Global S&T Development Trend Analysis Platform of Resources and Environment
| DOI | 10.1126/science.abf4518 |
| Asking the right questions about race and policing | |
| Phillip Atiba Goff | |
| 2021-02-12 | |
| 发表期刊 | Science
 |
| 出版年 | 2021 |
| 英文摘要 | Upon asking, “How can we fix this problem?” enough times, one wonders whether the problem can ever be fixed. This frustration characterizes an increasingly vocal segment of the United States on the topic of racism in policing, with most residents—including a majority of white respondents—believing that policing needs major change ([ 1 ][1]) and calls to defund the police meriting serious public engagement ([ 2 ][2]). On page 696 of this issue, Ba et al. ([ 3 ][3]) analyze officer demographics and police behavior in Chicago and show that Black officers use force less often than white officers. Such advances in quantitative social science on racism in policing ([ 4 ][4]) should be applauded. But the field needs to tackle questions of police abolition to remain relevant to policy discussions. Gaps remain in the field's reasoning about race that are difficult to address without considering when policing is the right tool—and when it is the problem.
Questions about when and how policing can reduce reported crime now make up one of the largest quantitative literatures on policing ([ 4 ][4]). This research challenged previous scientific consensus that policing could never prevent crime ([ 5 ][5]). Now, the question of policing as crime prevention has been the subject of two National Academies of Sciences reports and volumes of scholarship ([ 4 ][4], [ 6 ][6]). Yet, although the literature produced methodological innovations in establishing causality, it left critical gaps in understanding how policing affected vulnerable communities, particularly historically marginalized Black communities ([ 4 ][4]).
A more recent surge of interest in racial justice has motivated quantitative scholarship around the question of how policing can be made less racially disparate. Though this question does not directly contradict any literature (i.e., there is not a raft of scholarship arguing for policing's inherent egalitarianism), it does highlight major gaps in the previous orthodoxy. Specifically, it highlights the dearth of quantitative social science on racial equity in policing and the tacit assumption in much of the literature that reported crime (rather than, say, public concerns about state violence) is the primary metric by which public safety should be evaluated ([ 4 ][4]). Yet, even as emerging work such as that of Ba et al. begins to identify ways to combat seemingly obvious racism in policing, their findings suggest the need to engage a question that poses an even more fundamental challenge to established thinking in the field: whether and when police can be the right solution to social problems.
The assertion that police can cause more harm than good is not new ([ 7 ][7], [ 8 ][8]). But quantitative social scientists have not produced a sizable body of scholarship on the topic, and thus have fallen further behind in their ability to speak to one of the most urgent issues of public safety in the United States. For example, there is no consensus on the influence of training on officer behavior ([ 9 ][9], [ 10 ][10]). There is no consensus on what portion of racially disparate policing outcomes are driven by factors outside of police control ([ 11 ][11]). There is no consensus on what officer characteristics predict biased or burdensome outcomes. And, as Ba et al. discuss, there has been no consensus on what the influence of officer demographics is on officer behavior.
Scholars often assert that these questions remain unanswered because of the paucity of data necessary for making precise causal inference ([ 12 ][12]). It can take researchers years to gain access to police data of sufficient granularity to answer basic questions. The consequence is the relative silence of quantitative scientists regarding the most pressing public policy issue in policing. Indeed, a recent National Academies of Sciences report tasked with summarizing the scholarship on racial bias stemming from proactive policing concluded, essentially, that the quantitative question of racial bias was unresolved despite strong evidence from historical sources and suggestive analogs from quantitative literatures on bias in other field settings ([ 4 ][4]).
As a result, when scholars identify data that allow for strong inference around race and policing, they are rightly lauded by the field. And, to be sure, Ba et al. should be celebrated. Most of the data used to answer questions about how the race and gender of officers influence their behaviors compare officers within or between departments but cannot account for where, when, or whom officers are policing. The result is that the research tended to say “more Black officers is/is not associated with higher rates of force,” but the number of potential confounding variables was humbling. The ability to leverage the newly public Chicago Police Department data to match officers with peers on the same shift and in the same neighborhoods is a quantum advance for making strong inferences. Here, Ba et al. remove alternative hypotheses (at least in this dataset) that Black officers are simply assigned to higher-crime neighborhoods or that women are sent to less dangerous assignments.
These data reveal that Black officers use force 35% less often than white officers, and that women use force 31% less often than men. The magnitude of the differences provides strong evidence that—at least in some cities—the number of officers who identify with vulnerable groups can matter quite a bit in predicting police behavior. Although this does not settle the matter, the work stands alone in its ability to make apples-to-apples comparisons across officers—regardless of how many may be bad apples.
Although the study by Ba et al. advances the field's understanding of the relationship between police demographics and behaviors, some of the most notable findings suggest additional questions that align less with “how can we fix this” and more with “why are we doing this at all.”
The study reveals that 38% of the disparities in police stops of pedestrians and motorists between Black and white officers are predicted by white officers' greater use of discretionary stops such as for “vaguely defined ‘suspicious behavior,’” which means someone was detained for whatever an officer deemed suspicious. Ba et al. frame this as an explanation of how officer demographics predict officer behaviors. But, given that Ba et al. find negligible demographic differences in officers' responses to community violence, such a large difference in discretionary stops compels a reader to ask: Are any of those excess stops by white officers necessary? Should a department even be making them, given the demonstrated risk for abuse so evident in vulnerable communities?
Similarly, 83% of the excess use of force by white officers, compared to Black officers, is due to differences in targeting Black residents for force. Likewise, 82% of women's lower rate of using force compared to men is attributable to differences in applying force to Black residents—across racial groups of officers. The magnitude of the finding raises the question: Are any of those excess use of force incidents by white officers necessary? And if the excess force is not necessary for public safety, why does the department target Black communities for so much physical coercion? These questions are difficult to answer outside a broader engagement with the purpose of policing—and its limitations. With violence trending downward the past three decades ([ 13 ][13]), mostly troubling small geographic areas ([ 4 ][4]), and possibly occupying a small portion of police activity ([ 14 ][14]), what should the role of police be? Failing to take seriously the possibility that the answer should be “much less” may end up frustrating both researchers and a public that has been asking the question for far longer than most scientists. And, because policing has been seen as racial terrorism in too many communities and for too long, a failure to name that as a principal problem may render all efforts to fix policing appear to be a frustrating waste of time.
1. [↵][15]1. S. Crabtree
, “Most Americans say policing needs ‘major changes,’“ Gallup, 22 July 2020; |
| 领域 | 气候变化 ; 资源环境 |
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| 文献类型 | 期刊论文 |
| 条目标识符 | http://119.78.100.173/C666/handle/2XK7JSWQ/314075 |
| 专题 | 气候变化 资源环境科学 |
| 推荐引用方式 GB/T 7714 | Phillip Atiba Goff. Asking the right questions about race and policing[J]. Science,2021. |
| APA | Phillip Atiba Goff.(2021).Asking the right questions about race and policing.Science. |
| MLA | Phillip Atiba Goff."Asking the right questions about race and policing".Science (2021). |
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