Is it all about race? Intergroup threat and perceptions of racial profiling

Abstract

Relatively few studies have assessed theoretically relevant predictors of individual’s perceptions of racial profiling by law enforcement officers. The current study addresses this limitation by drawing on theoretical frameworks highlighted in the growing body of literature examining disproportionate minority contact (DMC) with the criminal justice system. Specifically, we draw on the racial and symbolic threat perspectives with the objective of identifying theoretically relevant individual and community level predictors of perceptions of racial profiling by public and private police bodies in airports, malls, and on the roads. Results of our analysis of data on White and Black individuals nested within communities support the racial threat perspective in documenting the influence of racial heterogeneity and interracial labor market competition on perceptions of racial profiling. However, in contention to predictions derived from the symbolic threat perspective, the results fail to uncover a link between interracial socioeconomic inequality and perceptions of racial profiling by law enforcement officers. These results highlight the importance of moving beyond individual explanations of profiling and other forms of DMC and suggest community characteristics and perceptions of intergroup threat are particularly salient to understanding perceptions of race-based distinctions in formal social control.

Keywords:

• Racial threat
• symbolic threat
• disproportionate minority contact
• racial profiling

Notes

1. Blalock (1967) proposed that the relative size of the minority population would have a nonlinear association to racial inequality in formal control. He specified a positive yet decelerating slope indicative of a threshold effect whereby there is a point at which further increases in the minority population produce smaller magnitude increases in racial disparities. This decelerating slope could be indicative of intergroup acceptance and assimilation, a reduction in the ability of Whites to unduly influence formal control agents, or a switch in focus to non-state-based control mechanisms such as labor market discrimination and residential segregation.