First 45-Words Critical in Determining Whether Police Stop Will Escalate
George Floyd’s murder at the hands of Minneapolis police officers in May 2020 sparked renewed attention on the relationship between police and the Black community. It also focused attention on the fact that black drivers are pulled by law enforcement at a disproportionately higher rate than White drivers.
With this in mind, researchers sought to figure out why some traffic stops end in escalation and why others end without any conflict by analyzing footage from bodycams.
The research was recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.
Researchers found was that for Black drivers, the first 45-words a law enforcement officer speaks after a traffic stop are critical and a harbinger of whether the stop will end normally, or escalate into a search, handcuffing, or an arrest.
Researchers studied bodycam footage from 577 traffic stops of Black drivers in an unidentified, medium-sized, diverse American city over the course of a month. The vast majority of the stops were for routine traffic violations.
Of those, 81 ultimately ended in escalation. Researchers did not include stops that escalated into use of force.
Using methods from computational linguistics, the researchers found that stops that result in escalation diverge from stops that end without escalation from the very start.
"The first 45 words, which is less than 30 seconds on average, spoken by a law enforcement officer during a car stop to a Black driver can be quite telling about how the stop will end," said one of the researchers, Eugenia Rho of Virginia Tech.
For stops that escalated, officers are “more likely to issue commands as their opening words to the driver and less likely to tell drivers the reason why they are being stopped.”
The study found that officers in escalated stops were more than two times more likely not to provide a reason for the stop, and nearly three times more likely to begin the stop with an order.
The words of the driver did not seem to play a part.
"The drivers are just answering the officers' questions and explaining what's going on," said another of the study’s researchers, Stanford University Psychology Professor Jennifer Eberhardt.
How Black Men Perceive Police
In part two, researchers played the tapes for Black men and asked them how they perceive the officers’ words.
The researchers found that participants reported more negative emotion, viewed officers more negatively, worried about the use of force, and predicted worse outcomes after hearing the officer’s initial words in cases that escalated.
"Many Black people fear the police, even in routine car stops. That fear is a fear that could be stoked or set at ease with the first words that an officer speaks,” said Eberhardt.
In total, over 15 percent of Black drivers in the cases studied experienced an escalated outcome.
Rho said that researchers had initially set out to look at escalation patterns for White drivers too but realized it “happened so infrequently” that there weren’t enough numbers to include in the analysis.