Title

“One Question Before You Get Gone..”: Consent Search Requests As A Threat To Perceived Stop Legitimacy

Keywords

citizen satisfaction; criminological theories; driving while Black (DWB); race and policing; race and public opinion; racial profiling; traffic stops; treatment by the police; war on drugs; White privilege

Abstract

The use of consent searches in the war on drugs has brought this type of search to the forefront of the racial profiling debate. Studies using official traffic-stop data have attempted to determine whether minority drivers are more likely than White drivers to be asked for consent to search. This analytic strategy, though informative, does not account for the perceptual nature of racial profiling and the damage that might be done to drivers’ attitudes toward police if they react negatively to being asked for consent. The present study, using the theories of procedural justice and expectancy disconfirmation, analyzes the impact of officers’ requests for consent to search on drivers’ perceptions about the legitimacy of the stops themselves. Interaction effects are also modeled by breaking the sample down by race. Results suggest that consent search requests significantly damage perceived stop legitimacy only among White drivers; the effect is marginally significant among Black drivers and nonsignificant for Hispanics. This finding is interpreted within the bounds of expectancy theory, whereby minority drivers’ expectations for the way officers will treat them are lower from the outset than Whites’ are, so Whites, then, are particularly affronted by search requests. This suggests that perceived racial profiling is a complex, nuanced phenomenon and that race is more symbolic than predictive of stopped drivers’ attitudes toward police.

Publication Date

10-1-2012

Publication Title

Race and Justice

Volume

2

Issue

4

Number of Pages

250-273

Document Type

Article

Personal Identifier

scopus

DOI Link

https://doi.org/10.1177/2153368712459273

Socpus ID

84899625696 (Scopus)

Source API URL

https://api.elsevier.com/content/abstract/scopus_id/84899625696

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