“One Question Before You Get Gone. . .”

• Author: Rod K. Brunson,Jacinta M. Gau
• DOI: 10.1177/2153368712459273
• Published date: 01 October 2012
• Date: 01 October 2012
• Subject Matter: Articles

‘‘One Question Before

You Get Gone. . .’’:

Consent Search

Requests as a Threat to

Perceived Stop

Legitimacy

Jacinta M. Gau

1

and Rod K. Brunson

2

Abstract

The use of consent searches in the war on drugs has brought this type of search to the

forefront of the racial profiling debate. Studies using official traffic-stop data have

attempted to determine whether minority drivers are more likely than White drivers

to be asked for consent to search. This analytic strategy, though informative, does not

account for the perceptual nature of racial profiling and the damage that might be

done to drivers’ attitudes toward police if they react negatively to being asked for

consent. The present study, using the theories of procedural justice and expectancy

disconfirmation, analyzes the impact of officers’ requests for consent to search on

drivers’ perceptions about the legitimacy of the stops themselves. Interaction effects

are also modeled by breaking the sample down by race. Results suggest that consent

search requests significantly damage perceived stop legitimacy only among White

drivers; the effect is marginally significant among Black drivers and nonsignificant for

Hispanics. This finding is interpreted within the bounds of expectancy theory,

whereby minority drivers’ expectations for the way officers will treat them are lower

from the outset than Whites’ are, so Whites, then, are particularly affronted by search

requests. This suggests that perceived racial profiling is a complex, nuanced phenom-

enon and that race is more symbolic than predictive of stopped drivers’ attitudes

toward police.

1

Department of Criminal Justice, University of Central Florida, Orlando, FL, USA

2

School of Criminal Justice, Rutgers University, Newark, NJ, USA

Corresponding Author:

Jacinta M. Gau, Department of Criminal Justice, University of Central Florida, 4000 Central Florida Blvd,

Orlando, FL 32816, USA.

Email: jgau@ucf.edu

Race and Justice

2(4) 250-273

ªThe Author(s) 2012

Reprints and permission:

sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav

DOI: 10.1177/2153368712459273

http://raj.sagepub.com

Keywords

treatment by the police, race and public opinion, citizen satisfaction, race and policing,

driving while Black (DWB), racial profiling, traffic stops, war on drugs, White privilege,

criminological theories

Introduction

One of the most noteworthy features of the public’s attitude toward police is that these

attitudes vary markedly by race. People of different races often carry certain sets of

expectations with them as they enter into encounters with officers, and their inter-

pretations of officer actions are informed by the extent to which they feel that officers

acted appropriately and behaved in a manner that conforms to their beliefs about

justice and equality. The end result is that what an officer does during a stop of a White

motorist may be interpreted quite differently relative to similar actions taken during a

stop of a minority driver. A substantial body of research has demonstrated the

importance of procedural justice during officer–civilian contacts (e.g., Tyler, 2006),

but there has, as yet, not been sufficient attention paid to the specific officer actions

that may enhance or reduce civilians’ satisfaction with police. Traffic stops are the

most common form of police–citizen contact (Eith & Durose, 2011); therefore, it is

important to examine events that take place during such encounters, as well as indi-

viduals’ perceptions of those events, to better understand persistent racial differences

in attitudes toward police.

The present study analyzes race-based differences in motorists’ perceptions of

officer actions during traffic stops. We utilize what has become a fairly routine and

mundane (though not free from controversy, as we later highlight) traffic stop event:

an officer’s request for consent to search a stopped motorist’s vehicle. Consent

requests symbolize an officer’s desire to expand the reach of the law into a driver’s

zone of privacy and, as such, have become a cornerstone of the racial profiling

controversy. We hypothesize here that consent requests reduce the likelihood that

motorists believe officers had legitimate reasons for making the initial stop because

motorists see the search as an illegitimate collateral function that calls the primary

function (the stop itself) into question. Further, we predict that this effect will vary

by driver race.

The results of these analyses will have implications for the use of consent searches

in traffic stops. Most notably, if asking drivers of all races for consent to search their

vehicles significantly delegitimizes officers, then police agencies nationwide should

think carefully about the ways their organizations utilize consent searches in ongoing

efforts to combat drug, gun, and other crimes. If, on the other hand, requesting consent

evokes negative psychological responses from drivers of certain racial backgrounds

but not others, then consent search requests may be unwittingly conveying the

impression to those drivers that they have been profiled or otherwise singled out.

Finally, if our findings reveal that consent search requests do not have deleterious

impacts on drivers of any race, one might conclude that this type of search, while

Gau and Brunson 251