Report of the Presidential Commission on Police Aggression and Its Disproportionate Impact on Minority Populations
/In June 2020, ISRA’s President Barbara Krahé commissioned a group of experts charged with the task of reviewing the literature on the nature, development, and impact of police aggression and issuing a public statement of their findings. The resultant report of this Commission (1) examines the inappropriate use of force by police in the context of research on modern policing as well as critical race theory, and (2) offers five recommendations suggested by contemporary theory and research that are aimed at policymakers, law enforcement administrators, and scholars.
The report was released April 21, 2021.
Members of the Presidential Commission
Commission Chairs
Paul Boxer, Rutgers University, USA
Rod Brunson, Northeastern University, USA
Noni Gaylord-Harden, Texas A&M University, USA
Commission Panelists
Kimberly Kahn, Portland State University, USA
Desmond Patton, Columbia University, USA
Joseph Richardson, University of Maryland, USA
Luis Rivera, Rutgers University, USA
Jocelyn R. Smith Lee, University of North Carolina-Greensboro, USA
Mario Staller, University of Applied Sciences for Police and Public Administration in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany
Barbara Krahé, University of Potsdam, Germany
Eric F. Dubow, Bowling Green State University, USA
Dominic Parrott, Georgia State University, USA
Kaylise Algrim, Rutgers University, USA
Commissioning of the Statement
Police killings of unarmed civilians and other forms of police aggression — particularly toward racial/ethnic minority groups — have been an unfortunately routine feature of modern life for decades, most recently and prominently in the United States. Yet even a cursory search of news media reports reveals that this form of aggressive behavior is present in countries around the globe. On May 25, 2020, police aggression was brought into sharp focus by the killing of George Floyd by Derek Chauvin, an officer of the Minneapolis Police Department. The video of Mr. Floyd’s death went viral quickly. With no charges filed or arrests made of those officers, large-scale protests began almost immediately — first in the streets of Minneapolis and then around the world. The officers involved in Floyd’s death eventually were arrested, but by then the protests had become enormous and met with aggression from police, as unarmed protestors were fired on with tear gas and rubber bullets amidst a backdrop of property destruction, vandalism, and agitation.
With Mr. Floyd’s killing now elevating the problems and challenges of police aggression to a global focus, it is important to consider what we know so far about the issues involved. As a starting point, it is clear that acts of police aggression and violence disproportionately impact male racial/ethnic minority populations. For example, Black men in the United States hold the greatest risk of being killed by the police, with a 1/1000 chance of being killed by police over their life span — this stands in contrast to a risk of about 1/2000 for all men and 1/33,000 for women (1). The bias inherent in these estimates appears to manifest in a variety of ways, including how Black men — especially young Black men — are perceived by police, the characteristics of individuals who seek employment as police, and the manner in which police are trained (2). These observations from the US are in line with those noted in 2018 by a United Nations panel charged with investigating police killings in the United Kingdom, with UK citizens of African or Caribbean descent at greatest risk of being killed by police (3). Data on rates of police killings and related acts of police aggression disproportionately impacting minority communities around the globe are difficult to come by. But news media reports from around the world certainly underscore the fact that police killings are not limited to Western nations — just in the first several days of June 2020, we have seen reports of police killings from Mexico (4) and South Africa (5). Media reports also have revealed persistent high or increasing levels of police aggression in China (6) and Brazil (7).
Despite the wide body of research available describing the origins and nature of aggressive and violent behavior in the general sense — much of which is readily available in the pages of ISRA’s journal, Aggressive Behavior — there is surprisingly little scholarship available on police aggression specifically. In fact, even within the pages of Aggressive Behavior, only one published study has dealt with use of force by police. In that study, police recruits’ intentions to use force in hypothetical video-mediated scenarios were heightened in the context of an ego-depleting task, suggesting that police aggression might emanate from a loss of self-control (8). The importance of self-control revealed in this study is consistent with studies in other scientific outlets on racial biases in police shootings, suggesting that cognitive control is critical to reducing the impact of any implicit bias or stereotypes (9). Yet there are many questions that aggression scholars have not even begun to ask of police violence and aggression, particularly with regard to its disproportionate impact on racial/ethnic minority populations around the world.
Thus, a critical aspect of our challenge is grappling with the gap in the broader aggression research literature left by such a dearth of studies on police aggression. Yet we know there are other, more developed literatures available from which to supplement the literature on police aggression directly and triangulate our analysis — for example, studies on aggression and violence motivated by racial, ethnic, and other intergroup factors; studies of aggressive and violent behavior perpetrated by other state actors, such as soldiers; and studies of the personal and interpersonal conditions that might give rise to extreme acts of aggression, such as stress, conflict, and fear. We need to develop a research literature around police aggression and violence through the multiple disciplinary lenses typically brought to bear on aggression — biological, psychological, sociological, and others. By so doing, we can address this critical moment of social unrest in a manner that can lead to the identification of new methods and modalities for preventing police aggression and improving both perceived and actual safety in communities — especially for minority groups who have disproportionately been the targets of that aggression. To this end, the International Society for Research on Aggression has commissioned a group of experts charged with the task of reviewing the literature on the nature, development, and impact of police aggression and issuing a public statement of their findings. Informed by the current state of scientific knowledge, the Commission’s public statement will include public policy recommendations. We anticipate that the important work of this commission will be completed within the year.
(1) Edwards, F., Lee, H., & Esposito, M. (2019). Risk of being killed by police use of force in the United States by age, race-ethnicity, and sex. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 116, 16793-16798.
(2) Hall, A.V., Hall, E. V., & Perry, J.L. (2016). Black and blue: Exploring racial bias and law enforcement in the killings of unarmed black male civilians. American Psychologist, 71, 175–186.
(3) Gayle, D. (2018, April 27). Structural racism at heart of British society, UN human rights panel says. The Guardian.
(4) Reuters. (2020, June 5). Mexicans protest police brutality over death of a man in custody. NBC News.
(5) Pijoos, I. (2020, June 10). Collins Khosa: ‘We saw soldiers assaulting him,’ say new witnesses in IPID report. Times Live.
(6) Kaiman, J. (2016, May 10). A mysterious death in China raises suspicions of police brutality. Los Angeles Times.
(7) Andreoni, M., & Lodoño, E. (2020, May 18). ‘License to kill’: Inside Rio’s record year of police killings. The New York Times.
(8) Staller, M.S., Muller, M., Christiansen, P., Zaiser, B., Korner, S. & Cole, J.C. (2018). Ego depletion and the use of force: Investigating the effects of ego depletion on police officers’ intentions to use force. Aggressive Behavior, 45, 161-168.
(9) Correll, J., Hudson, S.M., Guillermo, S., & Ma, D.S. (2014). The police officer’s dilemma: A decade of research on racial bias in the decision to shoot. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 8, 201-213.
