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The relationship between citizens and their criminal justice systems comes down to just that – relationships. And those relations generally start with essentially one-on-one encounters between law enforcement personnel and individuals, whether those individuals are suspects, victims or witnesses.

When those relations get off on the wrong foot – or worse, as in the case of a number of high-profile police killings in the United States attest to – the repercussions can resonate far away from where a traffic stop occurs. This is the field that social psychologist Nick Camp researches. As his website at the University of Michigan explains, Camps studies “the role routine police-citizen encounters play in undermining police-community trust, and how these disparities can be addressed.”

As he tells interviewer David Edmonds in this Social Science Bites podcast, “[O]ne of the things that we know from research and procedural justice is that when people don’t view policing as legitimate, they’re less likely to cooperate with police requests for assistance, for example. Until now, it’s hard to find experimental evidence for this, but one of the things we can use body cameras for is not just to look at disparities in these interactions, but their consequences.”

In this episode, Camp cites research on body camera footage, traffic stops, and even first names to describe how anecdotal tropes about often poor police-citizen interactions, especially in the African-American community, are borne out by the reams of data modern recording devices provide. He also offers hopeful signs of improving these relationships with training based on this very same data, and suggests that artificial intelligence might be useful in mining this data for more insights.

To download an MP3 of this podcast, right-click this link and save. The transcript of the conversation appears below.

David Edmonds: You don’t need a criminology PhD to know that African Americans are more distrustful of the police and the justice system than white Americans. Why? Of course, there are many reasons, but they include some that have been revealed in fascinating research by Nick Camp, a social psychologist at the University of Michigan. Nick Camp, welcome to Social Science Bites.

Nick Camp: Thank you for having me.

Edmonds: We’re going to concentrate today on trust in the criminal justice system, and in particular how it differs between Black and white citizens in the United States. It’s not a new phenomena, of course, and a defining episode was the killing of George Floyd. Perhaps you can remind us of that incident and tell us what impact it had on attitudes to the police and to the law.

Camp: Yeah. So you know, the environment of distrust and even violence between Black Americans and law enforcement is nothing new. You can go back to the 60s. I got involved in this research in 2014 after the killing of Michael Brown, but perhaps the most recent event that we’re familiar with is the murder of George Floyd by Derek Chauvin in 2020. George Floyd was a 46-year-old African-American man who allegedly used a counterfeit $20 bill to pay for an item in Minneapolis. Derek Chauvin and three other police officers show up and essentially suffocated George Floyd. And so that killing sparked protests, not just in Minneapolis and the United States, but around the world, and really brought out the fraught relationship between law enforcement and communities of color.

Edmonds: As you say, it was nothing new. Was there something particular about this episode that sparked off these demonstrations? Was it just the straw that broke the camel’s back?

Camp: Well, there’s two ways of looking at it. Certainly, the entirety of this interaction was caught on bystanders’ cell phones and also it happened in a context where there was body-camera footage, so more people were exposed to the entirety and the intensity of this interaction. Another way of looking at it is a lot of times these precipitating events, these kinds of sparks, occur in a context where there’s already a fraught relationship, there’s already strained history of interactions. You can really interpret this event in either of those lenses.

Edmonds: So you’ve been involved in various interesting research projects. Let’s get into the weeds of that a little. One is on name bias in the courtroom. Tell us about that.

Camp: Yeah, so I think the common thread through a lot of my work is a lot of times we tend to think of racism or bias as being one person being prejudiced against another person from a different group. But that isn’t really the way that a lot of inequities are perpetuated the criminal justice system. This is work led by Toni Kenthirarajah, looking at maybe an underappreciated cue in these inequities, and that’s legal defendants’ names. So in this research, we looked at sentencing disparities among African American defendants in Florida just based off of how stereotypically Black their name was perceived to be. So we compared sentencing decisions from people named like Jamal, which [is a] stereotypically African American name, to a name like Mark, which has fewer of those associations. And what we found is that even after you account for the severity of the crime the defendant was accused of, even if you count for age and a lot of these other potential confounds, just that stereotypicality of the name had an influence on how severe the punishment was, how severe the sentencing was.

Edmonds: Is it possible to put a number on it by how many years, by how much of an increase in the fine did this name make a difference?

Camp: Yeah, on average, a name that’s one standard deviation more stereotypical resulted in a sentence of about 409 days longer. So that’s an additional year behind bars for just a name. And I’ll also add that in this study, all of the defendants were African-American men. So I think this is a really kind of pernicious form of racism, right? Because it doesn’t fit that model of distinguishing between white defendants and Black defendants. Really, this is about those racial stereotypes influencing decisions among African-American men.

Edmonds: And is this an example of what people call unconscious bias?

Camp: It’s hard to say how to suss out how much is conscious and how much is unconscious. I will say that this is a cue that most of us are not really attending to, because we think of names as something that individuates people, that sets people apart, right? I’m Nick, that’s what sets me apart from other people in the classroom. But this is a case where names are leading people to fall back on biases and fall back on these stereotypical associations. So you know, how much of this is conscious and how much is not, at the end of the day, it still has an impact on one of the most high-stakes decisions that could be made about one’s life.

Edmonds: And you found the impact both in reality in the courtroom, but also you followed it up with an online experiment in which participants were asked to carry out the sentencings themselves.

Camp: That’s right. And so this was a context where we could give people the exact same circumstances and only change the defendant’s name, and then we replicated these results that we saw in the courtroom.

Edmonds: So that’s a remarkable and scary discovery. Something else you’ve looked into is evidence from body cameras. I guess that’s a very new source of data. What did you do exactly with the body camera data?

Camp: Yeah, so body cameras, by this point, they’ve been in circulation in the US for about 10 years. I think the first ones were deployed in the UK in like 2005 actually, in officers’ hats. But what’s new is a lot of times we think about this footage as evidence, either for criminal cases or for cases of officer misconduct, but we haven’t really considered it as a source of data. And what that means is that the vast majority of these thousands and thousands of interactions are being caught on camera and never get looked at, and that’s really a missed opportunity to understand parts of policing that we can’t otherwise have access to, to understand their consequences and, most importantly, understand how to change them.

Edmonds: So you looked at just routine exchanges between police and those they’d stopped. What did you discover?

Camp: Right, we looked at traffic stops from one month of stops in Oakland, California. And what we did was we created basically a script of these interactions and looked at officers’ language when they were talking to white or Black drivers. And first thing we noticed is that most th