Racial disparities in consent searches may stem from community responses, not officer targeting.

Evidence

Going a step further, police officials could examine the footage and uncover how policies are actually implemented on the ground. For example, does the race of the person stopped affect the likelihood that officers will inform them of their rights? Once informed, are Black community members less likely than White community members to refuse a consent search? In this case, the footage could be used to explore unanticipated implications of seemingly race-neutral policies. African American community members might not feel that they have a choice in refusing a police officer’s request, or they might be more fearful about the possible consequences of a refusal; in response, they may submit to consent searches at higher rates than similarly situated White community members. If this were the case, having this information would help a law enforcement agency tease apart that the racial disparities in consent searches that would ensue were not the result of officers “targeting” certain groups, but of how the community members themselves differentially responded. — Joseph Avery, Jim Sidanius, Joel Cooper, Gregory Davis, Amanda N., Bias in the Law, 434

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes Bargh’s automaticity work and the tension between situational vs. dispositional attribution in social psychology — differential response by the target of policing rather than the agent.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: do the Oakland and NYPD data sets actually separate officer-side bias from citizen-side compliance differentials?