Issue 14(4) Introduction

• Published date: 01 October 2024
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/21533687241276624
• Author: Janice Iwama
• Date: 01 October 2024
• Subject Matter: Editorial

Issue 14(4) Introduction

Janice Iwama

With the fatal shooting of Sonya Massey by a sheriff’s deputy, it is a tragic reminder

that there is still a lot to do to address the norms of racism and violence in our society

and establish accountability in policing. The articles in this issue contribute to this

body of knowledge by taking a critical look at policing practices and the perceptions

of the public on the role, education, and training of police off‌icers in our communities.

The f‌irst paper by Hoang et al. explores the effects of racial diversity education among

new police recruits and the authors f‌ind that racial beliefs inf‌luence participants’level

of cognitive engagement in diversity education. Next, Kammersgaard et al. take us to

Denmark where they interviewed 25 police off‌icers to investigate how they make sense

of racial and ethnic dynamics in their stop and search practices. They f‌ind that the off‌i-

cers reject the idea that ethnicity inf‌luenced their decision-making and offer alternative

explanations for the overrepresentation of minorities in police stops and arrests. Tawa

et al., on the other hand, examine the role of physiological stress on the decision to use

lethal force with Black suspects using a novel virtual reality paradigm. The authors

reveal that the relationship was inf‌luenced by a person’s level of implicit racism,

which raises important implications for police training on the use of lethal force.

McCarthy et al. also explore police decision-making by looking at the link between

police stops and historical and current complaints about police misbehavior in

Chicago communities. The authors reveal positive associations between these stops

and complaints, which leads them to believe that off‌icers may be retaliating against

residents.

The next set of articles examine the attitudes and perceptions of students and resi-

dents on policing. Based on survey data collected from undergraduate students at a

large Midwestern university, Ilchi et al. examined the factors associated to students’

attitudes about whether to convict a police off‌icer for the fatal shooting of an

unarmed Black citizen. The authors f‌ind that students that hold racist beliefs and per-

ceive off‌icers equivalent to soldiers were less likely to hold the police off‌icer account-

able for the shooting. Turning to perceptions on the presence of armed police in

schools, Montes et al. examined survey data from 2019 and 2020 and found little

change between the two years, but some racial differences with Black individuals

holding a less favorable opinion on police presence in schools in comparison to

white individuals. While focusing on the perceptions of Latin American immigrants

in the metropolitan area of Birmingham, Alabama, Lim and Bontcheva-Loyaga

found that Latinx residents generally held a positive perception of the police in the

United States in comparison to the police in their home country. In contrast, Bender

Editorial

Race and Justice

2024, Vol. 14(4) 443-444

© The Author(s) 2024

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DOI: 10.1177/21533687241276624

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