Police officers speak less respectfully to black people, body camera footage shows
An analysis of police body camera footage shows that officers consistently use less respectful language with black community members than with white community members. The researchers who conducted the study say the widespread racial disparities in officers’ language use may erode police-community relations.
A multidisciplinary team from Stanford’s psychology, linguistics and computer science departments developed a new artificial intelligence technique for measuring levels of respect in officers’ language to analyze the body camera footage. The researchers used it to the transcripts from 981 traffic stops the Oakland Police Department (OPD) made in a single month – over 183 hours of body camera footage.
According to the results, white residents were 57 percent more likely than black residents to hear a police officer say the most respectful utterances, such as apologies and expressions of gratitude like ‘thank you.’ Meanwhile, black community members were 61 percent more likely than white residents to hear an officer say the least respectful utterances, such as informal titles like ‘dude’ and ‘bro’ and commands like ‘hands on the wheel.’
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Dan Jurafsky, a study co-author of the study and Stanford professor of linguistics and of computer science, says there was no swearing, but the many small differences in how they spoke with community members added up to pervasive racial disparities.
“Understanding and improving the interactions between the police and the communities they serve is incredibly important, but the interactions can be difficult to study. Computational linguistics offers a way to aggregate across many speakers and many interactions to detect the way that everyday language can reflect our attitudes, thoughts and emotions – which are sometimes outside of our own awareness,” Jurafsky said.
“Our findings are not proof of bias or wrongdoing on the part of individual officers. Many factors could drive racial disparities in respectful speech. I’m hopeful that more law enforcement agencies will approach their body camera footage as data for understanding, rather than as evidence for blaming or exonerating. Together, researchers and police departments can use these tools to improve police-community relations,” Jennifer Eberhardt, co-author of the study and professor of psychology at Stanford, added.
The study was published June 5 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
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