Police Violence and the Maintenance of Public Sentiment: Why Do the Public Continue to Support the Police?

• In Event: Citizen Perceptions: Understanding the Impact of Police Use of Force

Abstract

Highly publicized incidents of police brutality have triggered outrage across America, but to what extent, and in what ways, do they change the way people think about police performance and police legitimacy more broadly? This study addresses these questions through the lens of intergroup attributions. Specifically, it tests the hypothesis that causal (mis)attributions of responsibility for police encounters structure the public response to police violence. To the extent that victims of police violence are perceived as culpable for precipitating the incident, causal agency may be obscured from police and aggression may be seen as acceptable. Building on previous work on the ultimate attribution error, this research suggests that intergroup bias shapes perceptions of responsibility. Minority victims may be misperceived as internally motivated, and consequently over-attributed causality and blame. Police, on the other hand, may be perceived as externally compelled and accorded exculpatory motivations. As such, group identity may predict lay evaluations of police malfeasance via ascriptions of responsibility. This research contributes to a growing body of work on police abuse of power, and may help explain the resiliency of police legitimacy amid continuing revelations of brutality.

The results have not yet been analyzed but will be complete by the conference.

Author

• Jenna Nicole Milani, University of Oxford