According to Aronson, Wilson and Akert (1998), there are approximately 500,000 police officers in the United States plus 220,000 support employees. The police are citizen's first link with America's criminal justice system and although they should be free of ethnic or racial bias, Aronson, Wilson and Akert report that many police officers throughout the country hold prejudicial views of ethnic minorities. Here, prejudicial views are defined as consisting of: a) a sense of being superior to members of a minority group; b) feelings that minorities are by their nature different or alien; c) a sense that dominant group members have proprietary claims on privilege, power and prestige; and d) a fear and suspicion that members of the minority have designs on dominant group benefits.
It is further noted that while there are many ways in which people will evidence their prejudicial views, in the cases of police officers, this will frequently manifest itself in terms of harassing minorities such as frequent and unneeded stopping and searching of minority citizens. The purpose of this paper is to design a study that explores public opinions of police harassment. In particular, the proposed research is designed to examine whether public disapproval of police officers in a large city increases as a function of increases in their perception of police as harassing minorities.
While there is no criminal theory that addresses police harassment of minorities, Hewstone (1990) reports that discriminatory behavior and related actions could well be related to what has come to be known as "the ultimate attribution error."
The ultimate attribution error deals with attributions related to prejudicial or biased views. According to Hewstone, people in general, and prejudiced people in particular, often have an ethnocentric or cultural bias in their attributions that favors their own ethnic/racial group over others. The "ultimate attribution error o...