Whites’ biased emergency calls underwrite a largely unstudied racial-bias channel.

Evidence

The community enforcement of racial bias has undoubtedly been understudied within the area of intergroup relations; further research could illuminate many questions regarding where bias enters into the process of community law enforcement. We drew from the literature on intergroup relations and cross-race interactions to provide an account of the potential mechanisms that lead civilians to make use of police intervention when they feel threatened. However, it is important to note that, for the most part, the empirical work we cited investigated threat in intergroup interactions more broadly and did not look specifically at cases of community enforcement. Thus, a first step in further understanding this process would entail obtaining and analyzing the transcripts of emergency calls in order to better understand any potential biased language used. This analysis, in turn, could provide insight into what kind of interventions would be most useful for reducing the occurrence of these events. While bills such as the one recently proposed by Oregon’s Senate could prove useful, they might only be successful in reducing racial bias at the first of the stages we discussed above, more specifically, the stage at which the civilian decides to make the call. — Joseph Avery, Jim Sidanius, Joel Cooper, Gregory Davis, Amanda N., Bias in the Law, 295

Categorization

• SEED: Calls for analyzing 911 call transcripts to find biased language — a concrete research/essay angle that could surface coded racial threat references.
• QUESTION: What did Oregon’s proposed Senate bill do, and would it only gate the initial call stage rather than later stages of the enforcement process?
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Joseph Avery, Jim Sidanius, Joel Cooper, Gregory Davis, Amanda N., Bias in the Law: A Definitive Look at…, 295