The First 45 Words

A hat tip to Doug Muder of the Weekly Sift for pointing me to this NPR story, which tells of a report from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. In it, researchers analyzed police body camera footage from traffic stops for minor violations in an anonymous mid-sized city. 

They found that how the cop stop starts the interaction with the driver is the defining factor, and that difference depends greatly on the race of the driver.

Muder summarized,

...police stops of Black drivers that escalate from minor traffic violations to searches, handcuffings, and arrests diverge from other stops in the first few seconds. If the officer’s first statement is a command (“Keep your hands on the wheel.”) rather than a question or an explanation (“Do you know how fast you were going?”), the encounter is much more likely to escalate, even if the driver is cooperative.

The researchers also spent time specifically analyzing the 27 seconds of George Floyd's interaction with the two rookie officers who first encountered him. (Note: this was not Derek Chauvin, who arrived later as "backup"):

...we found that Floyd apologizes to the officers who stand outside his car window, Floyd requests the reason for the stop, he pleads, he explains, he follows orders, he expresses fear... Yet every response to Floyd is an order.

From the very beginning, police officers issued commands without giving Floyd an explanation — the same linguistic signature associated with escalation in this study.

In the study's main analysis, which was based on one month of data, they found that police had stopped 588 Black drivers, compared with 262 white drivers. 

Over 15% of Black drivers experienced an escalated outcome such as a search, handcuffing, or arrest, while less than 1% of white drivers experienced one of those outcomes....

...in planning this study, they had initially set out to look at patterns related to traffic stop escalation for white drivers too, but realized that it happened so infrequently for white drivers that there just weren't sufficient numbers to even include them in the analysis.

The study also included a section where the researchers asked a nationally representative sample of Black men to each listen to 10 of the initial cop interactions — half commands-only and half requests for explanation. They found that:

Black men experience more negative emotion and rate officer demeanor more negatively in escalated stops, they are also more likely to expect escalation and to worry that these interactions could lead to police threats of force or actual use of force. In fact, we show that Black men are specifically attuned to the officers’ words: the presence or absence of orders and a reason for the stop, drive their perceptions of that stop.

Of course, all of this fits into the "No, duh" school of research, but it's important nonetheless.