Race and Worrying About Police Brutality: The Hidden Injuries of Minority Status in America

ABSTRACT

Given the historically contentious relationship – including most notably the use of excessive and lethal force – between the police and African Americans, the current project examines the extent to which Blacks in the United States fear police brutality. The study is based on a national-level survey (N = 1,000), and measures fear by how much respondents “worry” about experiencing police force. The data support the racial divide hypothesis, showing that Blacks’ worry about such violence is over five times that of Whites. Guided by the racial/ethnic gradient hypothesis, the analyses also assess Hispanic respondents’ level of worry. Rather than forming a gradient by falling midway between Blacks and Whites, Hispanics’ worry about police brutality more closely reflects those of Blacks at more than four times that of Whites, suggesting a racial/ethnic divide. These findings thus assert that worrying about police brutality is an emotional injury that minorities disproportionately experience and whose pervasiveness remains largely hidden from view.

KEYWORDS:

• Police brutality
• fear of police
• racial divide
• racial-ethnic gradient hypothesis

Disclosure statement

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

Supplemental data

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.1080/15564886.2020.1767252

Notes

1. The phrase “Hispanic” is used due to Hagan et al.’s (2005) interchangeable use of “Hispanic” and “Latino/Hispanic.” Furthermore, YouGov uses “Hispanic” when asking respondents to identify themselves. We recognize there is a distinct difference between these two terms and have opted for the use of “Hispanic” given the respondents’ self-identification.

2. Note that all multivariate models were estimated with a “Hispanic States” variable in place of the “South” variable in which states having a Hispanic population of more than 25% (based on the U.S. Census 2017 estimates; i.e., Puerto Rico, New Mexico, Texas, California, Arizona, Nevada, Florida) were defined as a Hispanic State. Results related to police brutality did not substantively change (results available upon request).

3. As a check of robustness, the worry of police brutality models were assessed with the inclusion of a generic measure of worry by summing responses (Worry a lot or worry a little = 1) of the five other worries assessed in this paper to control for generic worries of crime. Results remained robust but given the inadequacies of this measure of “worry,” authors opted not to include this measure in the models presented. Additionally, police brutality models were assessed with the inclusion of two items from the CES-D regarding fear and anxiety. The inclusion of these items in the models did not affect the reported results. The results of these models, which include various measures of general worry, are available in the online Appendix.

4. Racial/ethnic differences for each type of victimization were examined using chi-square. All models were statistically significant with eta values ranging between .136 (mass shooting) and .453 (hate crime). The eta for worry of experiencing police brutality was .410.