Manufactured Disorder: Race, Policing, and Erroneous Ticketing in Chicago

Recent research shows that more monetary sanctions are issued in communities with a higher number of Black or Latinx residents. However, these studies have not examined the extent to which these sanctions resulted from legitimate infractions.  Based on preliminary findings in Chicago, sociologist Kasey Henricks finds that more than one in eight tickets were erroneously issued. She will further analyze the data to answer three questions: 1) Are erroneous tickets more likely to be issued in neighborhoods with higher numbers of Black or Latinx residents? 2) Are erroneous tickets more likely to be issued by patrol officers or parking enforcement officers, and 3) Does ethno-racial composition moderate the relationship between errored tickets and differential policing? The study will synthetize 1) ticketing data from ProPublica Illinois with 2) parking regulation data from the Department of Streets and Sanitation (DSS), Department of Transportation, Officer of the City Clerk, and Park Chicago, and 3) socio-spatial data from secondary sources. To measure the extent to which the ethno-racial composition of neighborhoods is associated with erroneous tickets, ProPublica and DSS data are linked with demographic and housing data from the Census Bureau.