Police officers are significantly less respectful and consistently ruder toward black motorists during routine traffic stops than they are toward white drivers, a paper released this week found.
The paper, published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, detailed the ways in which footage from body cameras worn by members of the Oakland Police Department in California helped illuminate the disparity in treatment.
The report was written by group of researchers in the psychology, linguistics and computer science departments at Stanford University, including Jennifer Eberhardt, a psychology professor. She said in an interview on Tuesday that it was unlikely that the results were unique to Oakland and that she would expect similar imbalances to show up throughout the United States.
