Primed to (re)act: Can changes in procedural language prevent adverse events between police and minority male youth?

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Principal Investigator: Christopher  Graziul
Organization: UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO
Fiscal Year: 2024
Award: $551,709
Funding agency: National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities

PROJECT SUMMARY
While researchers continue to study the effects of disproportionate minority contact with law enforcement on
a range of health-related outcomes, a recent review of this work questions the methodological validity of
most studies on this topic. Many of these concerns focus on (a) unrealistic assumptions about police
behavior and (b) poor quality data. This project addresses both by introducing a human development based
model of law enforcement officer (LEO) behavior and applying this model to study how LEOs identify with
male minority youth (MMY) using a novel publicly available data source: broadcast police communications
(BPC). Our long-term goals are (1) to assess the viability of BPC for understanding how LEOs perceive
MMY both “in the moment” via the pre-reflective procedural language used before and during LEO-MMY
encounters and “at rest” via development of a survey instrument measuring LEO identification with minority
youth, and (2) to determine if BPC may be used in lieu of non-public data sources to study police behavior
by developing a novel computational strategy for extracting meaningful information from BPC via, among
other strategies, a first-of-its-kind automatic speech recognition (ASR) model and large scale (>100 hours)
training corpus of transcribed BPC for use by computational social scientists and ASR researchers.
Our previous research revealed that a complex set of psychosocial mechanisms govern the developmental
trajectories of MMYs, indicating MMYs adopt reactive coping strategies to particular stressful events (e.g.
encounters with police) that can be maladaptive (e.g. hypermasculinity) depending on context of
interactions. Our work also suggests that all humans are subject to similar processes. Since the outcomes
of LEO-MMY encounters are ultimately the responsibility of LEOs, this project seeks to improve the quality
of these encounters (i.e. reduce youth trauma) by studying a little acknowledged LEO reactive coping
strategy: the character of procedural language used to provide LEOs with incident-specific information via
BPC. This conceptual approach derives from our theoretical framing (i.e. Spencer’s phenomenological
variant of ecological systems theory, or PVEST) that highlights the development and utilization of reactive
coping strategies in response—particularly—to MMY associated stress. It is our premise that BPC can
prime LEOs to inaccurately interpret the behavior of MMY as threatening, increasing the potential for
adverse events. Such inaccurate assessments are hard to combat since LEOs are acting on the best
information available. As a result, the procedural language of BPC pose unacknowledged risks to the well-
being of MMY. This study will thus perform a first-of-its-kind analysis of BPC to simultaneously assess its
viability for determining racial discrimination in policing and develop a novel survey instrument measuring
LEOs ability to identify with MMY for use by researchers and policing organizations across the country.

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