Cops speak less respectfully to black community members

Professors Jennifer Eberhardt and Dan Jurafsky along with other Stanford researchers detected racial disparities in police officersâ?- speech after analyzing more than 100 hours of body camera footage from Oakland Police. The first systematic analysis of police body camera footage shows that officers consistently use less respectful language with black community members than with white community members, according to new Stanford research. Stanford researchers have developed a computational tool to analyze language extracted from police body camera footage as data for understanding law enforcement interaction with the community. (Image credit: Ryan Johnson/Flickr/Creative Commons) Although they are subtle, these widespread racial disparities in officersâ?- language use may erode police-community relations, said the researchers who conducted the study , published June 5 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences . â?'Our findings highlight that, on the whole, police interactions with black community members are more fraught than their interactions with white community members,â'' explained Jennifer Eberhardt , co-author of the study and professor of psychology at Stanford. The racial disparities in respectful speech remained even after the researchers controlled for the race of the officer, the severity of the infraction, and the location and outcome of the stop. To analyze the body camera footage, a multidisciplinary team from Stanfordâ?'s psychology, linguistics and computer science departments first developed a new artificial intelligence technique for measuring levels of respect in officersâ'' language.