Beliefs about minority representation in policing and support for diversification

Abstract

Diversification of police forces is widely promoted as a reform for reducing racial disparities in police–civilian interactions and increasing police legitimacy. Despite these potential benefits, nearly every municipal police department in the United States remains predominately White and male. Here, we investigate whether the scale and persistence of minority underrepresentation in policing might partly be explained by a lack of support for diversification among voters and current police officers. Across two studies ( N = 2, 661) sampling the US adult population and residents from a city with one of the least representative police forces in the country, individuals significantly overestimate officer diversity at both the local and national levels. We find that correcting these biased beliefs with accurate information reduces trust in police and increases support for hiring new officers from underrepresented groups. In the municipal sample, these corrections also cause an increase in residents’ willingness to vote for reforms to diversify their majority White police department. Additional paired decision-making experiments ( N = 1, 663) conducted on these residents and current police officers demonstrate that both prefer hiring new officers from currently underrepresented groups, independent of civil service exam performance and other hiring criteria. Overall, these results suggest that attitudes among voters and police officers are unlikely to pose a major barrier to diversity reforms.

Reforming the Police: Examining the Effect of Message Framing on Police Reform Policy Preferences

“…Second, our findings contribute to a body of scholarship examining how message framing affects attitudes about police reform. We find that, unlike recent research (Novick & Pickett, 2022; Peyton et al, 2022; Vaughn et al, 2022), presenting factual information about policing does not affect policy preferences. In our study, participant attitudes about police reform were not affected when presented with statistics related to racial injustice nor those related to differential involvement in crime.…”

“…As such, researchers explored the impact of message framing on attitudes about police reform. One approach has been to present factual information about police shootings (Schiff et al, 2022) or police racial demographics (Peyton et al, 2022) to determine whether that information affects attitudes about reform. Peyton et al (2022) found that presenting participants with accurate information about police racial demographics increased support for hiring new officers from underrepresented groups.…”

“…One approach has been to present factual information about police shootings (Schiff et al, 2022) or police racial demographics (Peyton et al, 2022) to determine whether that information affects attitudes about reform. Peyton et al (2022) found that presenting participants with accurate information about police racial demographics increased support for hiring new officers from underrepresented groups. Participants who learned about the racial demographics of police departments in the United States were more likely to support affirmative action programs compared with those who did not learn the information.…”

Police killings reduce trust: Predictors of trust in the police across 46 countries

“…This suggests that trust in the police can be enhanced through training to master dangerous situations without killing people and to hold police officers accountable for their deeds (Ehrenfeld & Harris, 2020) or through procedural justice training (Weisburd et al, 2022). Other measures include increasing officer diversity through hiring more women and people from underrepresented groups (Barnes et al, 2018;Peyton et al, 2022) as well as increased responsiveness (Van Craen & Skogan, 2015). Overall, positive and nonenforcement contact between the public and police are important to improve attitudes (Peyton et al, 2019).…”

Officer diversity may reduce Black Americans’ fear of the police

“…The few experimental studies that exist found police diversity to be beneficial, although none focused on police-civilian encounters or civilians' reactions to specific officers. Peyton et al (2022) showed that when residents of Yonkers, New York, were informed about the low diversity among local police officers, it reduced their trust in policing. Riccucci et al (2018) found that Black Americans trusted a police department more when they were told 85 percent (compared with 15 percent) of its officers were Black.…”