Contenu connexe Similaire à AJacob Final Prospectus (20) 1. THE BRUTAL TRUTH ABOUT
CRIMINAL JUSTICE REFORM IN
AMERICA
User-Generated Police Brutality Videos Place a Social Justice
Issue on the Political Agenda
AJ Annarose Jacob
Senior Seminar ‘16
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INTRODUCTION
Viral cell phone footage of police brutality is the driver behind the political momentum for criminal
justice reform. The recent barrage of police shootings and brutality caught on cell phone video has sparked
public outcry. The public attention to police brutality has enabled both ordinary citizens and activist groups
such as Black Lives Matter to put a spotlight on critical flaws within in the criminal justice system.
Criminal justice reform can mean many different things, but I will broadly define it as reform directed
at fixing issues within the judicial system, including but not limited to any or all of the following: eradicating
acts of police brutality and disciplining officers appropriately if and when such acts do occur, abolishing racial
profiling as a policing tactic, implementing tactics to reduce racial inequality within the justice system, ending
excessively harsh and/or discriminatory sentencing, eliminating mandatory minimums for nonviolent low-
level offenses, reducing mass incarceration rates, improving rehabilitation efforts, terminating civil asset
forfeiture abuse, ending suspicionless drug testing as a precursor to accessing welfare benefits, ensuring that
all defendants have adequate legal guidance, ending the death penalty and solitary confinement, and
improving prison conditions (ACLU, 2016).
The Internet has given ordinary citizens a platform to be heard. This has had a major impact on those
whom our society has long hushed: African Americans. For decades, police brutality committed against blacks
was essentially ignored because black bodies were subconsciously seen as the source of the threat itself
(Butler, 1993). Police brutality is not a new phenomenon, but cell phone video is. Once cell phone videos
depicting police shootings of unarmed young black men started to go viral, the general public began to pay
attention to racial inequalities in the justice system. When faced with visual evidence of injustice, it is harder,
albeit not impossible, for the public to identify reasons why the black man was at fault. The technical capital
of cell phone videos gives rise to social capital, and criminal justice reform can make its way into the national
agenda (Shirky, 2008).
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Cell phone videos often are used as graphic evidence of injustice within the judicial system. The
striking visuals of wrongdoing provoke a visceral, more emotional reaction from the viewer than a description
of the same event. This emotional response frames the issue of criminal justice as a question of deep-seated
values such as fairness, equality, and compassion rather than a phlegmatic public policy issue. Emotional
appeals persuade individuals more than purely intellectual arguments (Goleman, 2006). The emotional
appeal of viral cell phone footage increases support for and the salience of criminal justice reform to the
viewer. A defining characteristic of viral videos is their extremely high viewership (Broxton, 2013).
Widespread viewership rapidly spreads emotional appeal and saliency of police violence across the
population. This results in an aggregate increase in public support and political momentum for criminal
justice reform.
The broader question is whether user-generated media can place a social justice policy on the political
agenda. Although there has been a significant body of literature dedicated to examining the effects of the
media on public opinion and politics, research on the impact of citizen journalism and other user-generated
content in the political arena is sparse. This study contributes to the field of political communication by
illustrating that viral user-generated content can trigger aggregate shifts in public opinion. It also establishes
that agenda setting, a political communication tool traditionally attributed to the mass media, can also be
achieved by anyone with a modern cell phone in their pocket (Scheufele and Tewksbury, 2007). Furthermore,
it provides supporting evidence for a theory of electorate pressure: as public opinion changes, legislators
change their behavior to reflect the opinion of their electorate.
THEORY
Viral cell phone footage of police brutality is the driver behind the political momentum for criminal
justice reform. The footage functions as visual evidence of injustice perpetrated by law enforcement, and it
counteracts the underlying social narrative that the victim did something to “deserve it.” Instead of leaving
subjective details such as body language, tone, and intent up to the viewer’s imagination, viral videos allow
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the audience to conclude whether the victim did something to “deserve” the attack. Additionally, viewers can
use the visual evidence to decide for themselves whether the police officer’s personal safety is truly being
threatened, and therefore determine whether the police officer is actually acting in “self-defense,” a
common defense law enforcement uses following the deployment of lethal force.
Viewers often have a visceral reaction when confronted with visual evidence of this gross transgression.
This emotive response frames the issue as a question of values rather than a question of passionless public
policy. People are more likely to change their opinion of a policy issue based on emotional appeal than they
are purely intellectual policy arguments. Thus, people who view the cell phone footage of police brutality are
more likely to increase their support for criminal justice reform and increase the intensity of this support than
people who did not watch the cell phone footage.
Viral videos, by definition, are widely viewed (Broxton, 2013). Thus, the effects of viral videos
depicting police brutality apply to a wide audience. This will result in a shift in aggregate public opinion in
favor of criminal justice reform, and increase the aggregate salience of the issue. These shifts generate
political momentum. The political momentum created through public opinion shift is further accelerated by
mobilization. Viral videos mobilize viewers to engage directly with the video or the relevant subject area
through actions such as “liking,” sharing, or engaging with the material (Southgate, 2010). This has two
effects: first, it continues the cycle of virality by spreading it to new viewers and therefore amplifies the
effects on public opinion. Second, online engagement can lead to activism, both online and offline (Harlow,
2012). Both online and offline activism can accelerate political momentum by drawing the attention of both
the public and key decision makers.
• Hypothesis 1: Cell phone footage depicting police brutality provokes an emotional reaction
in viewers.
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• Hypothesis 2: The emotional reaction viewers have when watching cell phone footage of
police brutality causes viewers to have a more positive view of criminal justice reform than if
they had heard of the same instance police brutality in a different way.
• Hypothesis 3: Public opinion of criminal justice reform will increase in both direction and
salience following a viral cell phone video of police brutality.
To test my first hypothesis, I will conduct a within-subject experiment to measure the physiological
response to police brutality footage. Using Mutz and Reeves’ method of using electrodes to record levels of
electrodermal activity, I will expose subjects to researcher-created “news coverage” of four independent
incidents of police brutality (Mutz and Reeves, 2005). Each incident will have two videos: one segment will
feature the viral video itself, and the newscaster will narrate the footage as it plays. The second segment will
feature identical audio, but the newscaster will speak directly into the camera and no cell phone footage will
be shown. Each subject will see all four incidents: two cell phone videos and two newscaster-only videos. If
the subjects’ skin conductance is much higher during the cell phone footage segments than in the
newscaster-only footage, this provides evidence for my first hypothesis that cell phone footage depicting
police brutality provokes an emotional reaction in viewers.
To test my second hypothesis, I will use the same researcher-generated “news segments” I employed in
my first experiment. This time, each subject will be randomly assigned to one of three groups: test group 1,
test group 2, and control group. Test group one will watch all four news segments containing the cell phone
footage. Test group two will watch all four news segments containing newscaster-only footage. The control
group will watch four videos unrelated to police brutality. Following the treatment, the subjects will respond
to a questionnaire about police brutality and criminal justice reform. If the survey responses reflect a
statistically significant difference in response between group 1 and group 2, this provides support for my
hypothesis that the emotional reaction viewers have when watching cell phone footage of police brutality
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causes viewers to have a more positive view of criminal justice reform than if they had heard of the same
instance police brutality in a different way.
To test my third hypothesis, I will employ a forward-looking research design. First, I will establish a
threshold for virality. Next, I will conduct a biweekly national public opinion poll to create a baseline number
of public support for criminal justice reform. This national poll will have a sample large enough to analyze
public opinion on a congressional district level. Simultaneously, I will monitor the internet for any viral videos
of police shootings. Once a police shooting video has passed the threshold for going viral, I will immediately
conduct a national public opinion poll, identical to the baseline poll, to determine whether public opinion has
deviated from the baseline. If aggregate public support for criminal justice reform increases after the cell
phone footage goes viral, this provides support for my third hypothesis.
LITERATURE REVIEW
Humans may create technology, but technology also affects humans. From communication to
commerce to creativity, the advent of the Internet has radically changed human society. The Internet helped
citizens across the country see through the eyes of the marginalized by virtually eliminating communication
costs. This is the fuel which allows reformist flames to keep on burning, enabling criminal justice reform to
come to the political foreground despite being a cause usually championed by the invisible and the voiceless.
Bruce Bimber introduced many important concepts to modern political communication in writing
Information and American Democracy (2003). Terms like information regimes and information abundance
serve as frames to better understand the recent digital revolution and to contextualize it with past
informational revolutions. Bimber sees information environments as a question of access where
communication costs are constraints. He argues that in the fourth information regime these constraints have
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been lifted -- we are no longer restricted by costly information environments. Instead, information has
become variably cheap and easily distributed around the world.
Bimber’s main thesis is that the ease with which we receive our information is crucial in determining
how our democracy functions. He writes, “Exogenous changes in the accessibility or structure of information
cause changes in the structure of organizations that dominate political activity, and these in turn affect the
broad character of democracy,” (Bimber, 2003). There are sunk resource costs (both monetary and time
opportunity costs) to publishing information, but in the fourth information regime additional viewership adds
no supplementary cost — essentially, there is no distribution cost. This allows for exponentially more
opportunities because of what Bimber sees as almost unrestricted access. In the fourth information regime,
information about police brutality can be universally distributed in an instant, whereas this was never
possible in the past. This instantaneous distribution enables user-generated cell phone footage to go viral.
Political scientist Jack Walker said “Political mobilization is seldom spontaneous. Before any large
element of the population can become a part of the American political process, organizations must be
formed, advocates must be trained, and the material resources needed to gain the attention of national
policy-makers must be gathered,” (Bimber, 2003). Although this still holds true, the process has been
truncated. Vertical hierarchies have transitioned into horizontal networks. Issues that may have once been
local concerns can rapidly shift to national or even global magnitude due entirely to the scalability of
communication. Egalitarian grassroots movements such as Black Lives Matter can garner national attention
without a single national figurehead or any sophisticated organizational structure.
In his 2008 book Here Comes Everybody, Clay Shirky conducts a quantitative analysis of the effects of the
Internet on human relationships and organizations of all types. He employs platforms such as MySpace,
Twitter, Wikipedia, YouTube, WordPress, and Flickr, to name a few, as examples of the Internet bringing
people together and shifting group behavior. As institutions increase in size, the transaction costs of running
the institution also increase. Shirky calls this the institutional dilemma: “[The institution] exists to take
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advantage of group effort, but some of its resources are drained away by directing that effort,” (Shirky,
2008). Electronic networks provide communication tools which collapse transaction costs. Without these
constraints, group-forming becomes “ridiculously easy,” (Shirky, 2008). The reduced transaction costs of
group-forming are immensely beneficial to prosocial causes such as criminal justice reform, which have great
social capital but usually minimal monetary capital behind them.
Viral. Traditionally used to refer to the way biological viruses replicate and spread, the word has
been hijacked, now used to describe patterns of exposure, usually in the context of social media and the
Internet. It remains of the most potent social impacts of the Internet on human communication. Viral video,
particularly on YouTube, allows millions of people from around the world to simultaneously see the same
emotive images.
There have been many academic definitions of viral videos, but I will borrow Tom Broxton’s broad
description of the phenomenon: viral videos are a subset of highly social videos that rise to extreme levels of
popularity through sharing. According to Broxton’s research, viral videos have some unique characteristics.
Viral videos are distinguishable from other highly popular videos by the method by which they are
discovered. Viral videos are primarily discovered through social means, such as a link shared via Facebook,
Twitter, email, or another online social networking platform. Other popular videos can rise in popularity
through nonsocial means such as link clicks from related videos.
The mechanism of discovery is correlated to viewership patterns. Viral videos rise and fall from their
peak popularity much more sharply than other extremely popular videos discovered through nonsocial
means. They gain traction remarkably quickly, often within hours of initial reports on social media, but also
fade just as quickly. Only 9% of the top videos on YouTube remained among the top videos the following
week (Broxton, 2013). In contrast, 50% of top mainstream media stories remained a top story a week later.
This illustrates that viral videos have an incredibly short timeframe to leverage shared views.
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Certain categories of videos are much more likely to go viral than others. “Nonprofits and activism”
and “news and politics” are the second and third highest shared categories, respectively, topped only by
“pets and animals,” (Broxton, 2013). This bodes particularly well for criminal justice reform activists, since
police brutality videos can be categorized as both “activism” and “news and politics” and are thus
predisposed to virality.
The Internet has provided both everyday citizens and political organizers with a tool for consuming
and disseminating information without mediation from the mainstream media. YouTube has had a flattening
effect on politics. As a free distribution channel, the website is a low-cost alternative to paid advertising or
traditional mainstream media. Researcher Kristin English found that watching political videos on YouTube
became one of the top three most popular online political activities during the 2008 presidential campaign
(English, 2011). YouTube videos have the capacity to influence the political attitudes of viewers. The evidence
for this dates back to the 2006 midterm elections, when a Virginia Senate race was transformed by viral
footage of the Republican frontrunner referring to an Indian college student as a “macaca,” (English, 2011).
This has an egalitarian impact on policy because it lowers the barriers to disseminating a message. For groups
which have been consistently underrepresented and ignored by political elites, this technology is a godsend.
As English puts it, “Viral videos are more than just a hot topic or a forward from all of one’s friends; they can
be effectively used as forms of online political information produced by citizens for other citizens,” (English,
2011).
Some view viral videos as free advertising, but their impact surpasses this. Viral videos are
consumed, shared, promoted, discussed, and pursued voluntarily by the viewing audience, unlike the forced,
paid viewings of broadcast or print advertisements. Duncan Southgate explains that this enables wider
potential for engagement because viewers are watching of their own volition (Southgate, 2010). They are
more likely to interact with the content through ratings or comments, and forward the video to their social
connections, thereby continuing the viral cycle (Southgate, 2010).
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Online marketers, communicators, and strategists identify the benefits of viral videos and ask one
question: What makes it go viral? In truth, no one really knows. There is no hard-and-fast rule or magic code
that has yet been discovered to creating viral content. Scholars such as Jonah Berger and Katherine Milkman
have, however, been able to identify characteristics of viral content through a psychological approach to
diffusion. They discovered a causal relationship between physiological arousal and virality. Content which
evokes high arousal of the viewer, regardless of whether the emotions associated with it are positive (awe or
inspiration) or negative (anger or anxiety), is more viral than low-arousal content which evokes deactivating
emotions such as sadness (Berger and Milkman, 2012). This is because physiological arousal is a state of
mobilization which increases action-related behaviors such as sharing. In short, arousal leads to activism.
This is promising news in the context of police brutality videos. Cell phone footage of police
shootings or beatings of unarmed minorities induces anger and sometimes bewilderment in the viewer. Both
anger and bewilderment are high-arousal emotions, and thus the audience is more likely to engage with and
share these videos with their social network. Additionally, police brutality videos induce outrage, another
strong determinant of virality. Lance Porter and Guy J. Nolan found that outrageous, provocative content
such as sexuality, humor, violence, and nudity greatly improves the chance of a video going viral (Porter and
Nolan, 2006). Police brutality videos are, by definition, always violent, and thus always outrageous. This,
combined with their categorization as “nonprofit and activism” and “news and politics,” give the videos a
high chance of going viral.
In order to investigate viral videos, one must set a threshold for virality. In order to set a threshold
for virality, one must define virality itself. Saleem Alhabash explains that there are three main approaches to
defining virality: access, electronic word-of-mouth, and engagement (Alhabash, 2014). Defining virality
through access-based mechanisms such as click-through rates and page views has been discarded for poor
reliability (Drèze and Hussherr, 2003). Examining virality through electronic word-of-mouth mechanisms such
as content sharing through social media neglects other behavioral responses such as liking or commenting
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which can be significant in the viral cycle (Eckler and Rodgers, 2014). Using engagement to define virality
takes a comprehensive approach to online behavior, encompassing accessing, sharing, liking/disliking, and
commenting (Tucker, 2011). Although engagement is the most comprehensive of the three approaches to
virality, it also has limitations because it is difficult to define and measure.
For the purpose of my study, I will establish three conditions necessary to determine a threshold for
virality. First, the video must appear in YouTube’s top 100 most viewed videos of the day (Gill et al., 2007).
The widespread viewership of the video is critical to the study because any video which impacts public
opinion at a national level must be widely viewed across the country rather than a local phenomenon. Upon
finding a cell phone video of police brutality in YouTube’s 100 most viewed, this video will be cross-checked
with Twitter and Facebook to determine whether the video was propagated via social networks in an
epidemic-like fashion, resulting in an exponential growth in viewership (Crane, 2008). Finally, I will look for
other engagement measures such the number of likes or dislikes of the content on YouTube, Facebook, and
Twitter and the number of comments on the original video or on social media posts about the video. If the
video has a relatively low number of shares and low engagement via likes and comments, its high viewership
is not sufficient to classify it as a viral video. This is because my definition of virality classifies viral videos as
“highly social,” and the absence of social engagement via social media indicates that a video rose in
popularity through non-social means (Broxton, 2013).
The videos I am analyzing are not my own, but user-generated. This presents a major limitation in my
research in terms of analytics. YouTube users have access to a large amount of data about their own videos
through the “Insights” tab on their account. This includes views over time, sources of traffic, audience
demographics, geographic impact, social shares, engagement (likes, dislikes, and favorites) and audience
retention. Unfortunately, few of these statistics are available to external parties. However, third-party
providers such as SharedCount.com will track engagement on Facebook (likes, shares, comments, total),
Google +1 (number of +1s), Pinterest (pins), and LinkedIn (shares). Because Twitter has discontinued the
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Tweet share count API, it is more difficult to obtain statistics on Twitter, but manual searches and services
such as TweetDeck.com can be used to obtain data.
Social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter can launch and accelerate social movements by
framing an issue in pro-social terms (Harlow, 2012). Ellison and boyd define social network sites (SNS) “as
web-based services that allow individuals to (1) construct a public or semi-public profile within a bounded
system, (2) articulate a list of other users with whom they share a connection, and (3) view and traverse their
list of connections and those made by others within the system,” (Ellison, 2007). Not only does SNS
technology allow users to find and engage with people who share similar views on criminal justice reform,
but users can actually act as their own publishing houses and propagate a media frame of police brutality
videos simply by posting their thoughts on the video. This media frame is made immediately available to all
their SNS connections.
When viewers engage with online content via SNS, they are more likely to become activists of the
issue, both online and offline (Harlow, 2012). Activism can be broadly defined as “the actions of a group of
like-minded individuals coming together to change the status quo, advocating for a cause, whether local or
global, and whether progressive or not (Harlow, 2012; Cammaerts, 2007; Kahn and Kellner, 2004; Lomicky
and Hogg, 2010).” Black Lives Matter and the modern criminal justice reform movement can both be
described as “networked social movements,” defined by Castells as a social movement based on cultural
values acting through a loose and semi-spontaneous coalition coordinating via the internet (Castells, 2001).
Networked social movements also often begin with a local cause, i.e. an isolated police shooting, but aim
globally, i.e. national criminal justice reform (Castells, 2001).
Some vocal critics have stated that social networks will never be a source of substantive social
change. In the words of Malcom Gladwell, “Facebook activism succeeds not by motivating people to make a
real sacrifice but by motivating them to do the things that people do when they are not motivated enough to
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make a real sacrifice,” (Gladwell, 2010). This slovenly, superficial form of political engagement has earned the
title of “slacktivism.” Slacktivism can be defined as “a willingness to perform a relatively costless, token
display of support for a social cause, with an accompanying lack of willingness to devote significant effort to
enact meaningful change,” (Kristofferson and White, 2014).
Slacktivism often operates through the propagation of internet memes. When most people think of
memes, they think of photographs or cartoons embellished with texts. In actuality, a meme is a unit of
information which spreads virally, able to “infect” a hosts who then assists the meme in its replication –
Richard Dawkins described this as a literal parasitism of the brain (Vie, 2014; Dawkins, 2006). Examples of
memes in slacktivism include using a hashtag or changing one’s profile picture to a promoted image.
Slacktivism is a pejorative term, but it has benefits. Principally, slacktivism enables a group to expand
rapidly in size in a cost-effective manner. Participation in online groups has also been found to strengthen a
collective identity, even if it does not translate to offline action (Wojcieszak, 2009). A public display of a
massive group identity draws attention to an issue where it may have gone unnoticed. Furthermore, “even
seemingly insignificant moves such as adopting a logo and displaying it online can serve to combat
microaggressions, or the damaging results of everyday bias and discrimination against marginalized groups,”
(Vie, 2014).
The Black Lives Matter movement is a prime example of meme-generated slacktivism translating into
real political change. Black Lives Matter began as a hashtag, transitioned into in-person protests and rallies,
and ultimately gained enough authority to effectively strong-arm presidential candidates into publicly stating
their positions on BLM issues such as police brutality, racial profiling, and criminal justice reform.
The longevity and repetition of a meme play a strong role in its ability to influence others (Vie, 2014).
This is exemplified in the Black Lives Matter movement. Perhaps the meme of #blacklivesmatter would not
have had much longevity if it had been one isolated incident, the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the
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shooting of Trayvon Martin in 2013. It was the repetition of police violence which lent the hashtag longevity
and therefore influence, ultimately creating an international movement.
The current influence of Black Lives Matter is impressive. It has attracted support from presidential
candidates on both sides of the aisle. In August 2015, the Democratic National Committee passed a
resolution in support of Black Lives Matter, stating “[T]he DNC joins with Americans across the country in
affirming ‘Black lives matter’ and the ‘say her name’ efforts to make visible the pain of our fellow and sister
Americans as they condemn extrajudicial killings of unarmed African American men, women and children,”
(Seitz-Wald, 2015). In the first Democratic presidential debate, the candidates were asked, “do black lives
matter, or do all lives matter?” (Flores, 2015). Black Lives Matter is the perfect example of online virality
harnessed into political action, and sets a strong precedent for this research.
My research contributes to the field of political communication by exploring the agenda setting and
priming effects of citizen journalism on a population. Agenda-setting relies on the assumption that the
population depends on the media for awareness of events beyond their personal experience, and the media,
in turn, focuses the public’s attention on some particular issue (Sears and Kosterman, 1994). Scheufele and
Tewksbury (2007) define agenda setting as “the idea that there is a strong correlation between the emphasis
that mass media place on certain issues (e.g., based on relative placement or amount of coverage) and the
importance attributed to these issues by mass audiences.” Priming refers to “changes in the standards that
people use to make political evaluations” and “occurs when news content suggests to news audiences that
they ought to use specific issues as benchmarks for evaluating the performance of leaders and governments,”
(Scheufele and Tewksbury). Both agenda setting and priming are accessibility-based models that are centered
around using memory to process information. The effect isn’t carried by the information spread about the
issue, but rather the fact that the issue has “received a certain amount of processing time and attention,”
(Scheufele and Tewksbury).
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Scheufele and Tewksbury explain that agenda setting determines whether we think about an issue,
and priming changes the way we think about it. The effects of agenda setting and priming have been
attributed to the mainstream media, however, videos of police brutality are normally produced by citizen
journalists who are on the ground witness the incidents. The mainstream media only cover acts of police
brutality after they have already gone viral on social media, independently garnering public attention. In
these cases, the mainstream media is simply hopping on the bandwagon with their coverage rather than
actively investigating and reporting on incidents as they occur (Finnie, 2015). If my national survey reflects a
shift in public opinion about criminal justice reform after a user-generated video of police brutality goes viral,
this provides evidence that agenda setting and priming effect are not just byproducts of the mainstream
media, but of citizen journalists in the 21st
century.
If my research establishes agenda setting and priming effects of citizen journalism, this also explains
the change in what mainstream news organizations consider “newsworthy.” Historically, mainstream media
coverage of police brutality has been episodic and typically fits a specific pattern: police kill someone without
cause; communities organize mass protests in response, which are largely ignored by mainstream media until
some protests turn into riots; and then the story becomes “newsworthy” (Finnie, 2015). Traditional media
usually group the protesters and rioters together, and usually only cover young black men killed by police,
often excluding people who are attacked but not killed, women of color, or transgender individuals (Finnie,
2015). Information-sharing via online social networks, however, has undermined the gatekeeping ability of
traditional media organizations and amplified audience gatekeeping (Kwon et al., 2012).
Since mainstream media tend to rely on known authoritative sources, such as police departments,
they usually portray the law enforcement narrative as the truth (Sigal, 1996). In contrast, user-generated cell
phone footage usually depicts the same incident through the lens of a third-party observer who has no elite
or authoritative affiliation and is often perceived by the media consumer as an unbiased, independent source
of accurate information free of political agendas (Hamilton, 2013). Since the viewer can “witness” the
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incident with their own eyes through footage filmed firsthand, rather than information pieced together
retroactively by a reporter, they are more likely to view the cell phone footage as an unbiased representation
of events. This lends credibility to a victim’s version of events and causes public skepticism to wane over
time, allowing a thematic frame to emerge (Finnie, 2015). The victim is no longer burdened with societal
assumptions of guilt. Thanks to cell phone technology, citizens today are better equipped to capture video of
police misconduct and disseminate this footage. When footage of these incidents repeatedly go viral, it
increases the accessibility of police brutality incidents in the public memory. This change can manifest itself in
agenda setting and priming effects.
It is important to note that reliable, measurable agenda setting effects emerge primarily under
conditions of massive exposure due to low levels of public attention (Sears and Kosterman, 1994). Any
incident covered by citizen journalists which generates massive exposure will undoubtedly be covered by
traditional media as well, since it is clearly a newsworthy incident. This makes it challenging to isolate the
agenda setting effects of citizen journalists, since mainstream media also add to the information
environment. Nonetheless, citizen journalists have a much greater opportunity to report on incidents
firsthand and usually trigger mainstream media coverage later on. Thus, the effect is still important to
measure.
Research indicates that agenda setting may not only affect what we think about, but also what we
think (Weaver, 1991). Salience is defined as the importance of an issue to an individual and the degree to
which the individual views the issue as a problem (Wlezien, 2005). Although some scholars have tied salience
to direction, I accept a classical interpretation of salience that separates salience from the direction of
opinion for the purposes of this research due to the divergence of policy preferences around the area of
criminal justice (Humphreys and Garry, 2000). Issue salience correlates with knowledge of the issue, strength
and direction of opinion regarding solutions to the issue, and political behavior related to the issue (Weaver,
1991). Since salience correlates with political behavior, and political behavior aggregates to political
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momentum, I viewed a change in salience as an important factor driving political momentum behind criminal
justice reform. To measure a change in salience across the population, I made it a critical part of my
questionnaire.
Social or political momentum, sometimes colloquially referred to as “Big Mo,” is defined as “the
psychological processes that lead people to display bandwagon behavior,” (Kenney and Rice, 1994). The
bandwagon effect is characterized by the probability of individual adoption increasing with respect to the
proportion who have already done so (Coleman, 2003). Psychological causes of political momentum include
contagion, strategic voting, and cue-taking (Bartels, 1988). With respect to police brutality and criminal
justice reform, information availability may also trigger political momentum: when “new” information about
police brutality is made widely available to the population through viral videos, citizen journalism, and
mainstream media, this may cause some individuals to change their opinions on an issue. This could trigger
an information cascade in others, when people “abandon their own information in favor of inferences based
on earlier people’s actions,” (Easley, 2010). This bandwagon effect has profound outcomes in political
behavior.
Recently, the term “viral politics” has been used to describe political momentum generated through
social networks. Political entrepreneurs, most often individuals who are directly affected by a political event
or phenomenon (the “victims”) or organizations devoted to a particular cause, spread information and media
content to wider groups of people through personal interconnectedness (Gustafsson, 2009). If these political
entrepreneurs are successful, this will create a feedback loop and cause the movement to spread rapidly,
ultimately influencing the formal political system both directly through personal contacts with media
representatives and indirectly through the feedback loop of mainstream media (Gustafsson, 2009). In the
viral politics model, a few individuals (political entrepreneurs) invest a large amount of time in a political
cause and form a temporal elite associated with the cause, and spread information through their social
networks. Some information receivers will feel galvanized to join the temporal elite and lead the cause,
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others will invest some time, and most people will do little or nothing. The flexibility of commitment is
attractive to participants.
I believe viral politics present a strong model to analyze the criminal justice reform movement. At
the heart of the movement are temporal elites such as Black Lives Matter, legislators sponsoring reform bills
on the federal, state, and local level, and advocacy organizations that spread awareness and promote the
cause. As these temporal elites engage with their social networks to further the cause, this engagement
promotes both a shift in public opinion due to bandwagon effects and information cascades as well as formal
political action.
RESEARCH DESIGN
I will use three different study designs to test my three hypotheses.
For my first hypothesis I want to examine the emotional, gut-level response to viewing police
brutality. I will test this hypothesis with an experimental design which will appraise a viewer’s emotional
response by analyzing physiological reactions, specifically electrodermal activity, also known as skin
conductance. Electrodermal activity (EDA) has been a widely accepted and widely used response system in
the field of psychophysiology to reflect emotion, arousal, and attention (Dawson, Schell, and Filion, 2000).
EDA provides a direct and undiluted representation of sympathetic activity, and its presence is discriminable
enough to be determined in a single stimulus (Dawson, Schell, and Filion, 2000). Additionally, EDA is primarily
influenced by the neuropsycholigical inhibition system which responds to anxiety and punishment, thus the
experiment can establish that the subject is having a negative reaction to the videos rather than simply being
aroused or excited by the violence (Dawson, Schell, and Filion, 2000). EDA has been used by many
researchers to study arousal responses to media (Mutz and Reeves, 2005; Lang 2000; Reeves et al. 1999).
20. AJacob 20
I will use Mutz and Reeves’ method as a model for my experiment. Due to the large variance in skin
conductance between humans, I will follow Mutz and Reeves’ example and design a within-subject
experiment that eliminates variance between subjects as a confounding factor. This will also help me obtain
findings from a smaller sample of test subjects. I will aim to recruit a sample of at least 50 participants to
minimize my margin of error, but Mutz and Reeves’ used a sample of just 16, thus I can fall back on a lower
number if I do not reach my goal of recruiting 50 subjects.
I will recruit my subjects using free direct advertising such as posting flyers on community boards or
on college campuses. A copy of this flyer will be sent to the IRB for approval, with verification that I have
permission from the university to recruit. I will also send a letter to colleagues in the Political Communication
department asking for referrals of eligible subjects who may be interested in the study, and I may request
that they give a small amount of extra credit in exchange for participation in the study. I will not contact
students directly. To incentivize participation among non-students, subjects will also be entered to win a $25
Amazon gift card.
In preparation for the experiment, I will produce eight videos designed to simulate televised news
coverage of police brutality. There will be four scenarios that my videos will be designed around. Each
scenario will be a real instance of police brutality captured by cell phone footage that went viral. The
scenarios will each have two corresponding videos. One video will feature the actual cell phone footage from
the incident. An actor posed as the newscaster will narrate the footage as the footage plays on screen. The
other video will feature the same newscaster and the same script, but the cell phone footage will not be
shown. Instead, the newscaster will be speaking directly into the camera. This experimental design will certify
that the visual display is the only independent variable being tested – the audio and subject matter will
remain the same. There will be four cell phone footage videos and four newscaster videos in total. Each
subject will be shown two cell phone videos and two newscaster videos. This ensures that the subjects will
not be exposed to the same incident twice, which could confound the EDA results since the subjects would
21. AJacob 21
be familiar with the material and therefore be less aroused. The order of the segments will be randomized to
cancel out any potential order effects. Groups will be randomly assigned.
In my experiment, the subjects will watch the video alone in a windowless room, sitting at a desk
with a 23-inch computer monitor, which will play the videos for the subject. It is important that the size of
the screen and distance from the screen remain constant, as they have been proven to affect EDA readings of
arousal (Reeves et al., 1999). The 23-inch computer monitor size was selected because it is the average
computer monitor size for desktop computers. The subjects will be attached to an electrodermal meter. The
meter will have two sensors which will be wrapped around the subject’ left index and ring fingers. The meter
will collect three hundred data points for skin conductance across a five-minute period (Mutz and Reeves,
2005). These data points will be plotted and analyzed.
The situational specifics of the experiment do pose some threats to external validity that could
potentially limit the generalizability of the study. The clinical setting does not reflect how most people would
typically view the viral videos in their daily lives. However, the within-subject research design will mitigate
the threat by increasing the internal validity of the study because the subjects’ responses to the treatments
are compared against themselves. The situational specifics are held constant, and so each subject will be
exposed to the treatments in the same environment. In future studies, researchers may choose to make the
setting less clinical and more natural for the subjects to enhance external validity, but in this initial research it
is important to hold variables such as screen size, distance from the screen, and external distractions as
constant as possible to eliminate risks of confounding variables.
If my theory is correct, viewing cell phone footage of police brutality should cause a greater
physiological reaction than watching a newscaster describe the same scene, “even though it makes no
apparent sense to prepare for action in response to mere pictures…. [The violence] obviously cannot burst
through [the television] to threaten us, yet our brains respond as if this were exactly what might happen,”
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(Muntz and Reeves, 2005). I predict that the segments with the cell phone footage will produce more
physiological arousal than the newscaster-only segments.
For my second hypothesis, I want to build on my findings from my first hypothesis and prove that the
unique emotional reaction viewers have from watching cell phone footage of police brutality leads to a more
sympathetic view of criminal justice reform policies. I will use the same researcher-generated television
“news segments” that I used in my first experiment, and I will also use the same recruitment methodology.
This time, each subject will view either all the cell phone footage segments or all the newscaster-only
footage. A third group, the control group, will watch four news segments completely unrelated to crime.
Following the treatment, the subjects will answer a questionnaire themselves. The questionnaire
asks only close-ended questions primarily focused on opinions and attitudes of the respondents with
exhaustive and mutually exclusive answer choices, thus the presence of an interviewer is not necessary.
Additionally, participants may complete the survey more honestly in absence of an interviewer, potentially
minimizing response bias. None of the questions are taxing on the respondent’s memory. The questionnaire
begins by asking for the respondent’s position on popular criminal justice reform issues, such as the death
penalty, solitary confinement, racial profiling, excessive sentencing, and mass incarceration. After each policy
question, the respondent is also asked how important the issue is to him or her. This is designed to
determine the salience of criminal justice issues to the respondent. Salience can be described as the
importance individual voters attach to different issues (Berelson et al., 1954). The salience of an issue is
important to my broader research question because salience is an important driver of political momentum.
When political issues are more salient to a citizen, he or she is more likely to act on them, which causes
political momentum to build.
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Following the policy questions, I ask about the respondent’s view of the police. The questions begin
on the micro level, focusing on the role of the police in the respondent’s community, and then expands to
macro, asking the respondent’s views on of race in policing practices. Many of these questions have been
pulled from national surveys conducted by CBS, the New York Times, ABC News, and the Washington Post.
This allows me to compare my results to previous polling to ensure that my survey is valid. A copy of my
survey questions follow.
The survey concludes by asking basic demographic information such as sex, age, ethnicity, education,
religion, and political affiliation. Political affiliation and ethnicity are of particular interest, as they may
illustrate deviating trends in public opinion between demographics. For example, previous public opinion
polls have illustrated a deviation in responses between different races regarding criminal justice issues
(PollingReport.com). Since the demographic characteristics of an individual may influence their responses to
the survey, I am placing the demographic questions at the end of the survey so that respondents are not
primed with their own demographic characteristics, which could cause them to respond to the questions
differently.
After I receive my survey responses, I will catalogue them and analyze them using a two-sample t-
test. If there is a statistically significant variation between the two treatment groups, I have support for my
hypothesis that the emotional reaction viewers have when watching cell phone footage of police brutality
creates a more positive view of criminal justice reform than hearing about the same event without seeing the
first-hand video.
To test my third hypothesis, I will conduct a survey employing a forward-looking research design. My
survey design will be descriptive, which “provides precise measurement of variables that may be important in
theorizing but provides no basis for making causal inferences,” (Manheim, 2011). I will survey the nation
biweekly for a baseline number and then immediately after a cell phone video of police brutality passes the
24. AJacob 24
threshold for virality. I will then compare the post-viral data to the last baseline survey data and use a two-
sample t-test to determine whether the data is statistically different.
The research is a longitudinal trend study that repeatedly pulls cross-sectional data from the
population through biweekly national polling. I first establish a baseline of public support for criminal justice
reform through a national poll. Samples are pulled from the national population through a stratified random
sampling design. This process is repeated biweekly to establish a longitudinal trend. Each strata will be polled
using a simple random sample. Survey respondents will be selected at random from the sampling frame. My
sample size for each survey will be 1,500. Although my samples will be cross-sectional and consist of different
individuals every two weeks, the stratified random sampling method ensures that the survey is nonetheless
representative of the population. The questions will not vary in content or order between surveys.
The population will be stratified by race because I want to over-sample minorities relative to their
size in the population. My research and previous polling data indicates that race may be an important
demographic variable in opinion formation about criminal justice issues: there is often a statistically
significant difference between the responses of whites and the responses of minorities (PollingReport.com).
This leads me to believe that minorities are an important group and I want to ensure the sample size is
sufficiently large.
The survey will be conducted as Computer-Assisted Telephone Interviews (CATI) using a random digit
sample of landline and cellphone numbers in the continental United States. As the Pew Research Center
explains, random digit dialing ensures that all telephone numbers in the U.S. have a known chance of being
included (Pew Research Center, 2015). Telephone surveys are less expensive and simpler to carry out than in-
person interviews, and have better response rates than mail surveys. Additionally, the presence of an
interviewer can increase cooperation and provide immediate clarification (Ferber, 1980). However, not all
people have telephones, and those who do not generally come from lower-income households (Ferber,
1980). Thus, one limitation of my study is that it does not sufficiently represent low-income population.
25. AJacob 25
All interviewers will be trained for the study and required to take a strict oath of confidentiality prior
to interviewing any respondent. All interviewers will be supervised by senior personnel. My survey will also
comply with confidentiality safeguards by using only number codes to link the respondent to a given
questionnaire; the name-to-code linkage information will be stored separately from the questionnaire, under
lock-and-key (Ferber, 1980). I will take necessary measures to keep my response rate high, such as following
up with non-respondents and calling at different times of the day.
I will monitor traditional and social media for viral videos of police brutality. I have two preconditions
to determine a threshold for virality. First, the video must appear in YouTube’s top 100 most viewed videos of
the day (Gill et al., 2007). This list will be checked at noon daily. Second, there must be high social
engagement because viral videos are, by definition, highly social (Broxton, 2013). Once a cell phone video of
police brutality appears in YouTube’s 100 most viewed, I will check for engagement via social networks. I will
use SharedCount.com to track engagement via Facebook (likes, shares, comments), Google + (+1s), Pinterest
(pins), and LinkedIn (shares). I will use TweetDeck.com to monitor engagement via Twitter (tweets, retweets,
favorites).
If there is a high level of online engagement, this indicates that the video was propagated via social
networks and resulted in the exponential viewership pattern necessary for virality (Crane, 2008). If there is a
low level of online engagement, the video likely rose in popularity through non-social means, and cannot be
considered “viral,” (Broxton, 2013). Thus, I will exclude videos with high viewership but low online
engagement from my study since they do not fit within the parameters of a truly “viral” video according to
accepted academic definitions that emphasize social interaction (Broxton, 2013).
Once I have determined a video is “viral,” I will wait for the virality to peak. As soon as the video has
been classified as “viral,” I will determine the increase in views per day. When the rate of views per day has
decreased for three consecutive days, the video can safely be considered “peaked.” After a video has peaked,
I will immediately redistribute the same survey I used in my longitudinal trend study. The sampling method
26. AJacob 26
and survey questions will remain the same. I will then collect the data and compare it to the last biweekly
survey data collected using a two-sample t-test. A two-sample t-test will be able to tell me, with statistical
certainty, whether there is a significant difference in response for each question. A statistically significant
difference in responses does not indicate a causal relationship between the pre-viral data and post-viral
video data, but does support my hypothesis that public opinion of criminal justice reform will increase in both
direction and salience following a viral cell phone video of police brutality.
Before I am able to begin my experimentation, I must receive approval from the Internal Review Board of
the George Washington University, as I am using human subjects in my experimental design. I have made
several considerations to obtain IRB approval. The duration of both experiments is short. The videos will each
be less than 3 minutes long, thus the exposure to the treatment will be less than 12 minutes altogether for
either experiment. Furthermore, the treatment – exposure to viral police brutality videos – is something that
the subjects could easily come into contact with while going about their everyday life. There is minimal
exposure to dangerous or harmful information that the subjects would not be otherwise exposed to, since
the viral videos used in my study are, by definition, widely viewed by the population. The benefits of this
research to the field of political communication will outweigh the minimal potential for harm posed to
subjects.
I will take further cautionary measures in my Exclusion Criteria. My Exclusion Criteria for subjects
includes a history of clinically high anxiety or PTSD. Individuals with clinically high anxiety or PTSD may be
sensitive to the violence displayed in the cell phone footage, and I would not want to intentionally expose
any such individual to any potential triggers. The EDA measurement is unintrusive – the EDA meter fits
around the participants’ ring and index fingers – and is widely used in psychophysiological research. All
interactions with subjects will be supervised.
27. AJacob 27
Prior to beginning the experiment, all participants will sign an informed consent form. The consent form
will inform participants that they will be asked to view a series of videos which may be seen as offensive or
violent. It will describe approximately how long the procedure will take, and informs them of the Exclusion
Criteria. It also assures the participant that they are free to leave the experiment at any time should they feel
uncomfortable, and pledges that all information will remain confidential and not associated with their name.
I will not tell the subjects that I am testing their emotional reaction to police brutality videos, as this
knowledge could confound my results. However, I will not misrepresent my study to them by lying about its
purpose; I will only omit information. All subjects will receive my contact information so that they may reach
out with questions or concerns. After the subjects have signed the informed consent forms, the forms will be
kept in a locked cabinet separate from the rest of the research data.
RESULTS OF THE PILOT TEST
For my pilot test, I tested the questionnaire used in the research design for my second and third
hypotheses. Since I was only testing my instrument and not trying to extrapolate any research conclusions, I
decided that a convenience sample would be sufficient for the pilot test. I created an online survey using
Qualtrics Survey Software and distributed the questionnaire to friends and family and asked them to
distribute it to their social networks. I received 55 responses to my questionnaire.
The responses to the policy questions I posed in the questionnaire were generally quite left-leaning.
The lowest response percentage in response to a “liberal” criminal justice policy proposal was 72% in favor of
eliminating mandatory minimums. The salience questions were very similarly distributed, all in loose bell
curves with some questions skewing to the left and others to the right. This hinted to me that I may not have
included appropriate benchmarks for these questions to guide response selection. In the absence of such
benchmarks, participants may have arbitrarily picked between similar-sounding options, i.e. “very important”
or “moderately important.”
28. AJacob 28
In response to Question 1 (Do you favor or oppose the death penalty for persons convicted of
murder?), 22% of respondents favored and 78% opposed. Six respondents selected “Don’t know” and were
excluded from analysis. For the paired salience question (2), the responses formed a loose bell curve (11%
extremely important, 24% very important, 40% moderately important, 18% slightly important, 7% not at all
important). All respondents answered this salience question.
In response to Question 3 (Do you favor or oppose the use of solitary confinement within prisons for
non-dangerous offenders?), 15% favored and 85% opposed. Eight respondents selected “Don’t know” and
were excluded from analysis. The paired salience question (4) also had responses in a loose bell curve, but it
skewed right. No respondents answered “extremely important.” 13% answered very important, 40%
moderately important, 30% slightly important, 17% not at all important. Two respondents selected “don’t
know” and were excluded. The difference in responses between the death penalty question and the solitary
confinement question could possibly reflect a gap in awareness – the death penalty has been on the political
agenda much longer and more prominently than solitary confinement.
In response to Question 5 (Do you believe prison conditions can be inappropriately harsh and/or
violate the human rights or civil liberties of incarcerated individuals?), 88% said yes and 6% said no. Seven
selected “don’t know” and were excluded. The paired salience question asking about the importance of
prison conditions to the respondent also had a bell curve skewed toward the right (6% extremely, 19% very,
34% moderately, 30% slightly, 11% not at all). Two responded “don’t know” and were excluded.
Question 7 asked respondents if they believed racial profiling is an appropriate policing tactic. 7%
said yes, 20% said it is appropriate in certain situations, 29% said it is rarely appropriate, and 38% said it is
never appropriate. Three said “don’t know.” The paired salience questioning about racial profiling had a bell
curve skewing to the left (8% extremely, 32% very, 42% moderately, 17% slightly, 2% not at all). Two
participants did not respond. The leftward skew may reflect the political charge behind racial profiling.
29. AJacob 29
In response to Question 9 (Do you think sentencing for certain crimes can be excessively harsh or
discriminatory?), 84% answered yes and 16% answered no. Five responded “don’t know” and were excluded
from analysis. Question 10 asked respondents if they favor or oppose eliminating mandatory minimums for
certain nonviolent crimes such as drug charges. 72% favored and 28% opposed, and five responded “don’t
know.” When compared to responses for Question 9, this posed an interesting deviation: even though 84%
believe sentencing for certain crimes is excessively harsh or discriminatory, only 72% supported lessening
these sentences by eliminating mandatory minimums for nonviolent crimes. I predicted that these numbers
would be closer to each other. The paired salience question about sentencing reform was a bell curve skewed
to the left (4% extremely important, 31% very important, 35% moderately important, 25% slightly important,
4% not important at all).
In response to Question 12 (Some people have said the nation has a problem with mass
incarceration. Do you agree or disagree with this view?), 91% agreed and 9% disagreed. Nine responded
don’t know. For the paired saliency question, 6% said mass incarceration was extremely important, 29% very,
41% moderately, 24% slightly. No respondents said it was not at all important. Six responded “don’t know.” I
was surprised by both the amount of opposition to mass incarceration and the number of people who
selected “don’t know.” This may be because of uncertainty around the meaning of “mass incarceration.”
When rewriting the questionnaire.
In response to Question 14 (Would you support or oppose requiring patrol officers in your area to
wear small video cameras whenever they’re on duty?), 86% answered in support and 14% opposed. Five
selected “don’t know.” For the paired saliency question, the answers formed a near-perfect bell curve: 9%
extremely, 27% very, 31% moderately, 25% slightly, 7% not at all. All respondents answered this question.
Question 16 asked whether the respondent would support or oppose a policy saying that when
police kill an unarmed civilian it should be investigated by an outside prosecutor who does not work with the
police on a regular basis. 92% of the respondents answered in support, and 8% opposed. 4 answered “don’t
30. AJacob 30
know.” I was somewhat surprised that the response for this question was not unanimous, as this polling
question usually receives widespread support and respondents had answered so liberally thus far. This
indicated that there may be a handful of hardline conservatives in my sample. The paired salience question
had a bell curve response skewed to the left (11% extremely, 35% very, 31% moderately, 20% slightly, and 2%
not important at all. One person selected “don’t know.”
The next six questions in my survey asked respondents about their attitudes toward police and the
criminal justice system. The questions began on a personal level and expanded to macro-level questions
about police. The change between aggregate responses for each question was marked and fascinating: as
the questions became broader, attitudes toward law enforcement and the judicial system became more
negative.
Question 18 asked respondents how they feel about the police in their own community: mostly safe
or mostly anxious? 94% said they felt mostly safe, while 6% felt mostly anxious. Six selected “don’t know.” I
will note here that race may play an important role in respondents’ answer choice – previous polling data
suggests that blacks (and, to a lesser extent, Latinos) are significantly more likely to feel unsafe due to the
presence of police officers in their community. My sample had a very low participation rate amongst both
these racial groups, which I will discuss later, and this likely had an effect on aggregate response for this
question.
Question 19 asked respondents if they thought the police are too quick to use deadly force, or do
they typically only use deadly force when necessary? 38% of respondents said police were too quick to use,
and 62% said police typically only use when necessary. Ten respondents answered “don’t know,” – the
highest number for any question. This may have been caused by genuine uncertainty about the rate of
excessive force used by police.
31. AJacob 31
Question 20 asked respondents how confident they were that the police in this country are held
accountable for any misconduct. 7% said they were very confident, 37% said they were somewhat confident,
39% said they were not so confident, and 17% said they were not confident at all. One person answered
“don’t know.”
Question 21 asked respondents how confident they were that the police in this country treat whites
and blacks equally. 4% said they were very confident, 10% said they were somewhat confident, 37% said they
were not so confident, and 41% said they were not confident at all. One person answered don’t know.
Question 22 asked respondents if they believed blacks and other minorities received equal
treatment as whites in the criminal justice system. Only one respondent (2%) answered definitely yes. 8%
answered probably yes, 21% said they might or might not, 32% said probably not, and 38% said definitely
not. Two answered “don’t know.” It was interesting to compare the answers to Questions 21 and 22: 23% of
respondents were at least somewhat confident that police in this country treat whites and blacks equally. In
contrast, only 10% believe blacks and other minorities receive equal treatment as whites in the criminal
justice system. This suggests that for approximately 13% of respondents, the inequality is systematic within
the judicial system and independent of police misconduct. I found this interesting due to the high publicity
surrounding police misconduct in recent years compared to relatively reduced coverage of systematic bias in
the justice system. This may suggest a possible backfire effect for certain people’s opinions about police bias
when encountered with evidence of police brutality. However, my sample is far too small to reach that
conclusion.
Question 23 asked respondents if they think police officers stop people of certain racial or ethnic
groups because they believe that these groups are more likely than others to commit certain types of crimes.
54% of respondents said yes, they do strop people of certain racial or ethnic groups. 41% said it’s possible
this happens, but not certain. 7% said no, this does not happen. 4 answered “don’t know.” Again, a
comparison of responses to Question 21 is revealing. Even though 54% -- a majority -- said police do stop
32. AJacob 32
people of certain racial or ethnic groups because they believe these groups are more likely than others to
commit certain types of crimes, only 41% said they were not confident at all that police treat whites and
blacks equally. 23% of respondents were at least somewhat confident that police in this country treat whites
and blacks equally, yet only 7% said that police officers do not stop people of certain racial or ethnic groups
because they think they are more likely to commit crimes.
This indicates a cognitive disconnect: even though most people believe that the police stop members
of certain racial or ethnic groups more than others due to beliefs about the race’s likelihood to commit
certain crimes, at least 24% of this group did not identify this as unequal treatment. Similarly, at least 70% of
respondents who were somewhat confident or very confident that police treat whites and blacks equally also
believed that it was possible police officers stop members of certain racial groups because they believe they
are more likely than others to commit certain crimes – yet they did not classify this as unequal treatment.
My convenience sampling method led to an interesting demographic distribution in my sample. As
an undergraduate student at a very politically active liberal Northeastern university, I anticipated most of my
sample to comprise of young Democrats. When I distributed the survey to my peers, I waited 48 hours to
check for responses and discovered that I only had 16 responses. I was hoping for a larger sample to examine,
and was struggling to find respondents. Moreover, my responses were almost completely uniform. Most of
my policy-related questions (1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 10, 12, 14, 16) had 100% of respondents choose the same answer
choice – always the classically “liberal” answer choice – even though similar questions in national polls were
much more evenly split.
My mother, a genetic researcher and university professor, offered to distribute the survey to her
colleagues, friends, and students to improve my sample size. A few friends attending more conservative
universities offered to distribute the survey to their Republican and Independent friends to diversify the
sample. Within three days, my sample size increased to 55. Based on the demographic information provided
33. AJacob 33
by respondents, I am guessing that most of the responses came from my mother’s peer group. 75% of
respondents were older than 24 years old, and most were highly educated (46% possessed a Master’s degree
or higher). Friends’ efforts to add more Republicans and Independents to my sample had mixed success: 7%
and 11% respectively. Democrats comprised of 51% of the sample. I was surprised by the number of
respondents who selected their political affiliation as “none” (25%).
Most respondents were white or Asian (45% and 36%, respectively). 7% were Hispanic or Latino, and
I had one respondent (2%) who identified as black or African American. Blacks and Latinos were two
populations of special interest for my study, and the low participation rate of both minorities illustrated to
me that I must devise a better method to recruit participants from these groups for my experiments in the
future. It also validated the need for a stratified random sample stratified by ethnicity in my national
biweekly poll. I may also consider a mechanism for recruiting more Republicans and Independents into the
study, as their response rates remained comparatively low even though they were actively recruited.
I believe that my questionnaire worked well for the most part. Every participant who began the
survey also completed it and answered every question – there was no abandonment in participants. Most
participants completed the survey within six minutes, thus survey taking fatigue seems unlikely. Upon
reflecting further on my questionnaire, I did wonder whether the pointed questions could introduce the
observer-expectancy effect. It is relatively easy for subjects to extrapolate from my questionnaire that I am
studying the relationship between criminal justice reform and attitudes about law enforcement. If the
participants are aware of the researcher’s expectations, they could subconsciously or consciously change
their responses to match these expectations. However, I believe this is a relatively low risk. Furthermore,
adding more questions to effectively “throw off” participants would lengthen the survey and potentially lead
to abandonment or fatigue. Although I am mostly happy with my measurement instrument, I would like to
make a few alterations for my final research.
34. AJacob 34
First, I will change the salience questions. I will retain the wording of the questions and keep them
paired with each policy question, but I would like to have descriptive answer choices that establish clear
benchmarks for each option rather than leaving this to the respondents’ imagination. Instead of choosing
between extremely important, very important, moderately important, slightly important, and not important
at all, perhaps the options will read “I would likely vote based on this issue;” “This is a top issue for me, but I
would not necessarily decide my vote based on this issue;” “I think this is an important issue to consider, but
it is not one of my top issues;” “I might give this some consideration, but there are many other issues that are
more important to me;” and “This issue is not at all important to me.”
Second, I will change the wording of some questions to exclude jargon and instead use simpler
vocabulary that anyone could understand without prior knowledge of criminal justice issues. For example,
Questions 12 and 13 pertained to mass incarceration, and nine respondents selected “don’t know.” This may
have been caused by unfamiliarity with the term “mass incarceration.” I want to reword this question so that
it is easier to understand – perhaps it will say something like “Do you think America is too ‘tough on crime’
and imprisons too many people?” Additionally, I plan on changing Question 3 to include an example of
solitary confinement policies -- fewer Americans may understand the policy because it is covered less by the
mainstream media than the death penalty.
Third, I would change the wording of Question 21 based on feedback from a participant. The
question reads, “How confident are you that police in this country treat whites and blacks equally?” One of
my participants, a psychiatric researcher who is a colleague of my mother’s, contacted her to relay some
feedback: the question falls in the trap of seeing society polarized into blacks and whites when this is hardly a
reflection of reality, especially in multicultural cities such as Washington or New York where many individuals
have mixed ethnic heritage. Question 22 also specifically names blacks, although it tails this with “and other
minorities.” In my final research, I would remove any specific mention of blacks from the survey.
35. AJacob 35
The demographic data made me realize that it may be much harder than I expected to have certain
important groups participate in both my experiments and my national polling. I need to establish measures
to recruit more Republicans, blacks, and Latinos as subjects in my experiments. I am considering working with
on-campus organizations such as the Multicultural Student Services Center and GW College Republicans to
refer potential subjects to me and distribute flyers about my experiments. For my national polling, I will
ensure I devote adequate resources to stratifying my sample and over-sample blacks and Latinos in the
population to have a sufficiently large sample.
CONCLUSION
My prospectus integrates an experimental and correlational research design to draw connections
between the rise in viral cell phone footage of police brutality and the recent political momentum behind
criminal justice reform. New technological innovations such as the Internet, social networking websites, and
cell phone cameras enable ordinary citizens to share their experiences with a limitless audience at no cost.
This technology is giving a voice to those whom society has long suppressed, and as a result, persistent
atrocities such as police brutality are receiving mainstream attention.
Cell phone footage provides credibility to victims’ cries that were previously silenced by the public’s
skepticism. Society, once ignorant (perhaps willfully) of police misconduct, is confronted with unequivocal
visual evidence of this injustice in the form of shocking firsthand footage. The emotion and outrage drawn by
such videos cause them to be shared across social networks, magnifying their effects through social
engagement and altering societal narratives about law enforcement. This paradigm shift causes disillusioned
individuals to look more critically at the criminal justice system as a whole, observing long-term damage with
a new perspective. This kind environment is ripe for reform, and sure enough, bipartisan legislation has come
forward on all levels of government to fix systemic flaws within the justice system.
37. AJacob 37
microphones, and lighting, hiring actors, and securing a newsroom set. For my first experiment, I will also
need to buy an electrodermal activity (EDA) sensor. The Mindfield eSense Skin Response is an EDA sensor
available for $95 from MoveItGear. There will also be some printing costs associated with printing flyers to
advertise and recruit subjects for the experiment, and printing the questionnaires for the subjects in my
second experiment. I estimate this will cost approximately $100. Additionally, subjects in my experiment will
have a chance to win a $25 Amazon gift card.
The greatest cost for the research will be in the repeated national polling. I am using SurveyMonkey’s
PrecisionPolling cost calculator to generate a cost estimate for my biweekly national poll needed to test my
third hypothesis. In order to generate 1,500 complete responses, which is my desired sample size, I will need
to make 30,000 calls with an expected average response rate of 5%. At ten cents per call, each biweekly
national poll will cost approximately $3,000. I plan on conducting continuous national polling for three
months. This means there will be at least six national polls, plus at least one unscheduled poll immediately
following a viral video for an estimated cost of $21,000. The total cost of the research will be approximately
$22,220.
I anticipate this research to take me approximately six months. This will give me a sufficient amount of
time to gain IRB approval, produce the “news segments” used in both my experiments, recruit participants
for both my experiments, recruit and train interviewers to conduct the biweekly national polls, and carry out
my full research plan for each of my three hypotheses.
There are a few inherent limitations to my research design. First, the internal validity of both my
experiments depend on the believability of the faux “news segments” I create. If the clips appear unrealistic
or fictionalized to the subjects, this seriously undermines the internal validity of both the experiments
because the subjects will not be responding to what they believe is “real” news coverage of an incident. The
experiments also pose external validity issues because of the experimental setting – the distraction-free
38. AJacob 38
windowless room fitted with only a computer and a desk are unlikely to reflect how subjects interact with
these videos in their daily lives. This undermines the generalizability of the study.
The national polling is quite expensive and cannot prove causal relationships – even the most
significant data can only establish correlations. Additionally, the “threshold” of virality may present some
operational problems because it is difficult to quantify “high” versus “low” engagement in absolute numerical
terms. In general, the research lacks qualitative elements to the research design. Even the questionnaire is
comprised of only close-ended questions. The research may benefit from the addition of qualitative elements
to round out the research design.
I am examining humans’ complex emotional reactions to a provocative stimulus, influenced by an
individual’s values, attitudes, and perceptions. Due to the “soft” nature of my area of interest, adding a
qualitative element may be beneficial to gaining a richer understanding of the subject. This could be done by
adding open-ended questions to the questionnaire, or conducting deeper interviews in addition to
procedural surveys.
Future research could also examine legislative responsiveness to changes in public opinion about
criminal justice reform. I predict that one public support increases for criminal justice reform within a
congressional district, the representative for that district is more likely to come out publicly in favor of
criminal justice reform measures. This can be studied through a combination of polling and content analysis.
Polling data must be examined on the congressional district level to determine whether public support for
criminal justice reform goes up, down, or remains constant within a congressional district following a viral
police brutality video. Next, researchers should conduct a content analysis of written statements and press
releases of congressmen before and after the video goes viral. This should be coded to determine whether
the legislator is for, against, or ambivalent toward criminal justice reform in Congress. Any changes to a
politician’s stance on criminal justice issues following a viral video should be noted. Statistical analysis will
40. AJacob 40
o Slightly important
o Not at all important
o Don’t know
7. Do you believe racial profiling is an appropriate policing tactic?
o Yes, it is an appropriate policing tactic
o In certain situations, it is an appropriate policing tactic
o It is rarely an appropriate policing tactic
o It is never an appropriate policing tactic
o Don’t know
8. Of the issues you care about, how important is the issue of racial profiling to you?
o Extremely important
o Very important
o Moderately important
o Slightly important
o Not at all important
o Don’t know
9. Do you think sentencing for certain crimes can be excessively harsh or discriminatory?
o Yes
o No
o Don’t know
10. Do you favor or oppose eliminating mandatory minimums for certain nonviolent crimes such as
drug charges?
o Favor
o Oppose
o Don’t know
11. Of the issues you care about, how important is the issue of sentencing reform to you?
o Extremely important
o Very important
o Moderately important
o Slightly important
o Not at all important
o Don’t know
12. Some people have said the nation has a problem with mass incarceration. Do you agree or
disagree with this view?
o Agree
o Disagree
o Don’t know
13. Of the issues you care about, how important is the issue of mass incarceration to you?
o Extremely important
o Very important
41. AJacob 41
o Moderately important
o Slightly important
o Not at all important
o Don’t know
14. “Would you support or oppose requiring patrol officers in your area to wear small video
cameras whenever they’re on duty?” (ABC News/Washington Post 2014)
o Support
o Oppose
o Don’t know
15. Of the issues you care about, how important is the issue of small video cameras on police
officers to you?
o Very important
o Fairly important
o Somewhat important
o Slightly important
o Not important
o Don’t know
16. “Would you support or oppose a policy saying that when police kill an unarmed civilian it should
be investigated by an outside prosecutor who does not work with the police on a regular basis?”
(ABC News/Washington Post 2014)
o Support
o Oppose
o Don’t know
17. Of the issues you care about, how important is the issue of independent prosecutors to you?
o Very important
o Fairly important
o Somewhat important
o Slightly important
o Not important
o Don’t know
18. “How would you describe your feelings about the police in your community? Would you say
they make you feel mostly safe or mostly anxious?” (CBS 2014)
o Mostly safe
o Mostly anxious
o Don’t know
19. “In general, do you think the police are too quick to use deadly force, or do they typically only
use deadly force when necessary?” (CBS 2014)
o Too quick to use
o Typically only use when necessary
o Don’t know
42. AJacob 42
20. “How confident are you that the police in this country are held accountable for any
misconduct?” (ABC News/Washington Post 2014)
o Very confident
o Somewhat confident
o Not so confident
o Not confident at all
o Don’t know
21. “How confident are you that the police in this country treat whites and blacks equally?” (ABC
News/Washington Post 2014)
o Definitely yes
o Probably yes
o Might or might not
o Probably not
o Definitely not
o Don’t know
22. “Do you think blacks and other minorities receive equal treatment as whites in the criminal
justice system?” (ABC News/Washington Post 2014)
o Yes, they receive equal treatment
o No, they do not receive equal treatment
o Don’t know
23. “In general, do you think police officers stop people of certain racial or ethnic groups because
they believe that these groups are more likely than others to commit certain types of crimes, or
don’t you think this happens?” (CBS 2014)
o Yes, they do stop people of certain racial or ethnic groups
o No, this does not happen
o Don’t know
24. What is your sex?
o Male
o Female
25. What is your age?
o 18-24 years old
o 25-34 years old
o 35-44 years old
o 45-54 years old
o 55-64 years old
o 65-74 years old
o 75 years or older
26. Please specify your ethnicity or race.
o White
o Hispanic or Latino
43. AJacob 43
o Black or African American
o Native American or American Indian
o Asian/Pacific Islander
o Other
27. What is the highest degree or level of school you have completed? If currently enrolled, highest
degree received.
o No schooling completed
o Nursery school to 8th
grade
o Some high school
o High school graduate, diploma or the equivalent (i.e. GED)
o Some college, no degree
o Trade/technical/vocational training
o Associate degree
o Bachelor’s degree
o Master’s degree
o Professional degree
o Doctorate degree
28. What is your religious preference?
o Protestant/Other Christian
o Catholic
o Mormon
o Jewish
o Muslim
o Other non-Christian religion
o None
o Don’t know
29. What is your political affiliation?
o Democrat
o Republican
o Independent
o Other
o None
44. AJacob 44
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