Striking Out: Race and Support for Police Use of Force

Johnson, Devon; Kuhns, Joseph B.

doi:10.1080/07418820802427825

Cited by 82 publications

(115 citation statements)

References 68 publications

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“…Although salient demographic factors such as race (Johnson & Kuhns, 2009) and gender (Chapman, 2012) do affect attitudes about police, the strongest and most salient individual difference that predicts differential evaluations of police conduct are people's existing beliefs about police legitimacy (Tyler, 2006). That is, legitimacy beliefs are the key individual difference to observe when measuring attitudes about the justness of police actions, including the use of force.…”

Section: Individual Differences: Legitimacy Beliefsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Lay evaluations of police and civilian use of force: Moral and physical magnitude ratings of officer and civilian actions

Celestin¹

2018

Preprint

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Most police agencies in the United States rely on a rank-ordered categorization of forceful actions, along with decision heuristics for appropriate force options in response to civilian actions. We had lay people rate the moral and physical severity of officer reactions to civilian actions, and vice versa. The actions were representative of the entire range of force options in official police policy and realistic police-civilian conflicts. Results showed that ratings of moral severity of a reaction decreased as severity of the initial action increased, and that ratings of both police and civilian reactions were modulated by individual differences in beliefs about police legitimacy. High-legitimacy participants tended to rate lethal police actions following lethal civilian actions as acceptable, but low-legitimacy participants rated lethal police actions much lower. Thus, higher legitimacy seems to yield a willingness to accept lethal police force if civilian resistance is sufficiently severe, while individuals with low legitimacy may never perceive lethal police actions as acceptable. Similarly, low-legitimacy participants were much more accepting of civilian violence against police than high-legitimacy participants, and rated violent civilian reactions as deserving less severe punishment. High-legitimacy participants also tended to rate low-severity police reactions as insufficient when civilian actions were severe, but lowlegitimacy participants did not. Finally, even when actions and re-actions were exactly matched, more severe officer and civilian actions both tended to be perceived as somewhat excessive for all participants regardless of legitimacy beliefs, though likely for different reasons. USE-OF-FORCE APPROPRIATENESS 2

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Section: Individual Differences: Legitimacy Beliefsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Lay evaluations of police and civilian use of force: Moral and physical magnitude ratings of officer and civilian actions

Celestin¹

2018

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…The most consistent finding in the US criminological literature is that minority group members are more critical towards police use of force than majority group members (Arthur & Case, 1994;Barkan & Cohn, 1998;Johnson & Kuhns, 2009), with this statistical effect remaining even after controlling for socio-demographics such as income, education and employment (Jefferis, Butcher, & Hanley, 2011). According to Jefferis et al (2011) such negative attitudes are probably due to negative experiences between citizens and the police in minority communities, as well as experiences reported through the media.…”

Section: Public Consent Towards Police Violencementioning

confidence: 76%

“…According to Jefferis et al (2011) such negative attitudes are probably due to negative experiences between citizens and the police in minority communities, as well as experiences reported through the media. Johnson and Kuhns (2009) found that both the race of the respondent and the race of the offender (police officer) predicted attitudes towards police use of force. Research also shows that men generally express higher approval of excessive (Barkan & Cohn, 1998;Johnson & Kuhns, 2009) and reasonable (Johnson & Kuhns, 2009) use of force than women.…”

Section: Public Consent Towards Police Violencementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Even less work has addressed the issue from a psychological perspective, with the few studies into the topic tending to consider socio-demographic correlates (indeed most of these studies analyse data from the General Social Survey 1 , e.g. Arthur & Case, 1994;Barkan & Cohn, 1998;Johnson & Kuhns, 2009;Silver & Pickett, 2015).…”

Section: Public Consent Towards Police Violencementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Looking across the extant criminological literature, higher public support emerges when force is considered to be reasonable than in situations where force is considered excessive (Johnson & Kuhns, 2009). Yet, while a good amount of research has been conducted on individual and community-based factors that predict actual police use of force (see Prenzler et al, 2013 for a review), little research has tried to uncover the reasons why people accept and justify police use of force.…”

Section: Public Consent Towards Police Violencementioning

confidence: 99%

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