Policing at a Distance: Explaining Suburban Support for Urban Policing

Why would suburban residents use their own tax dollars to fund policing in jurisdictions where they do not live? Two traditions in policing studies generate divergent answers: one treats it as a spatially bounded public good whose support tracks direct benefit, the other as an instrument of racial-spatial hierarchy whose support tracks group-position defense. Through a divide-the-dollar game embedded in a survey of six major U.S. metro areas (N = 6,200), we test the extent to which suburban residents support using their own tax dollars to fund policing in the urban core compared to residents of that core. We find that while suburban residents initially appear as or more willing to pay for metro policing than urban residents, this reverses after controlling for demographics. We test three explanations for this heterogeneity: demographic, material, and symbolic. Suburban willingness to pay for urban policing is partly explained by demographics, particularly ideology and age, but material self-interest, such as commuting to the city for work, is not a significant driver. We find symbolic concerns play a significant role: racial resentment strongly predicts support for police funding among all residents, while fear of neighborhood racial change is a significant driver specifically for white suburbanites. These symbolic variables persist in their predictiveness after controlling for demographics. The coalition funding urban policing extends across municipal boundaries, organized less by exposure to the service than by defense of a racial-spatial boundary, with implications for how state-level fiscal institutions—referenda, grants, preemption—channel those preferences into urban police budgets.