Race And Officer Decision Making Essay

Words: 846
Pages: 4

Brown, R. A., & Frank, J. (2006). Race and officer decision making: Examining differences in arrest outcomes between black and white officers. Justice Quarterly: JQ, 23(1), 96-126. Robert Brown and Frank James, both professors of criminal justice at Fayetteville State University and the University of Cincinnati (respectively), considered an officer’s attitude towards a citizen and the treatment of that citizen to be directly related to the race of the officer. This study was implemented under the Cincinnati Police Division in order to determine the relationship between an officer’s reaction to a citizen’s offense and the officer’s race. Observers were trained and then sent to accompany officers during a routine day in order to compile general information about the officer as control data to compare the social experiment data to. A three-point ordinal scale was used to measure …show more content…
The data was gathered to focus on the average difference in arrest rates between white and black offenders based on the racial composition of the arresting officer’s department. All data was collected from various randomly selected police departments and provided general information concerning the both the officer and offender’s – especially race. The study’s data was then compared to the 2000 LEMAS police department organizational information to ensure that the sample size taken was representative of the population. The results concluded that black offenders are statistically 5% less likely to be arrested for simple assault charges than white offenders. This study also established that the geographical location and the amount of racial segregation effect the likelihood of