Die Verantwortung des Einsatztrainings: Die Welt besser machen

Police officers speak significantly less respectfully to black than to white community members in everyday traffic stops, even after controlling for officer race, infraction severity, stop location, and stop outcome. This paper presents a systematic analysis of officer body-worn camera footage, using computational linguistic techniques to automatically measure the respect level that officers display to community members. This work demonstrates that body camera footage 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. Using footage from body-worn cameras, we analyze the respectfulness of police officer language toward white and black community members during routine traffic stops. We develop computational linguistic methods that extract levels of respect automatically from transcripts, informed by a thin-slicing study of participant ratings of officer utterances. We find that officers speak with consistently less respect toward black versus white community members, even after controlling for the race of the officer, the severity of the infraction, the location of the stop, and the outcome of the stop. Such disparities in common, everyday interactions between police and the communities they serve have important implications for procedural justice and the building of police–community trust.

Significance Police misconduct and use of force have come under increasing scrutiny and public attention. The procedural justice model of policing, which emphasizes transparency, explaining policing actions, and responding to community concerns, has been identified as a strategy for decreasing the number of interactions in which civilians experience disrespectful treatment or the unjustified use of force. This paper evaluates whether a large-scale implementation of procedural justice training in the Chicago Police Department reduced complaints against police and the use of force against civilians. By showing that training reduced complaints and the use of force, this research indicates that officer retraining in procedural justice is a viable strategy for decreasing harmful policing practices and building popular legitimacy.