Baselining Incivility in One-on-One Police Encounters from BWC Archival Footage: Exploratory Study of Race, Gender and Contact Type Effects

ABSTRACT

Over the past years the world has witnessed a myriad of ‘viral’ policing videos, some showing police officers in a positive light and many others showing officers in a negative light. Whichever direction these viral videos go, civility/incivility can be recognized in all of them. We believe that the proliferation of body-worn cameras (BWCs) offers a unique opportunity to study general (non-viral) police-suspect interactions at an interactional level. The present study documents incivility, as experienced by police officers and as experienced by suspects, using a sample of 152 police-suspect interactions involving one officer and one suspect. Key measures of incivility include interruptions, directed profanity, directed slurs, and proven deception. Results demonstrate that officers experience incivility in about one-third of one-on-one interactions. Interestingly, suspects experienced incivility at a similar rate. For the research site, interactions between officers and suspects of color were more likely to be civilized. Results reveal that officers in this study were significantly more likely to direct profanity and do so at a higher rate when interacting with male suspects. Although this study is inherently exploratory, the research offers practical implications for baselining interactions on key measures of incivility.

KEYWORDS:

• Incivility
• police body-worn cameras
• systematic social event modeling
• police-community interactions

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Beau P. Holladay

Beau Holladay is a recent graduate from the Criminal Justice & Criminology Department at Washington State University having received a bachelor’s degree. He was a research assistant in the Complex Social Interactions Lab. His research primarily explores stress and decision-making.

David A. Makin

David A. Makin is the Director of the Complex Social Interactions Lab and associate professor in the Department of Criminal Justice and Criminology at Washington State University. His research explores the impact of technology and policy on public safety; in-field decision-making; systemic social observation and event modeling, and refinement of, and evaluation of, public safety education and training.