Computational linguistic models of police-community interaction
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- In this dissertation, I use footage from body-worn cameras to analyze the language of police-community interactions during routine traffic stops in three studies exploring officers' words and prosody as well as the back-and-forth structure of these interactions. In the first study, I implement pragmatic theories of politeness in a computational model of officer respect, informed by a thin-slicing study of participant ratings of officer utterances. Inspection of the weights learned by the model shows the strongest influence from negative politeness speech acts like apologizing and reassurance. Using this model I find large-scale evidence that officers speak with consistently less respect towards black versus white community members, even after controlling for contextual factors like the race of the officer and the severity of the infraction. In the second study, I show an analogous racial disparity from prosody alone by obtaining human judgments on content-filtered clips of officer speech. Building a model of human judgments from simple prosodic features I find evidence that officer anxiety is foregrounded as participants judge clips with lower F0, lower intensity, and slower speech rate more highly. In the third study, I develop an ontology of dialog acts unique to the traffic stop interaction, and employ these to show that community members are overwhelmingly compliant in these interactions, but that officers respond differently to less-compliant acts (e.g. rejecting fault or deflecting questions) from black and white community members. Such disparities in common, everyday interactions between police and the communities they serve have important implications for procedural justice, the building of police-community trust, and linguistic theories of interaction. This dissertation presents the first systematic linguistic analysis of officer body-worn camera footage, demonstrating that it can be used as a rich source of data rather than merely archival evidence, and paves the way for developing powerful language-based tools for studying and potentially improving police-community relations.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic resource; remote; computer; online resource |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Place | California |
| Place | [Stanford, California] |
| Publisher | [Stanford University] |
| Copyright date | 2019; ©2019 |
| Publication date | 2019; 2019 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Voigt, Robert Frederick |
|---|---|
| Degree supervisor | Jurafsky, Dan, 1962- |
| Thesis advisor | Jurafsky, Dan, 1962- |
| Thesis advisor | Eberhardt, Jennifer L. (Jennifer Lynn) |
| Thesis advisor | Eckert, Penelope |
| Thesis advisor | Podesva, Robert |
| Degree committee member | Eberhardt, Jennifer L. (Jennifer Lynn) |
| Degree committee member | Eckert, Penelope |
| Degree committee member | Podesva, Robert |
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Linguistics. |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|---|
| Genre | Text |
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Rob Voigt. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Linguistics. |
| Thesis | Thesis Ph.D. Stanford University 2019. |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2019 by Robert Frederick Voigt
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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