New research confirms what many observers already knew: Police officers speak less respectfully to black drivers than white ones.
The paper, efficiently titled Language From Police Body Camera Footage Shows Racial Disparities in Officer Respect, draws a clear conclusion: “Such disparities in common, everyday interactions between police and the communities they serve have important implications for procedural justice and the building of police–community trust.”
The data joins a growing body of research on the types of police behavior that erode marginalized communities’ faith in law enforcement. It’s also validating. “At the very least this provides evidence for something that communities of color have reported, that this is a real phenomenon,” said Rob Voigt, a doctoral student in linguistics at Stanford University told CNN.
Voigt was one of the researchers who studied 183 hours of body camera footage taken by the Oakland Police Department, in Oakland, Calif. The team analyzed 981 routine traffic stops, and transcribed the interactions between the police and motorists. Words spoken to white and black drivers, called “utterances,” were given to a team of volunteers to review multiple times. The officers were then rated on a four-point scale of how friendly, respectful, polite, formal and impartial they were in the interaction. The volunteers had no identifying information about the officers or the driver, the reason for the stop or the outcome.
The Los Angeles Times has a terrific analysis of the study if you want more details. But here’s bottom line: “A clear pattern emerged: When the motorist was black, police officers were judged to be less respectful, less polite, less friendly, less formal and less impartial than when the motorist was white.”
This sort of research is important, experts say, because it enables police departments to identify the types of behavior that erodes trust. Unfortunately, the rich data produced by body cameras isn’t being used for meaningful critique.
“Despite the rapid proliferation of body-worn cameras, no law enforcement agency has systematically analyzed the massive amounts of footage these cameras produce. Instead, the public and agencies alike tend to focus on the fraction of videos involving high-profile incidents, using footage as evidence of innocence or guilt in individual encounters,” says the authors of the study.
This information, while helpful, is only the first step in a long journey to mitigate the bias that is deeply rooted in policing, and in routine traffic stops in particular.
The best current resource on the well-documented phenomenon of “driving while black,” is Michelle Alexander’s outstanding book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. “A classic pretext stop is a traffic stop motivated not by any desire to enforce traffic laws, but instead motivated by a desire to hunt for drugs in the absence of any evidence of illegal drug activity,” she writes. “After having your car torn apart by the police in a futile search for drugs, or being forced to lie spread-eagled on the pavement while the police search you and interrogate you for no reason at all, how much confidence do you have in law enforcement? Do you expect to get a fair hearing?”
Good manners will not be enough to solve this.
But for the officers and authority figures who are doing their jobs in good faith, and are alarmed to discover their tone doesn’t always reflect what’s in their hearts — here’s another observation to consider. Black and white people are listening for different things in an encounter with each other. As a leader, you need to be sure the respect you may feel is actually being perceived.
John Dovidio, a professor at the Yale School of Public Health, offered some commentary on the body-camera study to CNN. “If you bring a majority and a minority group member together, a white and a black person, in those interactions the basic needs and goals of the white and black person are very different,” Dovidio said.
“The white person in these intergroup interactions tends to want to be liked. They want to be sort of affirmed as being a good person,” he said. “But people of color, and this occurs for other historically disadvantaged groups, their major goal is to be respected… Everybody wants respect, but minority group members in interracial interactions with authority figures have a particularly heightened need to feel respected in those interactions and that’s why respect is such a key variable.”