Asymmetrical escalation in a police traffic stop: An analysis using communication accommodation theory

Police in the United States continue to face a legitimacy crisis fueled by publicized incidents of misconduct, particularly during interactions with racial and ethnic minorities. This study examines a September 8, 2024, traffic stop in which Miami-Dade police officers physically removed Tyreek Hill, a Miami Dolphins wide receiver, from his vehicle, handcuffed him, and addressed him in a manner that drew widespread criticism. Guided by Communication Accommodation Theory (CAT), we systematically coded the first 186 seconds of the encounter using CATcoder , software an application we developed to capture verbal, nonverbal, and paralinguistic behaviors and to support more transparent, comparable observational CAT coding. Coded data underwent thematic analysis of accommodation and nonaccommodation patterns. Our findings reveal an asymmetrical escalation pattern in which sustained officer nonaccommodation foreclosed reciprocal and mutual accommodation; Hill’s intermittent shifts toward compliance appeared to reflect coercion rather than genuine convergence. These findings extend CAT’s account of high-stakes intergroup encounters.