WIRED
By Sarah Zhang
Michael Brown was, at best, stopped by police for stealing cigarillos. Sandra Bland for failing to signal a lane change. Freddie Gray for carrying a switchblade. Yet these encounters all ended with them dead. Distrust running both ways between police and the communities they’re supposed to protect have sparked cries for reform to prevent rapid escalation of police violence. What’s missing in the conversation, though, is science.
That’s because the science often doesn’t exist. Police rarely cooperate with outside researchers, especially those perceived as reformers. “In New York where I’ve done a lot of my work, I can’t get anyone to talk to me,” says Alex Vitale, a sociologist at Brooklyn College who has studied how police respond to protests. And even when social science research points to a need for reform, getting new ideas into police academy training and thousands of local police departments fractured all over the country is, put charitably, a slow endeavor.
Since 1994, the Department of Justice has funneled more than $14 billion to state and local police departments to support community policing initiatives, to limited success. The idea behind the so-called Community Oriented Policing Services program comes out of contact theory, which suggests the best way to reduce prejudice is to interact with people who are different. Police officers—particularly white officers working in black neighborhoods—only encounter people different from them when they’re responding to a crime. They rarely see the community in a positive light. Get officers out in the community in ordinary situations, and they’ll become less defensive and negative. That much bears out in the science.
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