Language from police body camera footage shows racial disparities in officer respect.
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ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Voigt R
PROVIDER: S-EPMC5488942 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Jun
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
Publications
Language from police body camera footage shows racial disparities in officer respect.
Voigt Rob R Camp Nicholas P NP Prabhakaran Vinodkumar V Hamilton William L WL Hetey Rebecca C RC Griffiths Camilla M CM Jurgens David D Jurafsky Dan D Eberhardt Jennifer L JL
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 20170605 25
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 o ...[more]
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