes areas of high crime, but constrains the targeted hot spots given different levels of acceptable racial inequality. This racial inequality constraint is measured as the proportion of minorities likely to be stopped in those areas prioritized by police. Using data on stops and crime in New York City, I show that police stops can be more equitably distributed according to race, but there are fundamental trade-offs. One cannot gain a racial distribution of stops proportionately equal to the residential population without large decreases in the efficiency of targeting high crime areas. More modest gains can be had though in reducing the proportion of minorities stopped while still targeting high crime locations.