How are the racial attitudes of police officers distinct from those of the public? How might the officer's own race shape those attitudes? Recent high-profile cases of contested uses of lethal force by white police officers against citizens of color have reanimated a long-established debate about the way(s) that race shapes police contact. While research has documented substantial racial disparities across a variety of criminal justice outcomes, little is known about how law enforcement officers might differ from citizens in the way that they think about citizens of color. Existing studies of such attitudes are often limited by the idiosyncrasies of small and unrepresentative samples. The present study overcomes these limitations by employing the first nationally representative survey comparing citizens and police a range of racial attitudes. Findings suggest that white police are, indeed, more racially resentful, more likely to see blacks as violent, and more likely to minimize anti-black discrimination than are white nonpolice. Black police officers, however, are not significantly more racially conservative than black citizens on any of the measures examined, lending modest evidence to the "selection effect" theory of Police Personality.

A well-established body of research finds that racial resentment predicts support for punitive criminal justice policy. This article links racial resentment with punitiveness, expanding the existing research—a body of work that largely treats punitivity as a response to threat. Data for this study come from three nationally representative samples and incorporate individual and contextual factors. Key variables include Racial Resentment, Political Ideology, Punitiveness, Crime—both objective crime (i.e., county-level crime rates) and subjective crime (i.e., fear of crime), racial population characteristics, and theoretically relevant controls. Contextual factors help to clarify whether support for spending is a “rational” response to crime or a “nonrational” response to perceived racial threat as expressed through punitiveness. Findings indicate that, net of a host of factors, a punitive value orientation as well as racial resentment predicts support for increased spending on law enforcement. Our analysis also suggests that racial resentment and punitivity are more consistent and stronger predictors of support even when controlling for Crime. The article closes with a discussion of opportunity cost vis-à-vis law enforcement and other community needs. Implications for further study of race and criminal justice policy get discussed with suggestions for dealing with the future of identity-based politics.

Research has long documented the fact that sensitive items on surveys are subject to relatively high levels of item response refusal, but the role played by respondent characteristics in shaping who refuses is underexplored. The present study integrates this methodological literature with a growing body of research concerned with the racialization of attitudes about gun ownership and policy among Whites in order to address this question. Specifically, this project investigates how racial attitudes influence survey item response refusal on items about gun ownership. Analyses of four distinct nationally representative samples suggest that racially conservative White respondents are more likely to refuse to respond to items concerned with gun ownership net of a host of relevant controls. Implications for the measurement of racial attitudes and gun‐related survey questions are discussed.

No abstract

The author constructs an over-time coefficient plot to allow visualized evaluation of the role played by indicators of racial resentment on political ideology among Whites since 1986. The visualization makes clear that the role of racial resentment in the formation of political ideology is one that (1) has been a consistently significant factor in U.S. politics for 30 years and (2) was increasing in importance prior to the candidacy of Donald Trump.