[ Car stops that result in a search, handcuffing, or arrest are
nearly three times more likely to begin with the police officer
issuing a command, such as "Keep your hands on the wheel" or "Turn the
car off."]
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FOR BLACK DRIVERS, A POLICE OFFICER’S FIRST 45 WORDS ARE A PORTENT
OF WHAT’S TO COME  
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Nell Greenfieldboyce
May 29, 2023
NPR
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_ Car stops that result in a search, handcuffing, or arrest are
nearly three times more likely to begin with the police officer
issuing a command, such as "Keep your hands on the wheel" or "Turn the
car off." _

Tae-Ahn Lea of Louisville was forced from his car, searched and
handcuffed after allegedly making a wide turn. An officer accused the
teen and his mother of having an “attitude” during the encounter.
, WDRB.com

 

When a police officer stops a Black driver, the first 45 words said by
that officer hold important clues about how their encounter is likely
to go.

Car stops that result in a search, handcuffing, or arrest are nearly
three times more likely to begin with the police officer issuing a
command, such as "Keep your hands on the wheel" or "Turn the car off."

That's according to a new study
[[link removed]] in
the _Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences_ that examined
police body-camera footage of 577 routine car stops involving Black
drivers.

Eighty-one of these stops ultimately involved searches, handcuffings,
or arrests. That kind of outcome was less likely when a police
officer's first words provided a reason for the stop.

"The first 45 words, which is less than 30 seconds on average, spoken
by a law enforcement officer during a car stop to a Black driver can
be quite telling about how the stop will end," says Eugenia Rho
[[link removed]], a researcher at
Virginia Tech.

Amid the recent high-profile killing of Tyre Nichols
[[link removed]] and
other Black motorists after traffic stops, the findings offer a grim
sketch of how police stops can escalate and how Black men recognize
the warning signs.

 

Rho and her colleagues focused on Black drivers because this group is
stopped by the police at higher rates and are more likely to be
handcuffed, searched, and arrested than any other racial group.

"The car stop is by far the most common way people come into contact
with the police," says Jennifer Eberhardt
[[link removed]], a
social psychologist at Stanford University. "With the spread of
body-worn cameras, we now have access to how these interactions unfold
in real time."

All of the stops in this study occurred in a racially diverse,
medium-sized U.S. city over the course of one month; the researchers
won't identify the city for privacy reasons.

"The vast majority of the stops that we're looking at are stops for
routine traffic violations, not for other things that are more
serious," says Eberhardt.

The scientists controlled for factors such as the officer's gender and
race, as well as the neighborhood crime rate. About 200 officers were
involved in these stops.

"It's not really a function of a few officers driving this pattern,"
says Rho.

The words or actions of the person behind the wheel of the car didn't
seem to contribute to escalation.

"The drivers are just answering the officers' questions and explaining
what's going on," says Eberhardt. "They're cooperative."

To understand how Black men perceive the initial language used by
police officers during a car stop, the researchers asked 188 Black men
to listen to recordings of the opening moments of car stops.

It turns out, perhaps not surprisingly, those Black men were highly
attuned to the implications of a police officer starting an
interaction with a command.

"When officers began with orders without reasons, Black male
participants predicted that the stop would escalate in over 84% of
those cases," says Rho.

And even though none of the stops in this study involved the use of
force, Black men worried about the possibility of force 80% of the
time when they heard a recording of a law enforcement officer issuing
a command without offering a reason.

"In this country, we know much more about fearing Black people than
the fears of Black people," says Eberhardt. "Many Black people fear
the police, even in routine car stops. That fear is a fear that could
be stoked or set at ease with the first words that an officer speaks."

Eberhardt notes that millions of people know about the killing
of George Floyd
[[link removed]] in
May of 2020 after police officers pulled him from his car, but far
fewer people know what happened in the first moments when he was
approached by an officer.

"We analyzed the first 27 seconds of Floyd's encounter with police on
that day. And we found that Floyd apologizes to the officers who stand
outside his car window, Floyd requests the reason for the stop, he
pleads, he explains, he follows orders, he expresses fear," she says.
"Yet every response to Floyd is an order."

From the very beginning, police officers issued commands without
giving Floyd an explanation — the same linguistic signature
associated with escalation in this study.

Tracey Meares [[link removed]], a Yale Law
professor and a founding director of the Justice Collaboratory at Yale
Law School, reviewed this study and says she found it gratifying to
see this kind of social dynamic measured with such precision.

"It's hard to deny then," she says, noting that some communities
are rethinking 
[[link removed]]whether
they want armed law enforcement to be involved in traffic violations.

"There are stark racial differences in who is stopped and who's not,"
says Meares, who points out that in the one-month period covered by
this study, the city's police officers did 588 stops of Black drivers
and only 262 stops of white drivers.

Over 15% of Black drivers experienced an escalated outcome such as a
search, handcuffing, or arrest, while less than 1% of white drivers
experienced one of those outcomes.

"They're not drawing any conclusions from that, but these are things
we should just be paying attention to," says Meares. "It strains
credulity that there are that many more traffic violations."

Rho says in planning this study, they had initially set out to look at
patterns related to traffic stop escalation for white drivers too, but
realized that it happened so infrequently for white drivers that there
just weren't sufficient numbers to even include them in the analysis.

_Nell Greenfieldboyce is a NPR science correspondent._

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* Traffic pullovers
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* police brutality
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* Racism
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