Music Banter - View Single Post - Whatever would Doctor King have said? Police brutality in the 21st century

Oriphiel · 04-19-2015, 12:21 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by DwnWthVwls

I'm curious if black people get killed by cops more frequently in areas that aren't riddled by violence, gangs, and drugs, or if the stats are skewed because of the all the ghettos inhabited by minorities.

This has been brought up as well, earlier in the thread:

Quote:

Excessive or reasonable force by police? Research on*law enforcement and racial conflict

Of note in this research literature is a 2003 paper, “Neighborhood Context and Police Use of Force,” that suggests police are more likely to employ force in higher-crime neighborhoods generally, complicating any easy interpretation of race as the decisive factor in explaining police forcefulness. The researchers, William Terrill of Northeastern University and Michael D. Reisig of Michigan State University, found that “officers are significantly more likely to use higher levels of force when encountering criminal suspects in high crime areas and neighborhoods with high levels of concentrated disadvantage independent of suspect behavior and other statistical controls.” Terrill and Reisig explore several hypothetical explanations and ultimately conclude:

"Embedded within each of these potential explanations is the influence of key sociodemographic variables such as race, class, gender, and age. As the results show, when these factors are considered at the encounter level, they are significant. However, the race (i.e., minority) effect is mediated by neighborhood context. Perhaps officers do not simply label minority suspects according to what Skolnick (1994) termed “symbolic assailants,” as much as they label distressed socioeconomic neighborhoods as potential sources of conflict."