Policing the pandemic: estimating spatial and racialized inequities in New York City police enforcement of COVID-19 mandates

Masking up and the role of the police

“…The enforcement of masks also may have further exacerbated race-based inequalities in policing within the US and added to an already contentious policing environment (Yang et al ., 2021). For example, Kajeepeta et al . (2022) found disparities in public health-related arrests such as social distancing and masking violations across New York City.…”

“…The enforcement of masks also may have further exacerbated race-based inequalities in policing within the US and added to an already contentious policing environment (Yang et al, 2021). For example, Kajeepeta et al (2022) found disparities in public health-related arrests such as social distancing and masking violations across New York City. Specifically, arrests for these violations were higher in areas with greater levels of poverty and minority populations, suggesting trends in differential enforcement.…”

“…Unique to the US context, the police were generally left to use their discretion on whether and how to enforce mask mandates, due to the lack of guidelines from local or state government. They then risk alienating segments of the population depending on how they choose to enforce mandates, becoming even more problematic if it opens the opportunity for unequal enforcement (Kajeepeta et al ., 2022; Yang et al ., 2021).…”

Examining the effects of the killing of George Floyd by police in the United States on attitudes of Black Londoners: A replication

“…While the onset of the pandemic saw "rally" effects, leading to more positive perceptions of police and other institutions, the longer-term effects of crisis policing can deteriorate public support and cooperation (Perry et al, 2021;Sibley et al, 2020). In addition, research on policing and the pandemic in the US and UK has shown racial disparities in COVID-policing (Harris et al, 2022;Kajeepeta et al, 2022), with BLM UK declaring that racism and COVID-19 were interrelated "deadly pandemics" (Goldsmith & McLaughlin, 2022). The effect of the death of George Floyd and subsequent protests is therefore difficult to disentangle from ongoing effects of broader institutional racism and racialized policing brought into focus by the COVID pandemic.…”

Altering Auras, Ideas, and Dreams: Naming and (Re)Claiming a Poetry for the Public’s Health

“…Professional and academic public health in the United States was born in a time of great and systemic social, political, and cultural violence and exclusion. Public health has not only reproduced and enabled such violence and exclusion over the years (Frieden & Collins, 2010; Gamble, 1997; Kajeepeta et al, 2022; Petteway, 2020), but has in many ways made epistemic and symbolic violence one of its hallmark characteristics—laying the foundation for a 21st-century public health research, practice, and knowledge canon rife with omissions, silences, and erasures that have functioned to devalue ways of knowing and knowledges from the margins. This is particularly legible through examination of whose knowledges, which types of knowledge, and which expressions of knowledge have been “counted” as legitimate and priority, as well as who has been/is credentialed to do the counting.…”