Citizenship Social Control: How Immigration Status Reorganizes Public Evaluations of Police Encounters

Abstract

How does an individual’s citizenship status affect someone’s evaluations of an officer-civilian stop encounter? Policing attitudes in the United States have historically remained fixed and divided along racial lines. White Americans’ police force approval has been consistently high for the past 30 years, while Black Americans have remained consistently low in their approval for the police force in the same time frame. What is unclear, however, is how Latino Americans’ support toward policing compares to this White-Black paradigm, and if these fixed attitudes at the aggregate level could be moved at the individual-encounter level. Given the current rise of cooperation agreements signed between local law enforcement agencies and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Immigration Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency, the question of how individual-level citizenship status influences public support for officer’s actions, and how it may interact with racial identification and the encounter outcome, is salient yet understudied. A 3 × 2 × 2 factorial survey experiment (N = 3,867 White, Black, and Latino respondents) finds that respondents revise their evaluations of a police stop as citizenship and outcome information of the individual being stopped is introduced. Citizenship cues shift evaluations equally regardless of target race, a pattern I term citizenship social control. What happened drives the largest effects: detention reduces officer support by 10–17 percentage points across all groups. The race of who happened to barely matters: target race effects are precisely estimated zeros for comparisons between conditions with a Latino or Black individual. Who is watching structures the overall level of support: partisanship, racial resentment, and police trust jointly generate 40-percentage-point within-group spreads that dwarf every treatment effect. As immigration enforcement expands into local law enforcement priorities, the citizen/non-citizen boundary may increasingly organize public evaluations of police encounters independently of the racial hierarchy that has traditionally structured them.