Type of Police Contact and the Race Gap in Citizens’ Perceptions of Injustice: A Research Note

Abstract

A substantial body of research has examined the public's perceptions of the police, typically showing that Black Americans, and to a lesser extent Hispanic Americans, hold less favorable views than White Americans. This tendency toward a racial gap also extends to estimates of police procedural justice, but the literature has not assessed whether racial differences are more pronounced in some situations than in others. The current study analyzed data from a large national survey of U.S. residents about their encounters with police officers to test whether the type of contact between police and citizens affected the racial gap in public perceptions of procedural justice. We found that Black and Hispanic respondents were more likely to report police procedural injustice than White respondents, and these differences were larger when contact had been initiated by the police than when an encounter had been initiated by the citizen.