Holmes and Smith: Intergroup dynamics of extra-legal police aggression - 1 views
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extra-legally, as informal means of coercive control over those perceived as threats to police authority or personal safety
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Nowhere is that possibility more apparent than in the treatment of racial and ethnic minorities in disadvantaged locales
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most commonly (although not exclusively) in disadvantaged urban neighborhoods
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Some explanations of the behavior identify individual differences among police officers or organizational differences among police departments as primary causal factors, approaches that generally lack empirical support
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situational
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exigencies, such as the race and demeanor of citizens, may determine the use of extra-legal police aggression.
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conflicts of interest
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tereotyping
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egregation and discrimination
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hypothesis that the police employ formal legal authority less vigorously in disadvantaged areas, Kane (2002) argued that, in the socially disorganized neighborhoods where lax enforcement occurs, various forms of police misconduct may become normalized by officers who encounter conflict with citizens and challenges to their legitimacy
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social psychology of intergroup relations to develop a theory of the underlying causes and ecological variations in the use of various types of extra-legal police aggression.
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Profanity and racial slurs, racially motivated stops and searches, and excessive physical force would generally constitute violations.
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uch as police brutality and excessive force, are often used to describe the phenomena under consideration, but these concepts generally refer only to physical force
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extra-legal police aggression is preferable for several related reasons.
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ggression
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any form of behavior that is intended to injure someone physically or psychologically.”
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Both unconscious and conscious processes may trigger extra-legal aggression by the police.
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he concept of aggression captures the critical point that the behaviors in question specifically aim to injure citizens.
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Profanity, racial slurs, and gratuitous verbal threats degrade, humiliate and frighten citizens
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An investigation conducted in six cities by the NAACP (1995) reported that verbal abuse and harassment are the most common forms of extra-legal police aggression and are standard operating procedure in minority communities.
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erbal abuses as well as obscene gestures and spitting
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An emerging focus of research on policing minorities is racial profiling, the practice of stopping and searching citizens on the pretext of suspicious or illegal activity but actually on the basis of racial identity alone.
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A study of police stops in New York City showed that Blacks and Hispanics were stopped at higher rates than Whites in all areas, but those encountered in neighborhoods with relatively small Black populations were stopped relatively more frequently
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intrusive searches subsequent to police stops, which likely occur more frequently in areas of concentrated disadvantage
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The most extreme forms of extra-legal police aggression involve the use of excessive physical force, that which occurs “under color of authority, without lawful necessity”
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Race appears to be an important correlate of its use.
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cities of 150,000 or more population, percent Black and percent Hispanic
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were related positively to criminal complaints against police officers
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nvestigated by the FBI and reported to the Civil Rights Division of the DOJ from 1985 to 1990, found that
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some research findings suggest a link between race and neighborhood characteristics.
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percent
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Black population and extreme Black segregation were related positively to sustained complaints of excessive force
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Percent Hispanic was also related positively to sustained complaints, but Hispanic segregation was not.
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Most studies include a small number of jurisdictions, rely on weak research designs with respect to causal generalizations, and/or use imprecise dependent measures.
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minority suspects encountered in disadvantaged neighborhoods are at greatest risk of victimization at the hands of police
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For example, Stewart et al. (2009) maintain that the police may discriminate against Black youth to defend the interests of White neighborhoods
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Certainly the use of questionable practices by the police, such as stops and searches on the basis of racial profiling, may serve the interests of Whites in maintaining the boundaries of the “racial-spatial divide”
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These findings support the proposition of a greater incidence and severity of extra-legal aggression in disadvantaged minority neighborhoods, but also suggest that lesser forms, such as unnecessary stops, may be used to handle “suspicious” Black citizens outside their neighborhoods.
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Relevant dimensions of intergroup relations include complementary processes involving group conflict, emotions, and cognitions.
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These social–psychological dynamics have been identified as primary contributors to aggressive behavioral responses.
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he various models of intergroup relations and aggression suggest that distal background conditions of neighborhoods and proximate psychological responses elicited in situational encounters with citizens determine the specific targets (race) and general locations (place) of extra-legal police aggression.
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1) social, emotional, and cognitive preconditions to aggressive behavior, (2) activation of aggressive responses by a target perceived as threatening, and (3) social and individual mediators/moderators of aggressive behavior.
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Group conflict
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Several conflict theories hold that complex societies contain various interest groups and that conflict is an inevitable social process with predictable consequences for social organization and behavior.
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ntergroup conflict arises as a collective reaction to real or perceived threats to group interests. T
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The conflict theory of law maintains that the deployment of coercive crime mechanisms expressly seeks to regulate threats to the interests of the powerful
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For example, police use of lesser forms of extra-legal aggression may accommodate the interests of Whites in affluent neighborhoods who can marshal political influence to dictate police practices
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The police may more freely employ more severe forms of extra-legal aggression in areas of minority disadvantage, as there is less risk and more salient personal interests at stake
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Realistic group conflict theory calls attention to the reality that the police constitute a distinct social group that possesses unique interests that do not always correspond to the interests of the dominant group of the larger society
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maintains that the existence of such outgroup threats create hostility toward the source of threat, ingroup solidarity, ingroup identity, tightened ingroup boundaries, punishment of ingroup defectors and deviants, and increased ethnocentrism.
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African Americans and Hispanics, who constitute the largest and most threatening outgroups in American society
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hese disadvantaged neighborhoods pose a host of challenging circumstances—social isolation, poverty, crime, drugs, weapon availability, violence, and social disorder/incivilities
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Much urban police work takes place in such locales.
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Subcultural conflicts of group interests between police and minority citizens exist in these neighborhoods and create normative rifts that often place them at odds with one another.
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he mutual perceptions of distrust and threat held by police and minorities in disadvantaged neighborhoods may generate group dynamics that reinforce ingroup solidarity and intergroup conflict that would not occur in more affluent locales.
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Such intergroup conflict may elicit various less severe forms of extra-legal aggression by the police, which are seen as instrumental to maintaining authority and avoiding danger.
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Conflict theories offer important insights into the background tensions that precipitate acts of extra-legal police aggression; however, other social psychological dynamics also must be considered.
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Primary emotions such as fear and happiness comprise the foundation of the complex human emotional repertoire upon which inter- and intra-group relationships are formed—human behavior is deeply rooted in myriad emotional processes
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Entering areas of concentrated minority disadvantage may routinely activate emotional responses among the police.
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Police officers may become unconsciously and consciously conditioned to associate such areas, as well as certain types of people, with criminality and danger
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While humans may become consciously aware of feeling afraid when faced with an aversive stimulus, unconscious mechanisms for acquiring, storing, and retrieving emotional memories may activate both a behavioral response to and the cognitive awareness of the emotion.
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While emotions comprise internal states of individuals that may affect behavior, they are also social phenomena shaped by society and culture
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Police use of extra-legal aggression in disadvantaged locales may, in part, reflect subcultural norms about the appropriate targets of anger and the relative power of police over disadvantaged citizens.
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the challenging conditions of disadvantaged minority locales clearly provide a structural context in which apprehension, fear, and anger are always relatively close to the surface, ready to take hold of a police officer's conduct.
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pro-social emotional bonds develop among officers who work these areas, amplifying the ethnocentrism that segregates the occupational subculture of policing from outsiders
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Heightened fear and anger toward citizens, along with emotional bonds to fellow officers, prime the police officer for aggressive responses in the face of perceived threats, whether real or imagined.
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Cognitions of ingroups and outgroups are analytically separable, and two distinct but closely related research traditions have developed
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akes place in tasks involving reward allocations in very minimal groups that lack normal features such as face-to-face interaction, norms, and intergroup relationships.
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he mere perception of group membership may be sufficient to produce biased judgments and discrimination
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self-categorization theory maintains that intergroup dynamics involving social identity occur whenever group memberships are salient and group comparisons are made
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Large perceived differences between groups give rise to the process of self-stereotyping, whereby individuals perceive themselves more as undifferentiated, interchangeable parts of a group and less as unique persons characterized primarily by individual attributes.
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Perceived ingroup similarity enhances elements of group cohesiveness—mutual attraction, esteem, empathy, cooperation, and ethnocentrism—among members of the ingroup and triggers discrimination against outgroups.
