Community Cops: Reducing threat through familiarity

 Introduction
• Police officers are trained to pull contextual cues from the environment in order to make quick decisions about potentially threatening situations. But what are these threat-related cues?

• In the book Are We Born Racist? Alex Dixon’s article “Policing Bias” highlights research that suggests one cue might be race. Experiments show that black aggressors are shot more quickly than whites, suggesting that race is primed in officers as a threat.

• Another threatening cue could be the surrounding area. Werthman and Piliavin (1967) in their ecological contamination hypothesis suggest that officers may feel more threatened by a dangerous neighborhood. A dark alley in a dangerous part of town may prime an officer to perceive any unfamiliar person as hostile.

• In another study, Joshua Correll found that priming race after an officer feels threatened by an environmental cue or vice versa does not exacerbate or enhance the overall threat. Suggesting that both race and environment can be equally threatening.

• Since environmental cues and race can prime an officer to feel threatened. Can familiarity influence an officer in the same way?

• Are unknown perpetrators shot more quickly or treated more harshly than a familiar target? Are unfamiliar targets another potential threatening cue?

• I hypothesize that when the target is unfamiliar to the officer, the response time to shoot will be quicker than if the target was familiar.

• As discussed in the introduction, people are often treated more harshly in harsh neighborhoods because they “seem” more dangerous. Suggesting officers feel threatened by the race of the target and the environment.

• Similarly, as shown by these results, officers feel more threatened by unfamiliar people, resulting in another threatening cue.

• To reduce this threat, police officers must engage with the public, learn about their citizens and interact with them on a regular basis.

• Familiarity seems to breed better intergroup relationships between officers and the community they serve.

• Further research can focus on the level of familiarity which is best balanced.

• This study has a potential limitation that familiarity may create unnecessary anxiety in the participants which could alter the results.

Works Cited
• Correll, J. et al. (2011) Dangerous enough: Moderating racial bias with contextual threat cues. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 47(1), 184 -189. doi:10.1016/j.jesp.2010.08.017

• Dixon, A. (2010). Policing Bias. In J. Marsh, R. Mendoza- Denton, J. Smith (Eds.), Are We Born Racist?: New Insights from Neuroscience and Positive Psychology. Boston: Beacon Press

• Werthman, C., & Piliavin, I. (1967). Gang members and the police. In D. Bordua (Ed.), The police: Six sociological essays. New York: Wiley.