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For Black drivers, a police officer's first 45 words are a portent of
what's to come
May 29, 20233:00 PM ET
Heard on All Things Considered
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Scientists are studying police camera footage to understand why some car
stops of Black men escalate and others don't.
Hill Street Studios/Getty Images
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 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, a
researcher at Virginia Tech.

Amid the recent high-profile killing of Tyre Nichols 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.

Tyre Nichols died of blunt force injuries to the head from his beating,
autopsy shows
NATIONAL
Tyre Nichols died of blunt force injuries to the head from his beating,
autopsy shows
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, 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.

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Fatal Police Shootings Of Unarmed Black People Reveal Troubling Patterns
"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.

America Reckons With Racial Injustice
America Reckons With Racial Injustice
"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 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, 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 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.

traffic stop
police brutality
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