Citation

Voigt R, Camp NP, Prabhakaran V, Hamilton WL, Hetey RC, Griffiths CM, Jurgens D, Jurafsky D, Eberhardt JL. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U. S. A. 2017; 114(25): 6521-6526.

Affiliation

Department of Psychology, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305; robvoigt@stanford.edu jleberhardt@stanford.edu.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2017, National Academy of Sciences)

DOI

10.1073/pnas.1702413114

PMID

28584085

Abstract

Using footage from body-worn cameras, we analyze the respectfulness of police officer language toward white and black community members during routine traffic stops. We develop computational linguistic methods that extract levels of respect automatically from transcripts, informed by a thin-slicing study of participant ratings of officer utterances. We find that officers speak with consistently less respect toward black versus white community members, even after controlling for the race of the officer, the severity of the infraction, the location of the stop, and the outcome of the stop. 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.

Language: en

Keywords

natural language processing; policing; procedural justice; racial disparities; traffic stops