Black and white meets blue : race and the social psychology of police-community interactions
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- In this dissertation, I examine how everyday interactions between police officers and community members build or erode trust along racial lines. In contrast to past social psychological approaches, which have narrowly focused on racial biases in officers' decision making, I advance an alternative framework for understanding these encounters: as institutional interactions. In Chapter 1, I outline this framework, which centers the interactions between institutional agents (e.g., police officers, teachers, doctors), and participants (e.g., citizens, students, patients). Like other intergroup interactions, these encounters bring together perspectives in a dynamic that unfolds across time. However, these interactions are unique in their institutional nature. Police officers are simultaneously individuals and extensions of the state, and act using a combination of their own discretion and departmental guidance. This dual role shapes both officer behavior and citizen experiences in the most common way in which citizens come into contact with the criminal justice system: as the subject of a traffic stop. A distinctive feature of vehicle stops is that the interaction occurs at the officer's discretion; that is, as a result of their decision to pull over a driver. In Chapter 2, I demonstrate that this discretionary context frames interactions in different ways for White and Black community members, shaping their construal of police encounters. In Chapter 3, I analyze racial disparities in the discretionary context of stops, demonstrating that, relative to White drivers, Black drivers are more likely to be stopped in circumstances where the justification for the stop is unclear and the officers' motives more discretionary in nature. I further establish that these disparities vary across departments, and are sensitive to changes in departmental policies. In Chapters 4 and 5, I turn to racial disparities in the content of interactions: how police officers communicate with drivers during traffic stops. In these chapters, I examine racial disparities in the respect that officers' language (Chapter 4) and tone of voice (Chapter 5) connote to drivers, as well as how officers' interpersonal communication influences how citizens' construal of police institutions. To conclude the dissertation, I highlight areas for future research within the institutional interactions framework, along with of implications of the theory for interventions to reduce racial disparities in policing.
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 | 2018; ©2018 |
| Publication date | 2018; 2018 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Camp, Nicholas Paul |
|---|---|
| Degree supervisor | Eberhardt, Jennifer L. (Jennifer Lynn) |
| Thesis advisor | Eberhardt, Jennifer L. (Jennifer Lynn) |
| Thesis advisor | Markus, Hazel Rose |
| Thesis advisor | Walton, Gregory M. (Gregory Mariotti) |
| Degree committee member | Markus, Hazel Rose |
| Degree committee member | Walton, Gregory M. (Gregory Mariotti) |
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Psychology. |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|---|
| Genre | Text |
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Nicholas Paul Camp. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Psychology. |
| Thesis | Thesis Ph.D. Stanford University 2018. |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2018 by Nicholas Paul Camp
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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