Explaining the American crisis of policing: Media, malfeasance, and racial prejudice

Andrea Silva and Diego Esparza

Social Science Quarterly, 2021, vol. 102, issue 7, 3103-3113

Abstract: Objective To include the factor of police malfeasance in the crisis of confidence in American police. Further, to explain the role of race, media, and contextual factors on individual perception of police performance. We argue that while the BLM movement was amplified by the deaths of Black people at the hands of police, it originates from the reality that police are continuously engaged in nefarious activities that wear down communities of color extensively. Methods Using the 2016 Collaborative Multiracial Post‐Election Survey (CMPS) and data on media reported police malfeasance in 2016 collected from the CATO institute, we explore the relationship between police malfeasance, race, and evaluations of police performance. We create two sets of logit regressions, one for all CMPS respondents and second, disaggregated by race to show the effects of media reported police malfeasance on respondent’s evaluations of police performance. Results In the pooled model, we find a positive and significant correlation between poor police performance evaluations and incidences of police malfeasance. Further, substantive increases in the probability of rating police performance as poor are correlated with all respondents when disaggregated by race. We find a significant correlation among Black and White respondents, who are more likely to rate police performance as poor. Conclusion Conventional narratives around the Black Lives Matter movement seem to show that deaths at the hands of local law enforcement “created” the BLM movement. We argue that the current delegitimating of police in terms of public support is related directly to police behavior themselves. Police malfeasance increases the likelihood of negative performance evaluations, thus undermining community trust in the police.

Date: 2021
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