Tuesday, November 28, 2023

On Language, Prediction and Power


Big Bonus on the Words Front, Dan Jurafsky professor of computer science and linguistics:

Vehicle stop study illuminates importance of officer's first words
May 2023, phys.org

A law enforcement officer's first 45 words during a vehicle stop with a Black driver can often indicate how the stop will end. "There's a clear linguistic signature to escalated vehicle stops. Simply put, the officer starts off with a command rather than a reason in escalated stops."

They analyzed audio recordings and transcripts from police-worn body cameras from 577 vehicle stops that occurred over the course of a month in a medium-sized, racially diverse city in the U.S. 

The study found that the stops ending in escalation were almost three times more likely to begin with the officer issuing a command to the driver and 2 1/2 times less likely to provide a reason for the stop.

"We found that stops that end escalated, often start escalated," Rho said.

But wait (great work here by the way, ambitious study) -- 

During the second study, researchers played the audio from the traffic stops in the first study to a nationally representative sample of 188 Black male U.S. citizens ranging in age, region, education, and political ideology. 

Black male participants predicted that 84% of stops that involved an officer giving orders with no reasons would escalate, and worried about force being used in more than 80% of the stops that involved orders and no reasons as compared to only 47% of stops that involved reasons with no orders.

"The most common way for the average citizen to encounter law enforcement is through vehicle stops," Rho said. 

via Virginia Tech: Rho, Eugenia H. et al, Escalated police stops of Black men are linguistically and psychologically distinct in their earliest moments, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2023). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2216162120


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