The Feedback Effects of Controversial Police Use of Force
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The Feedback Effects of Controversial Police Use of Force Kevin J. Mullinix1 · Toby Bolsen2 · Robert J. Norris3 Accepted: 5 September 2020 © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract Controversial cases of police use of force against minority civilians have become a ubiquitous feature of news headlines, and videos of these interactions between citizens and government actors have placed them in the public sphere. In this paper, we examine the feedback effects of these publicized incidents. Using a unique surveyexperiment implemented in 2019, we demonstrate that controversial police use of force against minority civilians prompts strong emotional reactions, increases support for body-cameras, changes beliefs about excessive force, and alters attitudes toward law enforcement. Notably, our design allows us to examine the effects of both text-based news stories and videos pulled from two real-world use of force cases, one lethal and one non-lethal. This study has important implications for public opinion, feedback effects, and perceptions of law enforcement. Keywords Public opinion · Feedback effects · Policing · Use of force At the time of this writing, the United States is experiencing widespread protest following the shooting of Jacob Blake by police in Kenosha, Wisconsin. In August 2020, Blake, a Black man, was shot in the back by Officer Rusten Sheskey during an attempted arrest, as he was opening his car door. The Blake shooting occurred in the midst of a movement for racial equality sparked in part by the killing of George Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s1110 9-020-09646-x) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Toby Bolsen [email protected] Kevin J. Mullinix [email protected] Robert J. Norris [email protected] 1
University of Kansas, Lawrence, USA
2
Georgia State University, Atlanta, USA
3
George Mason University, Fairfax, USA
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Political Behavior
Floyd by police in Minneapolis, Minnesota, which itself came on the heels of several others in which police were directly responsible for or failed to adequately respond to the deaths of Black citizens; perhaps most notably, the tragic shooting of Breonna Taylor in Kentucky. While the recent response has been unprecedented, these tragedies are not. In recent years, police killings of Black citizens—Michael Brown, Walter Scott, Eric Garner, and Philando Castile, for example—have captured the public’s attention and are a regular feature of news stories. Indeed, a recent headline in the Los Angeles Times proclaimed that, “Getting killed by police is a leading cause of death for young black men in America” (Khan 2019). In the United States, police kill more than a thousand civilians every year (Zimring 2020). The pervasiveness of stories about these events, which are sometimes accompanied by videos, raises an empirical question. Do stories and videos depicting controversial, racially-charged insta
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