Why interracial police-civilian interpersonal interactions can go poorly: police officer stereotype threat

ABSTRACT

Racially charged incidents between the police and Black civilians have sparked massive protests over racial disparities in policing. This has led many to stereotype police officers as racists, and officers themselves are aware of this. By integrating and extending prior theoretical models, this paper proposes a novel theoretical model of the various paths through which the activation of stereotype threat – officers’ fear of confirming the ‘racist police officer’ stereotype – can influence when and why White police officers display negative interpersonal behavior during routine encounters with Black civilians. The model theorizes that the activation of stereotype threat, coupled with the contextual anxiety inherent in police encounters, heightens officers’ anxiety and self-regulatory effort, leading to cognitive depletion and regulatory failure. This results in decreased empathy, ultimately ending with officers confirming the racist police officer stereotype. The paper reviews social psychological and criminal justice literature to support this theory and discusses the theoretical, practical, and research implications.

KEYWORDS:

• Policing
• stereotype threat
• interracial interactions
• race
• interpersonal interactions

Data availability statement

There are no original data associated with this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Note that an officer’s motivation to be non-racist and to uphold the values of ‘to serve and protect’ and ‘equal justice,’ and their actual ability to do so under cognitively taxing circumstances, may differ depending on whether these motives are internally driven (i.e., the officer is internally committed to them for personal reasons) and/or externally driven (i.e., the officer is motivated to act in accordance with them to keep their job). Indeed, the ability to respond without racial bias differs according to one’s level of internal versus external motivation to respond without prejudice (e.g., Devine et al., 2002; Plant & Devine, 1998). On difficult tasks that require regulatory resources, individuals who are low in external, high in internal motivation to respond without prejudice display lower racial bias compared to all other combinations of internal/external motivation, indicating that they are better able to regulate their responses under taxing circumstances (Devine et al.). Thus, officers for whom these motivations are internally—but not externally—driven may be better equipped to navigate stereotype threatening situations without ironically confirming the stereotype. Yet, it is also possible that the power of the situation and its concurrent emotions may overwhelm the effect of individual difference factors on officers’ behavior. That is, interracial interactions are particularly threatening for White people who are worried about appearing prejudiced (e.g., Richeson & Trawalter, 2008; Trawalter et al., 2012, Study 1), and the current attention focused on racial bias in policing situations may therefore heighten concerns with even appearing racist among officers who are internally committed to being non-racist, which may prompt anxiety and the ensuing processes laid out in the proposed model.