Planning Grant: Assessing African American Perceptions of Criminal Justice (Neighborhood Spatial Association and Local Crime Effects)

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This project will examine the influence of spatial associations on perceptions of the fairness in the American legal system. In particular, the project will investigate the effect of dissimilarities between a respondent's community with adjacent neighborhoods. Perception of the legal system may vary among residents of two neighborhoods with similar socioeconomic characteristics and racial composition because the experiences with the legal system differ as a result of their adjacent communities. This project addresses this gap in the conventional analysis of perceptions of the legal system by explicitly incorpo-rating characteristics of adjacent and close-by neighborhoods. The principal data source will be the National Black Politics Study (NBPS), a national survey of African Americans. NBPS provides items on perception of fairness in the legal system and among the police, as well as individual-family characteristics and the census tract of the respondents. The census tract information will be used to merge the NBPS data with 1990 Census Summary File data on neighborhood information, such as median income, education, poverty, population density, land use, housing occupancy, building vacancy, percent renters and owners. In addition, the project conducts a second contextual analysis by examining the impact of local crime and arrest rates by offense type of perceptions of injustice. The research will broaden the understanding of neigh-borhood effects on perceptions of inequality and fairness in the legal system. The project also will highlight potential costs of expanding arrest rates in terms of perceptions of fairness and ultimate cooperation with legal authority. The results from this work should significantly inform several important debates relating to neighborhood factors, community policing, broken windows, and quality of life policies. Finally, the project will produce two data sets with a host of neighborhood level information merged with attitudinal responses to questions relating to politics, religion, and the law.