The public's dilemma: race and political evaluations of police killings

ABSTRACT

This paper explores perceptions of the killings of African-Americans by police officers. We show how characteristics of the victim, officer and surrounding environment, as well as political cues, shape such perceptions. In the first study, we employ a conjoint survey experiment, wherein subjects are exposed to descriptions of hypothetical police killings. Focusing on subjects who score high on the Symbolic Racism Scale (SRS), we identify what leads such subjects to view shootings as more justified. We replicate and extend these effects in a second study in which subjects read fictitious newspaper articles. We find that exposing high SRS subjects to primes related to Black Lives Matter can decrease their belief in shootings' justifiability.

KEYWORDS:

• Racism
• experiments
• public opinion
• stereotypes
• social psychology
• political psychology

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Although we did not have actual videos, the aim in claiming otherwise was to increase the chance that respondents would take the hypotheticals seriously and engage with them as if they reflected an underlying incident. Otherwise, we feared that participants would generally disregard all differences we presented to them. There is always a trade-off between experimental realism and experimenter control. We tried to balance those two objectives, using descriptions of videos to enhance realism but not actually showing videos to maintain control. It remains possible that responses may have been confounded by people thinking about real-world incidents in response to our experimental treatments but that would also have been a risk had we shown fictionalized videos.

2 The reader will notice that we have made a decision not to identify those killed by the police as victims in the survey, as describing them as victims might have affected results. This was a difficult decision to make.

3 This is a novel survey item we constructed for this study. It is strongly related, in the expected direction, to scores on symbolic racism, ideology, and confidence in the police. Different responses on this perceived justifiability scale related to significant differences on these related scales. These mean differences by scale are depicted in the appendix, in Figure 1.

4 A reviewer speculated SRS and confidence in the police were actually tapping the same underlying dimension, and that their effect on perceived justifiability might be interactive. The two variables are in fact only weakly correlated (.28) and their interaction does not significantly predict perceived justifiability. A regression estimate is included in the appendix, in Table 5.