Research

The project: Each year, 29 million U.S. drivers are pulled over by law enforcement. While common, these interactions are far from mundane. A growing body of evidence suggests that intrusive and disrespectful police encounters pose a threat not only to citizens’ trust, but to the physical health of communities of color. This project uses police body camera footage as a window onto police-citizen interactions to examine 1) racial disparities in officer communication and 2) the consequences of these differences for physiological stress and institutional trust.

The process: In the first study, researchers sampled audio from the first 90 seconds of 160 traffic stops of Black and White drivers in medium-sized U.S. city and edited the clips so listeners could not tell the race of the driver and only hear the police officers’ speech. 266 online respondents listened to the clips and rated the respectfulness of the officers’ communication (e.g., “How condescending is this officer?”) and their anticipated anxiety if they were the driver in the clip (e.g. “I would feel stressed in this interaction”).

In the second study, self-identified Black and White community members listened to the clips of officers’ speech during traffic stops as captured by police body cameras. The community members were connected to physiological stress recording equipment (electrocardiogram and galvanic skin response) in order to capture physiological stress in response to listening to the police encounters. The researchers also documented people’s their self-reported perceptions of the clips.

Results: In the first study, people perceived clips where officers stopped White drivers as being significantly more respectful and less anxiety-inducing than officer interactions with Black drivers.

In the second study, preliminary analysis suggests Black and White participants make similar judgments about how respectfully officers communicate. However, these interactions – and disrespectful ones in particular – carry different impacts across race for participants’ perceptions of police departments, with Black people generally experiencing less comfort, less trust in police, and more concern about interacting with police officers.

Nicholas Camp, Organizational Studies at U-M