The UMass Computational Social Science Institute is pleased to offer an exciting lineup of 10 seminar speakers this fall, many linking to an overarching theme of interdisciplinary approaches to causality.

Joscha Legewie
Assistant Professor of Sociology, Yale University
Friday, September 29, 2017 • 12:30 p.m.-2:00 p.m. (lunch served at 12:15)
Computer Science Building, Room 150/151
Title: Policing and the Educational Performance of Minority Youth

Abstract: How does the expansion of police presence in poor urban communities affect the educational performance of African-American youth? Exploiting a quasi-experimental design from New York City, we show that aggressive, zero-tolerance policing can have a negative influence on the educational performance of African-American youth. Under Operation Impact, the New York Police Department (NYPD) saturated high crime areas with additional police officers with the mission to engage in aggressive order maintenance policing. We used administrative data from about 2 million adolescents aged 10 to 14 and exploited quasi-random variation in the relative timing of police surges and the date of standardized exams among children in the same neighborhood. Exposure to police surges significantly reduced test scores for African-American boys. The size of the effect increases with age but there is no discernable effect for African-American girls and Hispanics. Aggressive policing can thus lower the educational achievement of African-American youth and perpetuate the racial achievement gap.

Bio: Joscha Legewie (Ph.D. 2013, Columbia University) is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Yale University. His research focuses on social inequality/stratification, race/ethnicity, quantitative methods, education, and computational social science. His work is based on innovative quantitative methods. It builds on rigorous causal inference using natural or quasi-experimental research designs with a keen interest in “big data” as a promising source for future social science research – including administrative student records, millions of time and geo-coded NYPD stop-and-frisk operations or 311 service requests from New York City.