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Black people treated less respectfully in police interactions, study finds

July 17, 2017

In a first-of-its-kind study, Partnership member Jennifer Eberhardt and colleagues at Stanford University analyzed police officer speech patterns in 981 traffic stops recorded on body-worn cameras. “We find,” Eberhardt and her co-authors write in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, “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.” They hope the study will open up new avenues in research and support more positive interactions on the ground. “This work,” they write, “demonstrates that body camera footage can be used as a rich source of data rather than merely archival evidence, and paves the way for developing powerful language-based tools for studying and potentially improving police-community relations.”

A summary of and link to the study are available on Stanford University’s website.

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