Policing in a Largely Minority Jurisdiction: The Influence of Appearance Characteristics Associated with Contemporary Hip-Hop Culture on Police Decision-Making

Abstract

To date, the main lines of inquiry on the topic of policing bias have relied upon the operationalization of simple interracial/ethnic distinctions to determine if Black or Brown citizens receive disproportionately harsh treatment compared to Whites in a jurisdiction. Failing that, ecological models have been applied, built around the notion of territorial learning or “out-of-place” policing, meaning that the police more aggressively target racial minorities in areas where they are unexpected to be inhabitants. This study seeks to take the inquiry to a more refined level, examining the sorts of legal and extra-legal factors that account for within-race discretionary outcomes. Drawing upon ride-along data gathered in a largely African American metropolitan jurisdiction in the Southeast, we show that extralegal appearance factors associated with the contemporary hip-hop culture (i.e. dreadlocks, cornrows, afros, braids, gold teeth, saggy pants) are predictive of more severe formal outcomes imposed by officers than other relevant predictors. We ground this research in the police discretion and implicit bias literature to better inform theory and practice.

Keywords:

• discretion
• profiling
• implicit stereotypes
• hip-hop
• biased policing

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ The numbers associated with the study jurisdiction are intentionally vague to honor a commitment to protect the department’s identity.

² As a precaution, we pulled 2010 census data for the study jurisdiction and note that these numbers closely approximated the demographic patterns produced through our Walmart data collection efforts.

³ Upon close consideration of the data collection template, we determined that some observers were using a year of birth measure in place of the categorical age—variable that we included in our multi-variate models. In 127 cases, we substituted the year variable where appropriate to supplement our missing data on age, reducing the percent missing from 28.7 to 15.1.

⁴ The multivariate models reported below include the imputed data. We ran all models with and without the imputed data and noted negligible changes in the findings. Thus we provide findings on the imputed data models but gladly make the additional models available upon request.

⁵ We constructed a more finely grained version of the dependent variable that treated separately those citizens who were summarily released (N = 554) from those who were issued a verbal warning for their conduct (N = 90) and reran the multivariate models. While those models converged and produced parallel results, we report below the truncated dependent variable with these two categories combined out of a concern that the small cell size for the verbal warning group was artificially inflating the standard errors and corresponding effect sizes.

⁶ We conducted a series of supplemental analyses to explore the possibility that the age variable was having a confounding effect on the hip-hop appearance variable, namely that the majority of people being stopped and arrested were both young and dressed in what was deemed hip-hop attire. We observed that age and hip-hop appearance are not strongly correlated (r = −.105), indicating that hop-hop status is not concentrated amongst the young. These patterns were confirmed in follow up crosstabs and chi-squared tests. We also explored the possibility that offense seriousness represents a mediator of the hip-hop appearance and discretionary outcome relationship. We estimated several models in this regard and concluded that no such mediation effect exists in these data. All supplemental analyses are available upon request.

⁷ We tested interaction terms for both of these variables (race × demeanor and demeanor × hip-hop appearance) but found insignificant effects.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Dean A. Dabney

Dean Dabney is a professor in the Department of Criminal Justice & Criminology at Georgia State University. His research interests lay in the areas of police culture, homicide investigation, and qualitative research design.

Brent Teasdale

Brent Teasdale, PhD, is a graduate of Penn State’s Crime, Law, and Justice and Sociology programs. Currently, he is a Professor and Chair in the Department of Criminal Justice Sciences at Illinois State University. His book Co-Edited with Mindy Bradley, PhD, is titled “Preventing Crime and Violence.” He has published extensively on violence by and against persons with mental disorders and substance abuse prevention.

Glen A. Ishoy

Glen A. Ishoy is an assistant professor in the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. His research interests include policing, decision-making processes in the criminal justice system, family processes and delinquency, and criminological theory. His work has been published in outlets such as Crime and Delinquency, Criminal Justice Ethics, and The Journal of Criminal Justice Studies. Prior to entering academia, he spent nearly ten years as a police officer in a major metropolitan area.

Taylor Gann

Taylor Gann is a doctoral student in the Department of Criminal Justice & Criminology at Georgia State University. Her research interests include mental health and criminal justice as well as victimization and corrections.

Bonnie Berry

Bonnie Berry, formerly university faculty, is presently the Director of the Social Problems Research Group. Her research interests include appearance bias, animal rights, scientific misconduct, and all measures of social inequality. She is the author of several books and is currently the editor of Physical Appearance and Crime: How Appearance Affects Crime and the Crime Control Process (forthcoming with Cambridge University Press).