This seminar is part of the Computational Social Science: Research & Networking Series.
Computational social science has the potential to address pressing challenges, but interdisciplinary collaboration is crucial. The DSI Computational Social Science Working Group invites researchers to a new meeting series exploring the intersection of data science and the social sciences. Sessions will provide an informal space for sharing work in progress and discussing new methods, collaborations, and shared interests. Join this working group to explore this exciting interdisciplinary area and potentially lay the groundwork for future projects.
Registration Request Form: Registration will be prioritized for Columbia faculty, affiliated scholars, and postdoctoral researchers. If you are a student or external guest, you may be waitlisted to attend until closer to the event date. All who submit on the below form will receive a confirmation email and a calendar hold if your registration is approved. Thank you again for your interest in attending!
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Date: Friday, May 8, 2026 (1:00 PM – 2:00 PM ET)
Location: Northwest Corner Building, DSI Suite, Armen Avanessians Conference Room, 14th Floor
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Speaker: Gerard Torrats-Espinosa, Assistant Professor of Sociology, Columbia University
Policing Across the Divide: How Social Distance Between Where Officers Live and Where They Patrol Shapes the Racial Patterning of Police Contact
Abstract: Police officers in the United States routinely patrol neighborhoods where they do not live, yet the consequences of this residential separation for racial disparities in policing remain underexplored. Drawing on more than four million daily officer–patrol assignments linked to officers’ residential addresses from the Illinois voter file, we construct a composite index of social distance between the neighborhoods where officers live and the neighborhoods they patrol on a given day. The index combines demographic composition, socioeconomic conditions, and crime rates to capture the gap between officers’ home contexts and their work environments. We use a multi-way fixed effects design that absorbs officer, beat, and day-level variation to isolate within-officer changes in patrol assignments and hold constant both stable officer characteristics and time-varying ground conditions. We find that on days when officers patrol neighborhoods more socially distant from their own, white officers use force more often and conduct more discretionary stops of Black civilians, with smaller effects on arrests. Effects are concentrated in low-discretion encounters and persist across robustness checks. Results suggest that the residential divide between officers and the communities they police is itself a structural source of the racial patterning of police contact.