Enforcement trends in the city of St. Louis from 2007 to 2017: Exploring variability in arrests and criminal summonses over time and across communities

Abstract

The goal of this study is twofold: (a) to describe trends in enforcement activity in the city of St. Louis from 2007 through 2017 and (b) to document community variation in these trends. Five types of enforcement actions are examined: felony, misdemeanor, municipal, and bench warrant arrests and criminal summonses-in-lieu of arrest. Results indicate that enforcement activity decreased over the study period, particularly for nonfelony arrests among Blacks. City-wide trends obscure some variability in neighborhood enforcement. Neighborhood trends in enforcement varied by type of action, but in all cases, trends were conditioned by racial composition. For example, misdemeanor and bench warrant arrests exhibited steeper declines in neighborhoods with a higher percentage of Black residents, resulting in a narrowing of the race gap. In contrast, differences in criminal summonses across neighborhoods of varying racial compositions increased. The effects persisted net of measures of economic disadvantage, community location, residential mobility, household composition, calls for service, and population size. The findings highlight the importance of disaggregating enforcement trends by race and place and documenting changes in less serious, but more prevalent, types of law enforcement activity.

Behavioral nudges reduce failure to appear for court

“…From our data, we cannot estimate how often warrants for summons failures to appear lead to arrests in New York City. However, a recent study in St. Louis found that in 2017, ~1% of all residents were arrested for similar warrants (25). Of course, the proportion of defendants who are arrested for these warrants is necessarily higher than the proportion of residents, but if even 1% of defendants in our sample were arrested for failure to appear, then our interventions would have saved approximately $140,000 from August 2016 to September 2019.…”

Communities and the enforcement of lower level offenses

“…Results by Glazener, Kozlowski, Lynch, and Smith () and Hughes, Campbell, and Schaefer () suggest that calls for service and crime, respectively, are strongly related to enforcement and that neighborhood racial composition is less tied to enforcement after accounting for these factors. In contrast, Slocum, Huebner, Greene, and Rosenfeld () found that neighborhoods with a higher proportion of Black residents had higher rates of enforcement (with the exception of municipal arrests) even after accounting for calls for service and other sociodemographic features of the community. They also found, within the context of citywide declines in lower level enforcement, the most dramatic declines were for communities with a greater proportion of Black residents.…”

“…In addition, the papers found divergent relationships with economic disadvantage and enforcement actions. Glazener et al () and Slocum et al () found higher rates of enforcement for both lower level offenses and felonies among areas with greater economic disadvantage, while Hughes et al () only found a significant relationship with lower level citations and in the opposite direction. That is, communities with greater economic disadvantage had fewer lower level citations issued.…”

“…Slocum et al () conducted an analysis of enforcement trends (e.g., municipal, misdemeanor, felony, and bench warrant arrests, and issuance of criminal summonses) in St. Louis over an 11‐year period (2007–2017). They also examined calls for service, the proportion of community that had Black residents, economic disadvantage, age composition, and residential stability.…”

Corrigendum

“…In (Slocum, Huebner, Greene, & Rosenfeld, 2020), authors noticed that the race specific population counts used to compute the rates presented in Section 5.2 are incorrect. These population counts were not used in any other analyses, and the results in all other sections of the paper remain unchanged.…”