Seeing the state in action: Public preferences about and judgments of common police–civilian interactions

Abstract New technologies allow unprecedented public visibility of routine police–civilian interactions, but we know little about how the public wants the police to behave during them. We examine public evaluations about preferred punishment and fair treatment using vignette experiments that randomize multiple features of police–civilian interactions. These causal estimates reveal that for the mass public, officer race does not affect public attitudes, while participant demeanor, markers of threat, and civilian race do. Police–civilian interactions are evaluated through a lens of reciprocity: Hostile officers are judged as less fair, while hostile and armed civilians are viewed as deserving of harsher punishment. When civilians remain polite and threat is low, there is little support for punitive outcomes, but poor civilian behavior warrants more punitive state action. Moreover, people prefer more punishment for White compared with Black civilians, as well as in interactions with White officers and civilians compared with those in which both parties are Black. Interactions with a White officer and a Black civilian are judged as less fair, as are the fairness of assigned punishments in them. Finally, views about fairness are not equivalent to views about appropriate sanctions. These results provide critical evidence about public attitudes regarding police punishment and fairness in order maintenance.