Police use of force and nativity: revisiting standing evidence of public opinion on police use of force

Abstract

ABSTRACT Police use of force is a topic of longstanding and ongoing concern in the criminal justice literature. Carter & Corra (2016) studied citizen perceptions of police use of force, establishing an empirical link between racial resentment and support for police use of force. We contend that the Carter and Corra study is instructive but lacks an important measure of nativity. Opinion differences between U.S. non-native-born and native-born persons have been shown to be noteworthy in prior studies of citizen behaviors, beliefs, perceptions and attitudes. We find that nativity is a powerful explanatory variable and offer empirical support for the ‘conflicted conservative’ theory. Consistent with Carter and Corra (2016) we find that racial resentment is a substantive explanatory variable.