Latino Threat: The Role of Political Threat on City Capacity for Social Control

Abstract

In recent years, police killings of minority individuals have come to the forefront ofscholars and the minds of the general public, with the highly publicized murders of George Floyd, Freddie Gray, and Breonna Taylor. Extant literature largely focuses on police killings of African Americans, and while this is of great importance, less attention has been paid to police-involved homicides of Latinos. The current study seeks to understand city level variation in police killings of Latinos, paying particular attention to a “dynamic” measure of racial threat -- change in the Latino population, and the presence of open political opportunity structures. I draw on an original dataset of 233 cities, with data curated from Fatal Encounters, Decennial Census, the American Community Survey, the Uniform Crime Report, the National Immigration Law Center, and the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials. Regarding racial threat, I find that static Latino threat operates in a nonlinear fashion as it relates to police killings, and moreover that cities that experience more pronounced change in the Latino population over time (i.e., dynamic threat) translates to higher city-level rates of police killings of Latinos. Additionally, I find that sanctuary jurisdictions and gateway cities serve as a protective buffer for Latinos against lethal police violence. Implications for this complex and nuanced issue, including police-community relationships, the functionality of the police, and extralegal consequences for minority populations are also discussed.