Black, Hispanic and female police use force less often than white male officers
Black and Hispanic police officers tend to stop, arrest and use force against civilians less often than white officers do, and female officers of all races use less force than their male colleagues, a new case study of the Chicago Police Department suggests.
Information on the demographics and behavior of thousands of Chicago police officers revealed how officers of different races and genders acted while on similar patrol assignments. While the results do not shed light on why these differences exist, they do suggest that diversifying U.S. police departments — which have historically been nearly all white and male — may improve police treatment of minority communities, researchers report in the Feb. 12 Science.
“When I got the paper, I literally at one point said, ‘hot damn,’” says Phillip Goff, a behavioral scientist at Yale University who wrote a commentary on the study published in the same issue of Science. “I was a skeptic about demographic reform previously, and now I am a convert.… Demographics reform in policing actually has the potential to dramatically change behavior.”
Diversifying law enforcement is one of the oldest, most frequently proposed police reforms, Bocar Ba, an economist at the University of California, Irvine, said in a Feb. 8 news conference at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, held online. Calls for changes to law enforcement have been particularly strong within the last year, in response to the police killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and other unarmed Black civilians. But so far, scientific research has not provided clear answers about how police officer demographics may influence their law enforcement activities. [Continue reading…]