Abstract
Police shooting decisions have come under increasing scrutiny, and public understanding of those decisions is correspondingly important. Recent research demonstrated that profanity on the part of an officer in an OIS may strongly influence public assessment of police performance, even when that profanity was completely unrelated to police performance in the OIS per se; this demonstrated the importance of contextual factors, not directly related to the tactical reality of the OIS, to public judgment of the given incident. The present research extended these results into additional contextual areas. Using paragraphs describing an officer-involved shooting (OIS), which varied in the presence or absence of a violent history on the part of the officer and/or suspect, judgments of police performance in OISs were evaluated with reference to a measure of respondents’ verbal skills. It was shown that the language in which guilt and performance were discussed mediated respondent judgment of officer performance with reference to violent or nonviolent history. No such effect was observed for suspect history. General verbal skills as indicated by vocabulary also influenced judgment of the given OIS, but this influence was also mediated by the language in which guilt or innocence was expressed. Results highlight the importance of language use and abilities in the judgment of conduct, guilt, and innocence in officer involved shootings.
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Acknowledgements
This research was funded in part by small grants from the College of Science and Mathematics, California State University, Fresno.
Funding
This research was funded in part by small grants from the College of Science and Mathematics, California State University, Fresno. Portions of this research were funded by a portion of a $5000 Summer Salary granted to the corresponding author (Sharps) by the College of Science and Mathematics, California State University, Fresno.
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No animals were involved in this research. All procedures involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical statements of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards. Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study. This project received full ethical approval from the Human Subjects Committee, Department of Psychology, College of Science and Mathematics, California State University, Fresno. The project was approved as a “minimal risk” procedure for human subjects.
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All human subjects of this research were provided with full informed consent according to the ethical standards of the American Psychological Association, standard for this field. All were adults, and all indicated that they had fully read the Informed Consent form and the research descriptions contained therein, and signed the form to give their consent to participation in the research.
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Sharps, M.J., McCaw, H., Hill, C. et al. The Context of Officer-Involved Shootings: Violent History and Language Use in Public Judgments of an OIS. J Police Crim Psych 38, 639–642 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11896-023-09589-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11896-023-09589-z