Abstract
A police stop must be based on founded suspicion: an officer’s ability to correctly discriminate suspicious behavior. However, police stops can be influenced by negative attitudes toward Black individuals. We conducted a systematic review of empirical articles published from 2014 to 2019 that investigated the relationship between racial prejudice and police stops on PsycInfo using keywords such as “race,” “ethnic,” “police stop,” “traffic stop,” and “stop and frisk.” Results included 16 studies conducted in the United States, England, Wales, and the Netherlands and showed that Black men were the most frequent targets of police stops; that many individuals who have been stopped by the police reported negative perceptions of the police force; that the Stop, Question, and Frisk strategy used by some U.S. police departments proved to be a type of stop that favors racial selectivity; and that traffic stops were favorable environments for racially biased actions by officers. We conclude that institutional racism in police stops proves to be a problem shared by several countries, including Brazil. We suggest more investigations to characterize institutional racism in the police force and in other settings and interventions aimed at reducing individual biases and collective racist practices.
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Notes
The term “Black” (negro in Portuguese) is used here to denote individuals with African ancestry. In Brazil, the term is used both by government agencies and by individuals themselves.
References
References marked with an asterisk indicate studies included in the systematic review.
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Author Note
The present research is based on the undergraduate thesis in psychology of Aline Ara Santos Carvalho, under the supervision of Angelo A. S. Sampaio and Táhcita Medrado Mizael. The authors would like to thank Mariana Souza, Nilton Almeida, Christian Vichi, and Marco Tagliabue for comments on previous versions of the manuscript.
Funding
Táhcita Mizael was supported by a postdoctoral fellowship from the São Paulo Research Foundation (Grant 2020/02548-7) and also by the scientific program of the Instituto Nacional de Ciência e Tecnologia sobre Comportamento, Cognição e Ensino, supported by CNPq (Grants 573972/2008-7 and 465686/2014-1) and FAPESP (Grants 2008/57705-8 and 2014/50909-8).
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Carvalho, A.A.S., Mizael, T.M. & Sampaio, A.A.S. Racial Prejudice and Police Stops: A Systematic Review of the Empirical Literature. Behav Analysis Practice 15, 1213–1220 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40617-021-00578-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40617-021-00578-4