If this surprises you, it means you are a fan of Marjorie Taylor Greene or maybe TheDonald.

Of what am I talking?   A study completed by Drs. Nicholas Camp (Michigan),  Rob Voigt (Northwestern), with  Dan Jurafsky and Jennifer Eberhardt (both from Stanford), published as “The Thin Blue Waveform: Racial Disparities in Officer Prosody Undermine Institutional Trust in the Police”, in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

Maybe I should explain what prosody is first.  Prosody examines elements of speech- not phonetic segments, that include intonation, stress, and rhythm. Basically, one analyzes the pitch of the voice, the length of sounds (varying between long and short), the loudness, and timber (voice quality) to discern patterns.

And, in a nutshell, this study of cops (using body-camera footage) clearly demonstrated that they spoke far less respectfully to Black men than to White men.  No wonder Blacks declaim the degree of mistrust and malhandling to which they are exposed from the police. Not to mention that Black men are more than twice as likely to be killed by police as White folks, as well as much larger “use of force incidents”.   Or those ubiquitous DWB (driving while Black) incidents.

This study of some 95 million traffic stops demonstrated that Blacks are far more likely to be pulled over and more likely to be searched than Whites- even if its obvious that they aren’t carrying contraband.  Given that 60 million of us interact with the police each year, there’s a lot of problems.

Blacks are 57% less like to encounter “sir”, “ma’am”, or “thank you”- and 61% more like to encounter “dude”, “bro”, and “hands on the wheel”, when there’s a police encounter.

By the way, the researchers filtered the sounds (so folks wouldn’t be able to discern race) and invited some 400 folks- White, Latino, Asian, and Black volunteers- to listen to the clips and rate the tone of voice.  They, too, rated the cops with lower grades for respect, friendliness, and “general ease” of discussion when encountering Blacks over Whites.  And, while the differences between the races weren’t huge- they were easily discerned.  Those biases remained even when driver’s age and gender; officer’s race and gender; listener’s age, race, gender, and political orientation were controlled.

This also has other ramifications.   It means policing neighborhoods is more difficult because victims, survivors, and witnesses won’t talk with police due to mistrust.  And, that means the community can’t be kept safe.

Maybe now you should reread yesterday’s blog.