Does POV Overcome Racial Bias? Identification with Officers and Citizens and Evaluations of Their Behavior in Police Use of Force Videos

• In Event: HIGH-DENSITY: At the Intersection of Cognition, Emotion, and Message

Abstract

Digital technology has made it possible to capture police-citizen interactions and disseminate them widely, which has increased public scrutiny of policing and calls for more departmentally sanctioned capture of these interactions via body-worn camera devices. However, the public outrage, emotion and subsequent calls for intervention that are often resultant from these videos, especially when they depict white officer on minority citizen interactions, may depend as much on video production features (e.g., camera point of view) as the actual interactions depicted in them. This study investigated this possibility in an experiment. Findings indicate that more biased individuals reported more identification with the officer and more belief that the officer behaved appropriately when dark skinned citizens were harmed from the officer perspective. These individuals also reported less identification with the citizen and less belief that the citizen behaved appropriately when dark skinned citizens were harmed from the officer perspective.

Authors

• Rachel L. Bailey, Florida State University

• Jiawei Liu, Washington State U

• Alex Kirkpatrick, Washington State U

• David Makin, Washington State U

• Dale Willits, Washington State U

• Bryce Dietrich, U of Iowa