Body-cam study: Oakland police spoke less respectfully to black people
Oakland police officers tend to speak less respectfully to black people than to white people during traffic stops, using language in these everyday interactions that can erode community faith in the police, according to a first-of-its-kind study of body-camera footage released Monday by Stanford researchers. An analysis of 981 traffic stops made by 245 Oakland officers in April 2014 found that officers were more apt to use terms of respect such as “sir,” “ma’am,” “please” and “thank you” when dealing with white motorists when compared to black ones. After stopping black people, officers more often used terms deemed to be disrespectful, calling them by their first names, “bro” or “my man,” and instructing them to keep their hands on the wheel, the study found. “We found that the officers on average spoke fairly respectfully to people — it was just that they spoke even more respectfully to white community members than they did to black community members,” said Jennifer Eberhardt, a Stanford professor who co-authored the study. The rise of police wearing body cameras has been embraced by both officers and police watchdogs as a way to collect evidence about confrontations that may come into dispute. [...] they had human participants look at transcripts of a sampling of officer “utterances,” as well as what drivers said immediately beforehand, and rate the police communication in terms of respect. The study found that white people were 57 percent more likely to hear an officer say something judged to be highly respectful, while black people were 61 percent more likely to hear an officer say something judged to be extremely disrespectful. A previous study led by Eberhardt, published last year, found that Oakland officers were four times as likely to search African American men as white men during a traffic or pedestrian stop. There have been previous indications, though, that Oakland’s adoption of body cameras starting in late 2010 has improved policing in the city, including a big drop in the number of use-of-force complaints made against officers. While an officer’s treatment of a person during a traffic stop may seem small in the scheme of things, Alicia Garza, an Oakland activist who co-founded Black Lives Matter, said it’s important to see the interactions “as examples of larger patterns that have real tangible outcomes for people’s lives.”

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