Police Abuse or Just Deserts?

Abstract

Divergent public responses to police brutality incidents demonstrate that for some, police violence is an injustice that demands remediation, while for others state violence is justice served. We develop a novel survey experiment in which we randomize the race and gender of a victim of police violence, and then provide respondents with an opportunity to establish justice via compensation. We uncover small but consistent effects that financial restitution is most supported for a White female detainee and least supported for a Black female detainee, and this is largely driven by White respondents. Beyond the treatment effects, we show that Black respondents are much more likely to perceive detainees as deserving of restitution; across all treatments, Black respondents are 58 percent more likely than Whites to support a financial settlement. We further show that White respondents’ perceptions of deservingness are highly related to their perceptions of who is at fault for the beating—the detainee or the police—and whether the detainee was involved in crime. Black respondents remain likely to award a settlement even if they think the detainee was at fault and involved in crime. Our results provide further evidence that perceptions of who deserves restorative justice for state violence are entangled with race in targeted ways.

A Drop in the Ocean: How Priors Anchor Attitudes Toward the American Carceral State

“…We must consider how the racialized nature of American life changes people's information about different issues, the valence of their initial opinions, and the variation in their lived experiences. Our results reinforce the primacy of race in this process: although we observe an interaction effect where women's experience relates more to anti-status quo opinions than men's experience, the size of this effect is much smaller than between racial groups, consistent with previous work on the race/gender divide in public opinion (Bracic, Israel-Trummel, and Shortle 2019; Hyde 2005; Israel-Trummel and Streeter 2022). While people learn about politics through their experiences with governmental institutions, direct contact with street-level bureaucrats and officials does not shift attitudes uniformly.…”

“…Group membership constrains opportunities and assigns roles, leading to group-level outcomes and motivations (Maltby 2017;Pérez and Vicuña, 2023;Sidanius and Pratto 1999). These categories too provide a 'prism' through which different kinds of Americans experience and interpret the world (Bracic, Israel-Trummel, and Shortle 2019;Branton, Carey, and Martinez-Ebers 2021;Burch 2022;Carter and Pérez 2016;Hagan, Shedd, and Payne 2005;Israel-Trummel and Streeter 2022;Masuoka and Junn 2013).…”

“…SSI compensated them as part of regular panel participation. For other works that use the RCSS, see Anoll, Epp, and Israel-Trummel 2022; Israel-Trummel and Streeter 2022.…”

Contested Killings: The Mobilizing Effects of Community Contact with Police Violence

“…Work exploring the effects of police use of force, and police killings in particular, have built on these observations. Beyond showing that Black and white Americans perceive and evaluate police shootings differently, they find that the public responds differently to a police shooting or use of force incident depending on the civilian’s race (e.g., McGowen and Wylie 2020; Streeter 2019), as civilian race implicitly taps into latent associations with deservingness (Israel-Trummel and Streeter 2022) and criminality and threat (Porter, Wood, and Cohen 2021). Others show that the extent to which a killing fits the narrative of a wholly unjustified killing based not on threat but on race—the killing of an unarmed Black civilian complying with the officers—moderates responses (Burch 2021; Jefferson, Neuner, and Pasek 2021).…”

Racially Disparate Policy Responses to Mass Shootings

“…The Stoneman Douglas High School shooting (Parkland) happened at a school in an upper-income neighborhood, and the victims were children, while the Pulse nightclub shooting (Orlando) occurred at a nightclub in a low-income neighborhood, and the victims were primarily young LGBT adults. We might expect legislators to see children, students, women, higher income, and heterosexual individuals as more “deserving” of protection than young adults, men, low-income earners, and LGBT individuals for a wide range of reasons (Bridges 2016; Israel-Trummel and Streeter 2022; Padamsee 2020). If these characteristics are correlated with race, previous findings may be biased.…”