Community Members’ Evaluations of Police-Civilian Interactions

• In Event: Posters I

Abstract

The current study tests whether suspect race influences evaluations of interactions with police officers, as well as whether suspect race influences judgments about suspect characteristics (i.e., disrespect and resistance). This study also investigates whether the roles of officer versus civilian, and the perspectives of self versus other influence the way that police-civilian interactions are evaluated.
466 subjects were assigned to one of four conditions: officer evaluating themselves, officer evaluating another officer, civilian evaluating an officer, or civilian evaluating a civilian. Participants read a brief vignette describing a police-civilian (or civilian-civilian) interaction that was ambiguous with respect to suspect respect and suspect resistance. They were then asked to rate how resistant and disrespectful they found the suspect, along with other dependent measures.
The results from this study illustrate the differences that surface from simply having participants role play officers and altering the perspectives from which they do so. When participants played the role of an officer evaluating themselves, they rated the suspect as significantly more resistant than participants playing the role of an officer evaluating another officer. Overall, the findings from this study highlight the need to conduct more research on police and civilian perceptions of officer-civilian interactions.

Author

• Mawia Khogali, CUNY Graduate School / John Jay College