MMC2100 Brooks Massey: Police Brutality in the News

One aspect of police behavior that has not been fully or consistently emphasized is the problem of perception, particularly how African American police officers serving in smaller law enforcement agencies perceive themselves and their view of how their agencies and the communities they serve perceive them. African American police officers were surveyed to determine their perceptions of the positive or negative effects of their presence in local police agencies. Key findings indicate that African American police officers still find themselves victims of racial indifference and seemingly hostile work environments; believe that racial profiling is both practiced and condoned by their agencies; that agencies do little to improve diversity and provide little support for their efforts; and that they strongly perceive their presence in these smaller agencies to be a positive effect on police interactions in the minority community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the 1960s, one of the major reform efforts in law enforcement has been to increase the number of Black Americans within police agencies and on patrol in the streets. The general premise behind these efforts has been that increased diversity will improve police-community relations and will decrease biased police behavior, particularly against Black citizens. Policies seeking to reform policing through increasing the numbers of African American officers have been implemented with little empirical evidence that an officer's race (or ethnicity) is actually related to their behavior towards citizens, in particular arrest decisions. Using data from systematic social observations of police-citizen encounters in Cincinnati, OH, this study examines the influence of officer race on arrest outcomes, focusing on the behavior of Black officers. Findings suggest that officer race has direct influence on arrest outcomes and there are substantive differences between White and Black officers in the decision to arrest. In general, White officers in our study were more likely to arrest suspects than Black officers, but Black suspects were more likely to be arrested when the decision maker was a Black officer. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]