COMMUNITY-BASED AND RESTORATIVE-JUSTICE INTERVENTIONS TO REDUCE OVER-POLICING

Abstract

Residents of marginalized communities suffer simultaneously from “over-policing and underprotection.”1 The various forms of over-policing are well-documented. Socioeconomically disadvantaged neighborhoods are subject to harsh police tactics, such as order-maintenance policing and aggressive investigatory traffic and pedestrian stops not typically experienced in predominantly white and middle-class neighborhoods.2 Intense police surveillance combined with harsh sentencing policies have led to high incarceration rates that have devastating social and economic effects on these communities.3 Over-policing and harsh criminal policies tend to erode trust in the police and the criminal justice system more generally.4 One survey of residents in six low-income communities found that a majority of respondents viewed police as racially and ethnically biased, while fewer than half thought the police acted in a procedurally just way, agreed that their police department met various measures of legitimacy, or agreed that “the laws of our system are generally consistent with the views of the people in your community about what is just and right.”5