overpolice

English

Etymology

Verb

overpolice (third-person singular simple present overpolices, present participle overpolicing, simple past and past participle overpoliced)

(transitive) To police too much, as by patrolling a neighborhood excessively or meting out a punishment incommensurate to the severity of a crime.
- 2003 February 15, “The Fundamental Right to March”, in The New York Times‎^[1]:
  First, many veterans of protest marches believe that the police overpolice these events. Second, why are the police still willing to protect a St. Patrick's Day Parade if security concerns and costs are suddenly so important?
- 2016 July 1, Cory Doctorow, “White House plan to use data to shrink prison populations could be a racist dumpster fire”, in Boing Boing‎^[2]:
  Black people in America fit that description of being overpoliced and oversentenced.
- 2016 August 5, Victoria M. Massie, “Cops don’t need to hand out ice cream. They need to end racist policing practices.”, in Vox‎^[3]:
  Part of the difference in attitudes comes from African Americans’ experiences within a racially biased criminal justice system that overpolices black and brown neighborhoods and rarely holds officers accountable for reported mistreatment, excessive force, or even killing African Americans.
- 2023 July 19, Brianna Scott, Ailsa Chang, Jeanette Woods, “How AI could perpetuate racism, sexism and other biases in society”, in NPR‎^[4]:
  So if you live in a zip code that has been overpoliced historically, you are going to have overarresting. And we know that the overpolicing and the overarresting happens in Black and Latino communities. That's just a fact.

Antonyms

underpolice