I have a new preprint posted, Mapping attitudes towards the police at micro places. This is work with Jasmine Silver, as well as Rob Worden and Sarah McLean. See the abstract:

We demonstrate the utility of mapping community satisfaction with the police at micro places using data from citizen surveys conducted in 2001, 2009 and 2014 in one city. In each survey, respondents provided the nearest intersection to their address. We use inverse distance weighting to map a smooth surface of satisfaction with police over the entire city, which shows broader neighborhood patterns of satisfaction as well as small area hot spots of dissatisfaction. Our results show that hot spots of dissatisfaction with police do not conform to census tract boundaries, but rather align closely with hot spots of crime and police activity. Models predicting satisfaction with police show that local counts of violent crime are the strongest predictors of attitudes towards police, even above individual level predictors of race and age.

In this article we make what are analogs of hot spot maps of crime, but measure dissatisfaction with the police.

 

One of the interesting findings is that these hot spots do not align nicely with census tracts (the tracts are generalized, we cannot divulge the location of the city). So the areas identified by each procedure would be much different.

 

As always, feel free to comment or send me an email if you have feedback on the article.