The topic I selected in my previous assignment investigated the perception different races have about law enforcement officers, and how police officers view different races. DeSilver et al. (2020), in the first article, investigated ten popular beliefs about race and policing. Their study was motivated by George Floyd’s death, a man who appeared to be resisting arrest and died after law enforcement officers used too much force as they tried to arrest him. One of the ten things they investigated was the main reasons for George Floyd’s death. Police offices having fatal encounters with black people. They analysed information from previous surveys done by other researchers in recent years. The results showed that 60% of the adult participants thought that encounters between black people and police officers tend to be fatal and is a sign of broader problems between black people and police officers; 57 % of black officers, 27% of white officers, and 26% of Hispanic officers thought the same.
Graziano and Gauthier (2017) carried out the second study investigating the racial-ethnic hierarchy (and why they exist) where perceptions of law enforcement systems are concerned. The main aim of this study was to examine the views black people held about law enforcement and compare these views to the views that other races had about law enforcement. The independent variables were neighbourhood, policing, and the primary predictor variable-race-ethnicity. The dependent variable was measured using the number of times police officers used offensive language, excessive force, stopped a participant without reason, or the number of times participants experienced racial profiling. They investigated this theory using the chi-square test and descriptive statistics.
The results we are focusing on today are the relationship between race and the number of times police officers use force. Graziano and Gauthier’s (2017) results showed a significant relationship between race and the use of excessive force. Black participants showed they had more encounters with law enforcement that involved the use of excessive force than other races.
In the data provided in excel, participants were asked if there were any situations they would imagine approving a policeman hitting an adult male citizen. The data was analysed using a chi-square test. The results showed a significant relationship between ethnicity and situations where people would approve of a police officer hitting an adult civilian. Whites were more likely to support such situations, followed by blacks, then other races. The research was narrowed down to whites vs. blacks and whites vs. other races. The results were still significant in both cases. In all three cases, the χ2 seems to lie in the acceptance region, and the p-value is less than 0.05, which is the standard alpha value. However, the difference between blacks and other races was not tested, so we cannot conclude that there is a significant relationship between their racial differences and situations where they would approve of police officers hitting adult citizens.
Therefore, we can conclude that for the first article, most citizens believed that fatal encounters between blacks and police officers were motivated by other underlying reasons. More than half of black law enforcement officers thought that to be true, and 27% white officers. We can conclude from the second article that blacks have more encounters with police officers involving excessive force. Lastly, from the data provided, we can conclude that whites are more likely to approve excessive force than blacks and other races.
References.
Desilver, D., Lipka, M., & Fahmy, D. (2020, August 17). 10 things we know about race and policing in the U.S. Pew Research Center.
Graziano, L. M., & Gauthier, J. F. (2017). Examining the racial-ethnic continuum and perceptions of police misconduct. Policing and Society, 29(6), 657-672.
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