“Hi. Just so you know, I’m not going to arrest you.”
Imagine you’re not reading this article right now, but out in the world, walking around, and the person who says that to you is a police officer. Might such a statement put you more at ease? Might it improve trust and communication in police-civilian interactions? Kyle Dobson, a post-doctoral researcher at The University of Texas at Austin, is very much hoping this will be the case.
Back up to 2016, shortly after the election of Donald Trump, when Dobson’s research into policing first began. Disheartened by the most recent reports of police brutality, Dobson, then a PhD student in management and organizations, decided to focus his efforts onto something that could make a meaningful difference in people’s lives. Given his background in the psychology of dehumanization and connection, he felt that examining the shortcomings of community policing would be a good place to start. And examine Dobson did, along with his longtime collaborator Andrea Dittmann, together logging over 500 hours of ride-alongs with law enforcement officers, first with their university’s police department and then with police in the surrounding suburb and nearby city.
In addition to observing and talking with police officers, Dobson and Dittmann also interviewed the community members with whom the officers interacted. It didn’t take long for a pattern to emerge. Officers would approach civilians with the goal of building connections rather than making arrests. They would return to their vehicles feeling they had succeeded, but the civilian perception of the same encounter was often the opposite. When interviewed, civilians expressed suspicion of the officers’ motives and concern that they’d been singled out. The officers’ intentions were benevolent, but they had failed to convey this.
Expanding their observations to the larger surrounding city, Dobson and Dittmann had the opportunity to work with a newly established policing initiative trying out a different approach to community policing. “They recruited officers with good social skills and put them on a unit where their resource was time,” explains Dobson. Rather than responding to radio calls, these officers were able to focus exclusively on getting to know community members and talking to them about how best to address their community’s problems. “This requires trust that’s built very swiftly,” say Dobson.
What Dobson and Dittmann noticed in the pilot program is that officers who were especially good at building rapport started each interaction with a sentence that dispelled fears that civilians might have about their motives. It was typically something as simple as, “Hi, just so you know, I’m not trying to arrest you.” Dobson and Dittmann dubbed this a “transparency statement.” Issuing a transparency statement wasn’t any part of the officers’ training. It was just intuitive behavior, and those who employed it were barely aware they were doing so. The effects, however, were pronounced. After hearing a transparency statement, community members were more likely to engage openly with officers, and they felt better about the interaction afterward.
The next step for Dobson and Dittmann was to conduct a randomized controlled experiment in which they could combine the natural settings of fieldwork with the ability to show causation. By now they’d both received their PhDs and gone off to separate institutions, with Dobson landing at psychologist David Yeager’s lab at UT Austin. Dobson reached out to the UT Austin police department (UTPD) about participating in a field experiment.
“They have been wonderful collaborators,” says Dobson of UTPD. “I’m so proud of them for taking the risk of collaborating with me because it must have felt bonkers to them to hear my proposed ideas.”
Those ideas were that real UTPD officers would approach civilian research participants on and around the UT Austin campus and either issue a transparency statement (“I’m walking around trying to get to know the community.”) or a more ambiguous opening line that Dobson had observed in the field (“How’s it going?”) when initiating an interaction. 232 adult participants were selected and told in advance that they were part of a natural language experiment and would be interacting with other individuals on campus, but not that they would specifically be interacting with police. This setting allowed for recording of the conversations for later analysis and measuring of subjects’ stress levels via a device worn on their wrists, all of which would have been impossible to achieve in the initial ride-alongs.
As Dobson and Dittmann had hoped, the field experiment quantified the previously-observed benefits of the transparency statement. Subjects whose interactions began with the transparency statement provided longer answers, used language categorized as more authentic, and reported fewer negative emotions (e.g., nervousness and hostility) when surveyed afterward than those in the control condition. Stress level measurements supported these findings, with subjects in the transparency condition exhibiting lower indicators of stress by the end of the interactions.
In order to better understand the potential of transparency statements, Dobson and Dittmann also conducted a series of randomized, controlled online experiments in which subjects were asked to imagine scenarios where they were approached by either a police officer or another individual with less perceived authority (e.g., a grocery store employee). By varying both the text of the opening statement and the vocation of the hypothetical individuals who were making the approach, Dobson and Dittmann found that transparency statements were most effective in situations where the person issuing them had more authority over the person being approached, and when the statement wasn’t just friendly and polite but clearly eliminated the perceived threat of arrest. From the field observations, Dobson also noted that officers’ attempts to diffuse the stress of interactions by using humor often didn’t land well.
“Think about a boss who comes into your office and starts making jokes while you’re trying to work,” he says. “It’s frustrating but you can’t really do anything about it and it’s just reinforcing that power disparity.”
Dobson is continuing to work with UTPD on the next phase of the research — seeing if implementing the transparency statement as part of police training can have measurable benefits in real policing. He and Dittmann recently gave a presentation on their findings to police officers at the UT Systems Executive Conference. So far, police response has been enthusiastic.
“Chiefs love it,” he says, because it’s something easy for rank-and-file officers to learn and remember. “I think people are really excited about the idea, I’m just very careful as a researcher.” Which is why he is so eager to test if the transparency statement works as well in the day-to-day policing as it did in experiments. “I want to see if my intervention in a training form can have organizational and societal outcomes.” Dobson’s professional caution is balanced by his desire to motivate officers to believe in the possibility of better community relationships. “Police are very cynical about what can change, and I want to make them optimistic about the kind of work that can be done to rebuild trust in their communities.”
Dobson hopes to see more research that focuses on finding solutions rather than just identifying problems in law enforcement. One way he’s doing this is by collaborating with a startup called New Blue, which awards micro-grants to reform-minded officers, many of whom are female, to work with community members in creating new models of policing that better serve those communities. Dobson hopes to match these officers with researchers who have the resources and expertise to refine and test their ideas.
After years of observing and interviewing law enforcement officers, Dobson is now fairly comfortable engaging with police. But, as a young Black male, seeking out police for his research initially felt a little like walking into the lion’s den. “I’m generally someone who’s very optimistic about other people,” he says. “So, I was really hopeful that what I’d find is just miscommunication of some sort that I could solve.” Fortuitously, the first police chiefs Dobson worked with were also Black men who were highly supportive of the research he was embarking on. “They really appreciated seeing someone of my demographic coming out and talking to them and being willing to listen, and they responded with that same level of interest and care.”
In the end, working with police has even helped Dobson to feel less threatened when he finds himself a subject of the investigatory stops for which young Black men are disproportionately singled out.
“All those times I was fearful and threatened and I hated those interactions,” says Dobson about being stopped by police in the past. “But now, every city I go into I feel like I understand these people way better than the average member of a community and I feel powerful because of that.”