UCLA

Urban planners and police often shape the built environment in racialized ways, and can harm communities through discrimination, exclusion, incarceration, and police violence. Yet limited scholarship analyzes the various police practices that emerge from urban planning processes. This thesis explores how over 650 municipal general plans in California - forward-looking regulatory documents with lasting influence on neighborhood and life outcomes - engage the police through two text analyses: machine learning topic modeling and a random sample qualitative analysis. I find that over 70 percent of California cities mention policing in their general plans, and I identify ten unique themes in the way it is discussed. I find that cities with wealthier, older, and whiter populations tend to have more mentions related to enforcement and calls to the police and fewer mentions related to community and crime prevention. Future research should explore the capacity for communities and planners to proactively monitor outcomes of police enforcement and mandate reforms through the general plan.