In recent years, incidents of police brutality against racial minorities have gained an increasing amount of media attention. Studies suggest that racial profiling can have a significant effect on police activities such as traffic stops (Horrace & Rohlin, 2016), and in face-to-face encounters, and that racial bias is evident early in an interaction, when the only information available is a person’s race (Kahn, Steele, McMahon, & Stewart, 2017). Based on studies like these, racial profiling has been proposed as one possible explanation for excessive use of force by police officers. Police officers are trained to use “only the amount of force necessary to mitigate and incident, make an arrest, or protect themselves or others from harm” (National Institute of Justice, 2016). Therefore, if an officer perceives a higher level of threat based solely on race, it could lead to excessive police brutality against racial minorities. This study will probe whether this is the case.
Research Hypothesis
The police mostly harass and brutalize people of minor race.
Do the color of the skin, culture, and social background considered by the police when making judgments on what to do to a suspect.
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The police mostly consider people of racial minority a threat compared to people from the white race.
Methodology
Participants
Ideally, this study will be a state wide survey including people from diverse cultural backgrounds, race, religion and social background. The participants in the study will include both civilian’s state officials and a few policemen. The survey will be conducted throughout the state, surveys will be done and people of diverse races will be interviewed.
Design
The study is very complicated and cannot rely on just method to provide evidence of police brutality and racial profiling; therefore the study will use the multimethod research design. The method is suited for this study as it majors on a combination of baseline estimates of driving behavior, the analysis of official data, focus groups of state troopers and supervisors, citizen focus groups and a state wide citizen survey. This method is very effective and has proven to minimize errors. This method was adopted given the previous research analyses showed that some of the chosen traffic stops are not proportional to the racial distribution of the jurisdiction resident. Therefore the previous researches did not show evidence of the police engaging in racial profiling and brutality.
Apparatus / Materials / Instruments
In this study, state wide traffic surveillance cameras will be viewed to confirm police racial profiling during traffic jams then the videos will be kept for data. Additionally, questionnaires will be structured for civilians of different races to fill in.
Procedure
The study will find surveillance cameras throughout busy routes to see what kind of people are mostly pulled by the police in traffic jams and how they are treated. This will help the study make rational judgments and prove right the research questions. Questionnaires will be distributed in supermarkets, petrol stations and other public places to be filled and returned to the same place where they will be collected.
References
Horrace, W.C. & Rohlin, S.M. (2016). How dark is dark? Bright lights, big city, racial profiling. Review of Economics and Statistics 98 (2)226-32.
Kahn, K.B., Steele, J.S., McMahon, J.M., & Stewart, G. (2017). How suspect race affects police use of force in an interaction over time. Law and Human Behavior 41 (2), 117-26.
Police use of force. (2016). National Institute of Justice. Retrieved from https://www.nij.gov/topics/law-enforcement/officer-safety/use-of-force/pages/welcome.aspx
