Results from experimental trials testing participant responses to White, Hispanic and Black suspects in high-fidelity deadly force judgment and decision-making simulations

Objective

Advance the methodological techniques used to examine the influence of suspect race and ethnicity on participant decisions to shoot in an experimental setting.

Methods

After developing and testing a novel set of 60 realistic, high definition video deadly force scenarios based on 30 years of official data on officer-involved shootings in the United States, three separate experiments were conducted testing police (n?=?36), civilian (n=?72) and military (n?=?6) responses (n?=?1,812) to the scenarios in high-fidelity computerized training simulators. Participants’ responses to White, Black and Hispanic suspects in potentially deadly situations were analyzed using a multi-level mixed methods strategy. Key response variables were reaction time to shoot and shooting errors.

Results

In all three experiments using a more externally valid research method than previous studies, we found that participants took longer to shoot Black suspects than White or Hispanic suspects. In addition, where errors were made, participants across experiments were more likely to shoot unarmed White suspects than unarmed Black or Hispanic suspects, and were more likely to fail to shoot armed Black suspects than armed White or Hispanic suspects. In sum, this research found that participants displayed significant bias favoring Black suspects in their decisions to shoot.

Conclusions

The results of these three experiments challenge the results of less robust experimental designs and shed additional light on the broad issue of the role that status characteristics, such as race and ethnicity, play in the criminal justice system. Future research should explore the generalizability of these findings, determine whether bias favoring Black suspects is a consequence of administrative measures (e.g., education, training, policies, and laws), and identify the cognitive processes that underlie this phenomenon.     

Validating a novel tool for coding body worn camera footage of police-community member interactions

Objectives

This study aimed to validate a tool for coding police body-worn camera (BWC) footage to measure the dynamics of police–community encounters, including items related to community members, officer performance, and situational outcomes.

Methods

Over 1000 BWC videos were scored by five coders who participated in an iterative interrater reliability exercise to improve the agreement. Krippendorf's alphas and a multilevel simultaneous component analysis were used to assess interrater reliability and the component structure of ratings, respectively. Bootstrapped and multilevel exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses were conducted to ascertain any underlying dimensions supporting officer and community member behavior, and cluster analyses were performed to examine whether interactions could be grouped into coherent categories.

Results

The lower bound of unweighted means of bootstrapped alphas ranged from 0.67 to 0.96 depending upon item type, and 21.60% of the total variance in raters was between-subjects. Factor analyses revealed only a single factor (“defensiveness”) underlying four items related to hostility directed toward officers by community members. Cluster analyses described seven categories that were highly overlapping but conceptually plausible with cluster silhouette means ranging from −0.06 to 0.13.

Conclusions

We validated a collection of interval-level coding metrics on a random sample of over 1000 interactions between police officers and community members recorded through BWCs. In doing so, we provide a roadmap for researchers and practitioners to effectively measure the dynamics of police–community encounters and officer performance within those encounters and a framework for addressing the validity and reliability of items in future studies involving the measurement of BWC footage.