Abstract
Objectives
To measure disparities in experience of police use of force and injury among persons with serious mental illnesses.
Methods
We gathered novel police use of force and suspect ...injury data from 2011 to 2017 from a nonrandom sample of nine police departments in the United States and used synthetic methods to estimate the share of the local population with serious mental illness. We estimate disparities using multi-level models estimated in a Bayesian framework.
Results
Persons with serious mental illness constitute 17.0% of use of force cases (
SD
= 5.8) and 20.2% of suspects injured in police interaction (
SD
= 9.0) in sample cities. The risk that persons with serious mental illness will experience police use of force is 11.6 times higher (95% CI, 10.7–12.6) than persons without serious mental illness. Persons with serious mental illness are also at a higher risk of experiencing injury, 10.7 times (95% CI, 9.6–11.8), relative to persons without serious mental illness. These relative risk ratios are several times larger than racial and ethnic disparities estimated in the same cities.
Conclusion
Persons with serious mental are at a significantly elevated risk of experiencing police use of force and injury in police encounters than the general public. The disparities we estimate are several times higher than racial/ethnic disparities in force and injury. Efforts to reform police practices and reimagine public safety in the United States should address significant disparities in police use of force against those with serious mental illness.
Recent research in the United States has argued that the threat of confirming the “racist cop” stereotype may paradoxically increase the propensity for coercive policing by depressing officers’ ...self-legitimacy. The current study aimed to assess the influence of the threat of the “racist cop” stereotype on officers’ self-legitimacy and their attitudes toward force in an Australian policing jurisdiction. An online survey was completed by 306 frontline officers in Queensland, Australia. Structural equation modeling was used to assess the influence of stereotype threat on officers’ attitudes toward force, and the extent to which this is mediated by perceptions of self-legitimacy. The findings confirmed previous findings, with increased officer perceptions of stereotype threat associated with increased support for coercive policing, mediated by reduced self-legitimacy. The findings are discussed with reference to how the validity and salience of the “racist cop” stereotype can be diminished.
Not Yet Human Goff, Phillip Atiba; Eberhardt, Jennifer L; Williams, Melissa J ...
Journal of personality and social psychology,
02/2008, Letnik:
94, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Historical representations explicitly depicting Blacks as apelike have largely disappeared in the United States, yet a mental association between Blacks and apes remains. Here, the authors ...demonstrate that U.S. citizens implicitly associate Blacks and apes. In a series of laboratory studies, the authors reveal how this association influences study participants' basic cognitive processes and significantly alters their judgments in criminal justice contexts. Specifically, this Black-ape association alters visual perception and attention, and it increases endorsement of violence against Black suspects. In an archival study of actual criminal cases, the authors show that news articles written about Blacks who are convicted of capital crimes are more likely to contain ape-relevant language than news articles written about White convicts. Moreover, those who are implicitly portrayed as more apelike in these articles are more likely to be executed by the state than those who are not. The authors argue that examining the subtle persistence of specific historical representations such as these may not only enhance contemporary research on dehumanization, stereotyping, and implicit processes but also highlight common forms of discrimination that previously have gone unrecognized.
The Space Between Us Goff, Phillip Atiba; Steele, Claude M; Davies, Paul G
Journal of personality and social psychology,
01/2008, Letnik:
94, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Four studies investigate the role that stereotype threat plays in producing racial distancing behavior in an anticipated conversation paradigm. It was hypothesized that the threat of appearing racist ...may have the ironic effect of causing Whites to distance themselves from Black conversation partners. In Study 1, participants distanced themselves more from Black partners under conditions of threat, and this distance correlated with the activation of a "White racist" stereotype. In Study 2, it was demonstrated that Whites' interracial distancing behavior was not predicted by explicit or implicit prejudice. Study 3 provides evidence that conceiving of interracial interactions as opportunities to learn may attenuate the negative consequences of threat for Whites. Study 4 found that Whites have conscious access to their experience of stereotype threat and that this awareness may mediate the relationship between threat and distance. These results are discussed within a broader discourse of racial distancing and the possibility that certain identity threats may be as important as prejudice in determining the outcomes of interracial interactions.
According to stereotype threat theory (Steele, 1997), stereotyped targets underperform on challenging tests, in part because they are worried about being viewed in terms of the negative stereotype ...that they are intellectually inferior. How then are the negative effects of stereotype threat reduced for stereotyped targets? To examine this issue, a study was conducted to investigate whether stereotype threat's adverse effects are reduced when a Black experimenter administers a verbal test to Black participants. We further examined the question of whether Black participants have a subjective awareness of stereotype threat. Results showed that when a Black experimenter gave a verbal test to Black participants, they did not suffer the typical performance decrements associated with stereotype threat. Additionally, results supported the hypothesis that Black participants have conscious access to the experience of stereotype threat and that this effect is partially mediated by their endorsement of the stereotype.
Despite an increase in research relating to racial disparities in policing—particularly in the area of deadly force—there have been comparatively few attempts to theorize which factors predict ...disparate policing. We fill this gap by combining routine activity theory from criminology with situationist approaches to discrimination from social psychology. We propose that disparate policing is most likely to occur when officers who are vulnerable to situational risk factors for bias encounter citizens who are members of vulnerable out-groups. We argue that situational risk factors for bias and aggression among police provoke feelings of threat and motivate self-protection and/or feelings of disgust and out-group derogation. We present social psychological laboratory research and, where available, field research specific to policing as a way of exploring and bolstering the proposed framework. This work supports an agenda for future scientific research that may assist practitioners in identifying likely opportunities for reform even as we await further field research that tests these hypothesized parameters.
The present experiments suggest that the desire to benefit the in-group drives dominant-group members' policy preferences, independent of concern for out-groups' outcomes. In Experiment 1, the effect ...of a manipulation of affirmative action procedures on policy support was mediated by how Whites expected the policy to affect fellow Whites, but not by the expected effect on minorities. In Experiments 2 and 3, when focused on losses for the White in-group, Whites' racial identity was negatively related to support for affirmative action. However, when focused on gains for the Black out-group or when participants were told that Whites were not affected by the policy, racial identity did not predict attitudes toward the policy. In Experiments 2 and 3, perceived fairness mediated these effects.
There is a shocking dearth of scientific certainty about how to assess racial bias in policing. Specifically lacking is an examination of the causal relationship between officer psychological ...attitudes and their interactions with minority suspects. Do officer racial attitudes lead to more racially biased police behavior? Why do we, as psychologists and scientists, know less than we should about psychological attitudes and their effects on police behavior in the field? To answer this question, we first review what researchers have learned given the available types of existing data: crime data, officer data, and public opinion data. Next, we discuss how insufficient access and lack of rigorous design have detracted from thorough research on racial bias in policing. Finally, we detail how new opportunities for social scientists have the potential to overcome these barriers and conduct rigorous psychological research on equity in policing.
The social category "children" defines a group of individuals who are perceived to be distinct, with essential characteristics including innocence and the need for protection (Haslam, Rothschild, & ...Ernst, 2000). The present research examined whether Black boys are given the protections of childhood equally to their peers. We tested 3 hypotheses: (a) that Black boys are seen as less "childlike" than their White peers, (b) that the characteristics associated with childhood will be applied less when thinking specifically about Black boys relative to White boys, and (c) that these trends would be exacerbated in contexts where Black males are dehumanized by associating them (implicitly) with apes (Goff, Eberhardt, Williams, & Jackson, 2008). We expected, derivative of these 3 principal hypotheses, that individuals would perceive Black boys as being more responsible for their actions and as being more appropriate targets for police violence. We find support for these hypotheses across 4 studies using laboratory, field, and translational (mixed laboratory/field) methods. We find converging evidence that Black boys are seen as older and less innocent and that they prompt a less essential conception of childhood than do their White same-age peers. Further, our findings demonstrate that the Black/ape association predicted actual racial disparities in police violence toward children. These data represent the first attitude/behavior matching of its kind in a policing context. Taken together, this research suggests that dehumanization is a uniquely dangerous intergroup attitude, that intergroup perception of children is underexplored, and that both topics should be research priorities.
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