Community Accountability, Minority Threat, and Police Brutality: An Examination of Civil Rights Criminal Complaints*

Abstract

A growing body of evidence shows that minorities are disproportionately the targets of police brutality, but important theoretical questions about the causes of that inequity remain unanswered. One promising line of research involves structural‐level analyses of the incidence of police brutality complaints; however, existing studies do not incorporate variables from alternative theoretical explanations. Drawing on the community accountability hypothesis and the threat hypothesis, we tested the predictions of two prominent structural‐level explanations of police brutality in a study of civil rights criminal complaints. The study included cities of 150,000+ population (n = 114). The findings reveal that two community accountability variables—ratio percent Hispanic citizens to percent Hispanic police officers and the presence of citizen review—were related positively to police brutality complaints, partially supporting that perspective. Two threat hypothesis measures of threatening people—percent black and percent Hispanic (in the Southwest)—were related positively to complaints, as predicted. The relative degree of support for the two hypotheses is assessed.

Does Minority Representation in Police Agencies Reduce Assaults on the Police?

“…Concerning complaints, Smith and Holmes (2003) found that there were fewer civil rights complaints about the police when the proportion of Hispanic officers in a police department matched the proportion of Hispanics in the general population. In another study, rates of force complaints were higher among agencies with higher violent crime rates, but minority representation was unrelated to complaint rates (Hickman & Piquero, 2009).…”

“…According to this perspective, achieving higher diversity is expected to enhance the legitimacy of police agencies in the community and bring different attitudes and predispositions to police departments. In turn, this is hypothesized to improve the quality of interactions between the police and citizens (Smith & Holmes, 2003). Improved relationships would then be less likely to result in physical confrontations, which may lead to unnecessary deaths or injuries of officers or citizens (Tyler, 2004).…”

A Multilevel Examination of the Relationship Between Racial Tension and Attitudes Toward the Police

“…Similarly, following the minority threat perspective (Blalock, 1967). the police are a tool for the majority group -in this case, Whites -to exert social control over minorities (Smith & Holmes, 2003). This leads to Whites holding more positive feelings about the police than other groups.…”

Racial Context and Crime Reporting: A Test of Black’s Stratification Hypothesis

“…The black-to-white arrest ratio (FBI, b, various years) was used to account for differences between blacks and whites in arrest probability, an outcome that might affect victims' decisions to call the police (Hickman and Simpson 2003). Finally, we included in the analysis a measure for the racial composition of the police: the ratio of percent black sworn officers to percent black population (see Smith and Holmes 2003). While American police forces were traditionally all-white, the push for racial diversity strengthened in the late 1960s, when the President's Commission on Law Enforcement and the Administration of Justice (1967) and the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (1968) recommended increases in the hiring of minority officers for the purpose of improving police relations with the minority communities.…”