Police Data at Harvard

Police bigotry isn't what gets you killed.

Takeaways from a Harvard seminar on policing.

Phillip Goff

Phillip Goff, Ph.D., a criminal justice researcher at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, presented some information at a Harvard JFK School seminar I attended. I am in Massachusetts, attending classes here.

1. The giant trend: Americans are a lot less racially prejudiced now that they were in decades past. Prejudice used to be open, flagrant, and legal. Now it is rarer, subtle, and illegal. There is progress in America and people concerned about racial justice miss the giant trend if they forget this big trend.

2. Treating kids as adults. Police officers, both black and white, routinely under-estimate the ages of white teenage boys they are seeing in police encounters (by about half a year) and over-estimate the age of black teen age boys (by an extraordinary amount, 4 years.) This causes police to treat black teenagers as adults and a greater threat than they do white teenagers. 

3. For a police officer, control equals safety. Degree of racial prejudice by the officer is only slightly correlated with police encounters that involve use of deadly force. The key factor is macho-ness.. Cops who score high on masculine dominance, "macho-ness," are the ones who escalate to deadly force most quickly. They perceive non-compliance by a person in a police stop to be a challenge to their control. Since control equals personal safety, police encounters that become a contest of "who is the boss" and "who is the man here" are the encounters that escalate. 

4. It probably backfires when communities put a spotlight on police bigotry. It makes the likelihood of use of police force higher In encounters with the public. Goff said the officer has three tools to use in an encounter:: 

   ***the legitimacy of his role signaled by uniform, badge and official role.

   ***their social skills, as they interact with the person

   ***coercion 

Insofar as police are understood to have low legitimacy, being considered corrupt or bigoted, they lose the first and second tool to use to manage police encounters. They lost their social legitimacy and their conversation with the citizen starts from an assumption that the policeman has bad intent.

5. What is the best way to survive a police encounter: communicate compliance and don't challenge the officer's authority or dominance. That protects ones immediate personal safety.  But it comes with a cost of lack of self respect because one concedes ones own legitimacy as a citizen. There is an alternative approach: to insist on ones rights. But that one has the risk of being seen as a challenge to the policeman, with consequences.

Note to readers:   I am visiting Harvard and attending classes, primarily at the JFK School of Government, the Foreign Affairs institutes, and at the Law School. There are about six or eight events a day happening here--far too many to do them all. I consider it a kind of Disneyland for adults.  Below area few photos from bulletin boards, a small sample of what is available, which will give readers a flavor of what is available.