Presenter(s): Adriane Hershey
Faculty Mentor(s): David Markowitz
Oral Session 3 SW
Police brutality has been a consistent problem in the United States since inception, but has become more salient due to its intrinsic connections to political and social movements, including the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and the Black Lives Matter beginning in 2013. Today, police violence against armed and unarmed citizens is pervasive: between 2015 and 2018, almost 4,000 people were killed by the police. Only 58 of the officers involved in shootings since 2005 were charged according to the Washington Post and 24 were convicted of wrongdoing. While prior work has largely evaluated how often police shootings occur and where shootings are most prevalent, less work has determined if there are signals identifying the type of officer who is convicted or not convicted of brutality. Drawing on research compiled by the Washington Post, we created a database of 75 police officers who killed a civilian and developed demographic and psychological profiles of each officer in search of characteristics that predict if they will be convicted or unconvicted of a crime. The data suggest that officers with over 10 years of experience on the force are less likely to be convicted (p = .032). Officers were marginally more likely to be convicted if there was a suspected cover-up (p = .07) and less likely to be convicted if the officer was in plain clothes at the time of the incident (p = .076). These patterns emphasize the importance of understanding police brutality from institutional, social, and psychological perspectives.