Abstract
Objectives
In a period of mass protest, police use of force against protesters regularly makes headlines across the country. Our study contributes to the literature on public opinion about protest policing by examining support for punishing officers who use force against peaceful protesters.
Methods
We used a factorial survey experiment administered by YouGov (N = 1000), wherein an officer used force against a peaceful protester. We randomized the type of force, the protest goal, and protester characteristics (race, sex, and age)—factors relevant to theories of retributive intuitions (just-deserts) and group threat. We also included political beliefs and racial resentment as observational predictors. Respondents rated the moral acceptability of force and the officer’s deservingness of punishment.
Results
Respondents evaluated the use of force against peaceful protesters as morally wrong and deserving of punishment. Except for protester age, the experimental manipulations did not affect evaluations of police use of force. However, there was a sizable political divide in use-of-force evaluations, which was mediated by racial animus.
Conclusions
When it comes to public evaluations of police behavior toward peaceful protesters, what matters more than situational details (e.g., protest goals, protester demographics) is the evaluators’ political and racial attitudes. Americans on the political right are less willing to punish police misbehavior because they are more racially resentful.
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Notes
Our hypothesis that racial resentment acts as a mediator draws from contemporary political science studies. In short, and in contrast to previous eras where widescale political sorting was based on racial attitudes (largely as a consequence of the Southern Strategy; Carmines & Stimson, 1989), recent political science literature suggests that the partisan sorting process has stabilized and resulted in more polarized parties (Mason, 2018). As a result, current studies suggest that differences in elite messaging between parties drives changes in individuals’ racial attitudes, consequently increasing polarization in racial attitudes between parties (Enns & Jardina, 2021; Engelhardt 2021a,b).
Although counterintuitive, the number of factors in a factorial experiment has little effect on statistical power for main effects, because cell size (by crossed factors) matters less than level size (by an individual factor) (Collins et al., 2009). In other words, for any given factor, all other randomized factors “simply add to the infinite list of pretreatment covariates” and can be ignored without biasing estimates, due to randomization (Bansak et al. 2021: 32).
Missing values on income (N = 107) were imputed using scores on the other variables. This did not meaningfully impact the findings.
The items in the religiosity index measured frequency of prayer and church attendance, as well as the perceived importance of religion.
Because the use of a TASER is also relatively targeted, supplementary models included TASER as the reference category. The findings were substantively identical same across all models.
We also examined if protest goals and protester race are moderated by racial resentment (e.g., Metcalfe & Pickett, 2022). We did not find any evidence of a conditional relationship for either outcome.
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This study is funded by the University of South Carolina’s Advanced Support for Innovative Research Excellence (ASPIRE) with the help of Dr. Christi Metcalfe.
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Thompson, A.J., Metcalfe, C. & Pickett, J.T. Should police officers who use force against peaceful protesters be punished? A national experiment. J Exp Criminol (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11292-023-09589-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11292-023-09589-3