Dr. Catherine Tomko is research faculty at Johns Hopkins School of Public Health focusing on structural factors impacting substance use and mental health harms among people who use drugs.

The relationship between gentrification—a process involving demographic and economic changes in neighborhoods—and policing is underexplored. Gentrification may intensify the racialized targeting of people who use drugs (PWUD) if new white or affluent residents call 911 calls for drug-related offenses. We analyzed this by: 1) conducting a scoping review of peer-reviewed literature on police interactions in gentrified areas, and; 2) examining associations between neighborhood gentrification and drug-related 911 calls in Baltimore, Maryland.

Screening of 2,424 abstracts examining policing and gentrification globally identified 31 articles for abstraction, only one of which focused on PWUD. Results illustrate increased policing in gentrified areas, particularly for Black and Hispanic communities, often led by citizen calls-for-service. We examined this dynamic following Baltimore’s drug decriminalization policy in 2020. Using an established gentrification measure we categorized census tracts into high vs low gentrification groups. Interrupted time series models were used to estimate monthly drug-related 911 calls in two time periods to account for possible pandemic-related effects: April 2020-December 2021 [N=53,527 calls] and January-December 2022 [N=23,094 calls]. In the first period, drug-related 911 calls in high gentrification tracts declined significantly less than in other neighborhoods (-14.5 vs -50 calls/month, respectively). In the second time period, calls began increasing in high gentrification tracts (+6.5 calls/month, p=0.04) but plateaued in other neighborhoods. Data suggest that despite city-wide reductions in 911 drug calls following decriminalization, declines were less pronounced and more short-lived in gentrifying areas.

These findings provide new insight into how housing and policing crises may intersect to produce inequities. Our scoping review will identify gaps in data and directions for future research. Using the example of Baltimore we will discuss how citizen-generated complaints in gentrifying neighborhoods may potentiate drug enforcement even amid decriminalization. Implications of this work for harm reduction and drug policy will be discussed.