Police Violence & Public Opinion: Linking Polling Practices with Current Events

• In Event: Looking Under the Hood: Polls, Epistemological Bias, and Human Error

Abstract

Recent media coverage of lethal confrontations between White police officers and unarmed African Americans inspires heated conversations about the state of race relations and criminal justice in the United States, and these conversations often influence the content of polling items. Unlike conventional public opinion research on racial differences in law enforcement practices, we are concerned not only with people’s perceptions but also with the process by which investigators design surveys. Our interest in both the survey discourse on and survey responses about police violence motivates the following research questions: 1/ do the ways in which pollsters ask questions reflect public discourse, and 2/ are the ways in which polling items presented shaping how respondents think about racial biases in police violence. We address these questions by employing computer-assisted content analyses of survey "toplines" (summary documents of polling results). This novel source of data allows us to examine dynamics in polling practices, particularly, whether survey designs and polling results are correlated with conversations about, for example, the degree to which the excessive use of force among police officers is diagnostic of America’s racial inequalities in the implementation of law enforcement.

Authors

• Ray Block, Penn State University

• Nathan Morse, Penn State University