{"id":12199,"date":"2026-01-28T17:00:36","date_gmt":"2026-01-28T17:00:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/discoveries\/?p=12199"},"modified":"2026-01-28T17:00:36","modified_gmt":"2026-01-28T17:00:36","slug":"murder-at-home-police-violence-at-work","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/discoveries\/2026\/01\/28\/murder-at-home-police-violence-at-work\/","title":{"rendered":"Murder at Home, Police Violence at Work"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n Samuel Thomas Donahue and Gerard Torrats-Espinosa, <\/span>“From the Block to the Beat: How Violence in Officers’ Neighborhoods Influences Racially Biased Policing,” American Journal of Sociology<\/em>,<\/a><\/span> 2025<\/span><\/div>\n\n
\"\"<\/a>
A long-exposure photo at night of a police car with flashing lights. “Hunting for a Gunman<\/a>” by\u00a0MSVG<\/a>\u00a0is licensed under\u00a0CC BY 2.0<\/a>.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Perceived threat plays an important role in police officers\u2019 on-the-job decision making. That makes sense – an officer concerned for their safety is more likely to use force against a civilian. But what if the perceived threat has nothing to do with that civilian? What if it didn\u2019t originate on the job at all?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Samuel Thomas Donahue<\/a> and Gerard Torrats-Espinosa<\/a> wanted to understand how a homicide in a police officer\u2019s neighborhood affects their likelihood of using force on civilians in the next week. Their study<\/a> suggests the answer depends on race – both the race of the officer and the race of the civilian.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Using administrative data from the Chicago Police Department (CPD), police officers\u2019 home addresses from voter registration rolls, and publicly available crime data, Donahue and Torrats-Espinosa created a snapshot of almost 9,000 CPD officers\u2019 neighborhood contexts and workplace conduct between 2012 and 2020. The authors matched officers exposed to a homicide near their homes with other officers who were not exposed to a homicide but otherwise shared the same race, assigned \u201cbeat,\u201d and shift day and time. To understand how race might affect police officers\u2019 likelihood of using force, the authors looked at scenarios with varying officer and civilian races.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/div>In almost every case, there was no meaningful change in the likelihood of an officer\u2019s use of force – with one notable exception: when a homicide occurred within 1\/8th of a mile of a white <\/em>police officer\u2019s home, that officer became seven times<\/em> more likely to use force against a Black <\/em>civilian in the following weekwhen a homicide occurred within 1\/8th of a mile of a white <\/em>police officer\u2019s home, that officer became seven times<\/em> more likely to use force against a Black <\/em>civilian in the following week.<\/span>. No other combination of officer and civilian race saw a change anywhere close. Donahue and Torrats-Espinosa say this is evidence that white police officers experience anti-Black racial bias when dealing with Black civilians in the aftermath of a neighborhood homicide.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Donahue and Torrats-Espinosa view this effect as an example of racial threat <\/em>– when prejudices among a dominant group are ignited by perceived threats to their status. The fact that the effect only showed up when white officers came into contact with Black civilians suggests that neighborhood homicides activate racial bias rather than a professionalized police response.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This article also shows how \u201cat home\u201d contexts impact \u201cat work\u201d behavior, and how violence can spread between neighborhoods \u2013 and between murders by civilians and violence by police.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Samuel Thomas Donahue and Gerard Torrats-Espinosa, “From the Block to the Beat: How Violence in Officers’ Neighborhoods Influences Racially Biased Policing,” American Journal of Sociology, 2025 Perceived threat plays an important role in police officers\u2019 on-the-job decision making. That makes sense – an officer concerned for their safety is more likely to use force against […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2227,"featured_media":12200,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[124,13,14],"tags":[141458,141441,141445,141434,141452,141478,141451,141448,141456,141469,141483,141450,141435,37293,141457,141460,4407,138511,2534,1063,141480,141477,141475,141479,141467,141437,141443,141486,138477,141488,141251,141471,141439,141462,141461,141485,141463,141440,141465,141468,141442,141270,141438,141444,141453,141482,134876,141436,30419,141474,12882,109563,141409,37333,141449,141489,17586,138217,4225,138486,38471,141473,141454,141464,141481,141472,141476,126014,140386,524,141466,141455,141484,141487,141470,141459,141447,141446],"class_list":["post-12199","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-crime","category-inequality","category-race","tag-administrative-data","tag-anti-black-bias","tag-at-home-context","tag-based-on-the-article-policing","tag-behavioral-spillover","tag-bias-activation","tag-bias-in-policing","tag-black-civilians","tag-chicago-police-department","tag-civilian-harm","tag-civilian-race","tag-civilian-police-interactions","tag-comma-separated","tag-community-violence","tag-cpd","tag-crime-data-analysis","tag-criminal-justice","tag-criminal-justice-research","tag-criminal-justice-system","tag-criminology","tag-decision-making-under-threat","tag-dominant-group-threat","tag-empirical-social-science","tag-environmental-triggers","tag-fear-and-policing","tag-here-are-100-tags","tag-homicide-exposure","tag-homicide-proximity","tag-implicit-bias","tag-inequality-in-justice","tag-justice","tag-law-enforcement-accountability","tag-law-enforcement-behavior","tag-matched-study-design","tag-natural-experiment","tag-neighborhood-crime","tag-neighborhood-effects","tag-neighborhood-violence","tag-occupational-stress","tag-officer-behavior","tag-officer-safety","tag-perceived-threat","tag-police-decision-making","tag-police-misconduct","tag-police-psychology","tag-police-race","tag-police-reform","tag-police-use-of-force","tag-police-violence","tag-police-civilian-encounters","tag-policing","tag-public-safety","tag-quantitative-research","tag-race","tag-race-and-policing","tag-race-based-outcomes","tag-racial-bias","tag-racial-disparities","tag-racial-inequality","tag-racial-prejudice","tag-racial-threat","tag-racialized-outcomes","tag-racialized-threat-perception","tag-residential-context","tag-situational-stress","tag-social-context-of-policing","tag-sociology-of-crime","tag-spillover-effects","tag-structural-racism","tag-systemic-racism","tag-trauma-exposure","tag-urban-policing","tag-urban-violence","tag-use-of-force-incidents","tag-violence-diffusion","tag-voter-registration-data","tag-white-police-officers","tag-workplace-behavior"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/discoveries\/files\/2026\/01\/5159812532_f83778e795_o.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/discoveries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12199","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/discoveries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/discoveries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/discoveries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2227"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/discoveries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12199"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/discoveries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12199\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12205,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/discoveries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12199\/revisions\/12205"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/discoveries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12200"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/discoveries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12199"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/discoveries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12199"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/discoveries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12199"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}