When Understanding Fails - How Law Enforcement's Low-Context Communication Norms Harm Non-Harmful Civilians

This paper examines how law enforcement’s reliance on low-context, linear, and “facts-only” communication norms creates systemic bias against civilians who speak in high-context or high-recursion-depth styles, including neurodivergent individuals, cultural minorities, artists, and academics. Drawing on sociolinguistics, cognitive psychology, and police training protocols, it introduces the PUTMAN-Δ/LE model to quantify the “recursion depth gap” between civilian communication and patrol-level officer decoding capacity. The model explains how this gap leads to misclassification of non-threatening individuals as impaired, deceptive, or dangerous—often triggering escalation, wrongful detention, or involuntary psychiatric holds. Case studies and documented incidents illustrate harm pathways, while policy recommendations propose Δ-awareness training, structured translation protocols, and integration of cultural competence and neurodiversity awareness into standard patrol operations. The work reframes misunderstanding as a systemic bias, highlighting that true public safety includes protecting civilians from harm caused by institutional interpretive limits.