Race/ethnicity and perceptions of the police: a comparison of White, Black, Asian and Hispanic Americans

AbstractThis study extends the dominant Black–White paradigm in assessing public perceptions of the police by including Hispanic and Asian Americans. Relying on a large random sample of Seattle residents, this study examines: (1) perceptions of police problem-solving, hassling, racial profiling and bias among Hispanic, Asian, Black and White Americans and (2) factors that influence police perceptions. Results reveal both majority–minority and inter-minority variations in attitudes towards police, suggesting that a single vertical scale or gradation of attitudes cannot adequately describe the complexity of different racial/ethnic groups' perceptions of multiple aspects of policing. A range of individual demographic, police- and crime-related, and neighbourhood structural and cultural factors influence public perceptions of the police. Some interesting findings include that educational attainment and employment have negative effects on public satisfaction with the police, police visibility is associated with greater satisfaction with police problem-solving yet stronger beliefs on police harassment and racial profiling, and neighbourhood codes of violence is a consistent and outstanding predictor of public perceptions of the police. Possible explanations are provided.Keywords: race/ethnicityperceptions of policeAsian AmericansHispanic Americans Notes1. Given the nature of the data, this study follows the conventional practices to view Hispanic and Asian Americans as two aggregated racial/ethnic groups, although both are very diverse populations.2. Three of the four examined areas of police performance deal with police discrimination or unjust treatment, thus it is not the purpose of this study to complete a comprehensive examination of Seattle residents' evaluations of police performance.3. According to the 2000 Census data, Asian Americans constituted 13.1% of Seattle population, followed by Blacks, 8.3%, and Latinos, 5.3%.4. The 'other' group includes Native Americans, Pacific Islanders, other racial/ethnic groups, and people who self-identify as having two or more racial/ethnic identifies. This study treats them as a hodgepodge of groups due to data limitation – future research should examine the experience of individual minority groups within.5. The dependent variables, problem-solving, hassling, and racial profiling, are recoded into dummy variables, with 1 representing respondents who strongly agree or agree that police do a good job in solving problems, police hassle residents, and racial profiling is a problem, respectively, because the assumption of parallel lines required for ordinal logistic regressions was violated.6. The two factors are correlated to a certain degree (Pearson's r=0.42), but not highly correlated. As shown in the results, when both are included in the analysis, neighbourhood codes of violence exerts a significant negative impact on residents' perceptions of all four areas of police performance.7. Note that in this study, the foreign-born immigrants mainly include Hispanics and Asians. Respectively 66.7 and 44.6% of Asians and Hispanics in this sample are foreign-born, both proportions mirroring nationwide distributions.