Are Police Officers More Suspicious of Minorities?
Authors: Geoff Alpert, University of South Carolina, John MacDonald, RAND Corporation, Roger Dunham, University of Miami
Goal: The goal of this study is to evaluate the latent psychological factors that influence police decision-making in the field. Behavioral and non-behavioral suspicion were evaluated in terms of whether or not minority status was a driving factor in developing both types of suspicion. The formation of suspicion and investigative stops of citizens were evaluated as resulting variables of the study.
Background Information: At the time of this study, there was no empirical evaluation of the social processes that influence a police officer’s decision-making tendencies. At a time in which racial profiling was at the heart of policing research and academia, the authors felt that this was an injustice to the true evaluation of policing practices. Whilst there was plenty of research indicating how officers decided to stop, search, and/or arrest a suspect, there was a lack of information regarding the precedents of these crucial decisions. Prior research indicates that while an officer’s prior experiences and attitude help to partially explain their decisions in the field, the most influential information that helps to determine a police officer’s decision making is through the situational factors surrounding the scene at the time.
Research Methodology: The researchers took a mixed-methods approach to this study. Qualitative data were drawn from a 174 Systematic Social Observation (SSO) in Savannah, Georgia. Quantitative data was collected to account for data points such as officer race, years of service, rank, etc. Data was also collected to identify whether or not officers perceived the neighborhood they were patrolling as predominantly black, and whether or not the officer believed the neighborhood to be “troubled”. Both of these two elements hold in previous literature for developing police suspicion and influencing subsequent decision-making. Two hypotheses were developed based upon prior literature: 1) minority suspects would be more likely to be viewed suspiciously by the police for non-behavioral reasons, and 2) the minority status of suspects will play a significant role in the decision to formally stop a citizen.
Findings: Authors find that the minority status of offenders does not significantly influence the decision of a police officer to formally stop and question a suspect in an investigative manner; however, minority status does have a significant influence in the development of non-behavioral suspicions. This means that officers are more likely to become suspicious of a Black individual for reasons outside of their behavioral cues, as compared to what the individual is actually doing.
What does it mean?: Based on the findings of this research, we can conclude that officers do form suspicion differently for minorities compared to White citizens. While this particular article does not address why this might be, the principle is confirmed through their results. Hypothetical reasons that this might happen revolves around subconscious prejudices as well as the culture that some departments have in their organizational framework. I believe that a key question to ask is this: Are ALL police officers prejudiced in their formation of suspicion? NO. However, this research article supports the notion that it needs to be something that is documented and accounted for before these practices spread throughout an entire department and get to the point that there is no coming back from. Further, please note that 1) this data was collected a long time ago and there has been strides to hold police officers much more accountable since then, and 2) this is a study of 1 police department and 174 observations. This does not mean that all departments form suspicion of minorities in this fashion, nor does it give us reason to believe that all members of the Savannah Police Department (now the Savannah Chatham Metropolitan Police Department) form suspicion in this manner. The final take from this article is this: police administrators ought to acknowledge that this is something that happens in police agencies across the country. Effective administrators will be cognizant of these findings, and input effective strategies to control for these possibilities.
Link to article: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/247200271_Police_Suspicion_and_Discretionary_Decision_Making_During_Citizen_Stops
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