(dramatic music)
- [Jake] We're at Stanford University
because we've been invited to join in action
a groundbreaking study into the differences
between how police officers treat black people
and white people.
So tell me about your project here.
[Jennifer] We've been working with the Oakland Police Dept.
on analyzing footage from body-worn cameras.
They clip them on the front of their uniform.
And let me just show you a piece of footage, actually,
that comes from a stop from one of these cameras.
- [Officer] Can you turn the car off for me, sir?
- [Man] What?
- [Officer] Is the engine off?
- [Jake] How, how much footage do you have?
- [Jennifer] Oakland has had
footage for maybe nearly seven years now,
and so there is a huge amount of footage.
Well, we're interested in stepping back
and actually looking at the footage as data,
and to not just look at the footage for one case,
but to look at the footage for all of these stops.
- [Jake] What kinds of patterns do you think you could detect?
- [Jennifer] Well, we want to look to see, for example,
if African Americans are treated any differently
from white Americans during these stops,
and we're using these computational linguistic tools,
help us to understand the language used in the stops.
- [Officer] Yeah, do you have your driver's license
with you, sir?
- [Jake] Whatever Everhart's researchers have found
sheds new light on how police officers across America
treat white people and black people.
- [Officer] Pretty good.
The reason I pulled you over,
you got a brake light out right there
on your passenger side.
You aware of that?
- Oh.
I'll get out in a sec and I'll fix it.
- [Officer] All right.
- [Officer] Put your hands behind your back.
- [Woman] What did y'all stop me for?
- [Officer] Face away!
- [Woman] Why did you stop me?
- So what I'm interested in is
not just what the officer is saying,
but when they're saying it,
and it turns out that the order
in which the officers say things matters a lot.
- [Jake] So what does one of these conversations
typically look like?
- [Vinodkumar] So a typical conversation
starts with a greeting,
goes on to giving the reason for the stop,
and then giving the documents, asking for documents-
- [Jake] License and registration, please.
Yep.
What has your data told you about the differences
between the script that a white person receives
and the script that a black person receives?
- [Vinodkumar] Based on our analysis
of it on thousands of jobs,
what we see is that white motorists are given the reason
for the stop more earlier on in the conversations
and more consistently than black motorists,
and sometimes black motorist are not given the reason
for the stop at all.
- Wow.
(woman crying)
- Uh-huh.
- [Officer] The other side here, your brake light.
- [Man] Oh, my brake lgiht?
- [Officer] Uh-huh.
- Oh, I didn't know that. [Officer] Okay.
- I'll get it fixed. [Officer] All right.
- [Robert] So I'm looking specifically at respect,
and once we can identify these particular things
about the officer's language,
we can make an estimate
of sort of their overall respectfulness at any given time.
And so a key part of that is looking at how particular kinds
of words are being used more
when an officer is speaking to a black person
versus a white person.
- Right, right.
- [Jake] Apologizing, reassurance, formal titles.
- [Robert] Those for instance are,
we would traditionally think of as pretty respectful,
and it turns out that they're significantly more common
in stops when the officer is talking
to a white community member.
- [Jake] Wow, but questions where they're probing
for more information, informal titles.
- [Robert] Like dude and bro and man.
- Right, right.
Oh, wow.
- [Jake] And the hands on the wheel.
I can tell you right now I have never been told
to put my hands on the wheel.
- [Robert] Yeah, and those words are more common in stops
with black community members.
- [Jake] Wow.
- [Robert] A surprising fact is that
if we just look at the words
that were used by the officer,
we can predict the race of the person
that they're talking to about two-thirds of the time.
- [Jake] Wow.
Even if you don't know the race of the person
that was stopped,
you can tell it from how that person was spoken to.
That's crazy.
- I'm asking, I'm asking for the reason.
why we're being pulled over.
- [Jennifer] A black person who gets pulled over is worried
about how they're going to be treated.
- [Man] Why are you pulling me out of my car?
Sir, take your hands off of me.
- [Jennifer] They see these officer-involved shootings,
say, on television.
- [Man] I have no weapons.
- [Jennifer] They know other people who've been pulled over.
- [Man] This is assault.
- [Officer] Turn around, turn around.
- [Jennifer] They've heard stories
about negative interactions with the police.
- [Man] Excessive force.
- How is this gonna go for me, right?
That's what they're thinking.
How is this gonna go for me?