To Protect and Serve Capital: Policing, Real Estate Development, and the Regulation of Invested Spaces in New York City

How does real estate development relate to order maintenance policing patterns? I argue that real estate developers influence low-level policing to protect their investments, tracing the history of funding and financial incentives to police redevelopment. I use development permits as a tangible metric of spatially rooted investment and construct a dataset of census tracts in New York City from 2009 to 2019. I find that areas with more new residential development are associated with more order maintenance arrests in the following year, net of crime, calls to police, and area demographics. This relationship is largest for corporate-owned redevelopment, suggesting that increasing corporatization may uniquely relate to policing patterns. I find that this relationship is present not only in areas at risk of gentrification, but also in wealthier and Whiter tracts, where development-directed policing functions to protect increasing investment in already-wealthy areas. Spatial Durbin models show that redevelopment may have an even greater effect on the policing patterns in the surrounding area. By quantifying the influence of physical reinvestment on disorder policing, this article highlights the relationship between urban economic investment and formal social control.