How do they address black women? Not bro or dude, i presume ...

Showing less respect to citizens leads to more confrontation and all of what that entails.

That the great and vaunted University of Stanford spends its time and money on an all-important "study" such as this tells me everything.

No wonder they keep saying there's a big problem with higher education these days, and that college isn't worth it anymore.

Colleges should focus on teaching students to build a productive, prosperous economy instead of teaching them how to be a victim, look for prejudice where there isn't any and find out new ways to be offended. Its what happens when people spend too much time "studying" life rather than living it.

It's difficult to believe that there was only one side to the verbal interactions between Oakland's Officers and those motorists being stopped. Yet, there doesn't seem to be one word in this article as to if the Stanford study analyzed the verbal utterances toward the officers by the motorists.

There's no way to know who spoke first in these interactions, unless Stanford took the time to determine if the opening comments from the motorists were hostile, shrill, non-hostile, non-shrill, etc. How the officer responds to a stopped motorists' tone-of-voice can set the stage as how an officer might speak to a motorist for the rest of the stop.

The body-cams would also provide some evidence as to whether more tickets were issued to motorists by race. And there is also the number of occupants in the car, which can be a problem for a single officer.

It was about six years ago that four Oakland police were killed when they stopped someone who immediately killed two officers. Then, when holed up in a nearby apartment, he killed two more as a swat team attempted to dislodge him from the apartment. It would take a little research, but the Oakland Police Department could have provided Stanford's researchers the number of officers killed via traffic stops over the years, with the race of the drivers who killed those officers. What Stanford's researchers did not give much credence to is just how dangerous traffic stops can be in some cities--like Oakland where a lot of murders and crime take place.

The article did seem to acknowledge the officers's professionalism .. but does not seem to give them much credit, or praise, for their interaction with the public via this Weekly article.

Also missing from this study would seem to be the number of public complaints received from those stopped during the period of this study.

It seems clear that Stanford is full of people who have a lot of time and money to "investigate" just about everything they can to cast doubt on our public safety officers, without adding much of value to those organizations from these "investigations".

Yes, Oakland has had its problems in the police department.. but complaining about the tone-of-voice or the language used--when used professionally, seems to be pushing the envelope. Oakland should be lauded for providing those body-cam recordings--but this study should make them wary of wanting to support Stanford in any future attempts by that school trying into insinuate Stanford into Oakland's police force.

Will Stanford be doing the same study on other police departments? Probably not. Of course, it's possible that in time the audio streams from body-cam videos could be converted to text, and analyzed by software that is developed by Stanford, or others, so that every police force in the country could determine if their officers interact with the public in professional and consistent ways. However, that's a daunting task--and it's not likely the authors of this study will volunteer their time to make such a system available to our nation's police departments.

Looking forward a few years, perhaps we can expect self-driving police cars to stop and ticket other cars, both self-driving and non-self-driving. At that point in time, it's hard to believe that the machine-to-machine communication would treat the machines differently, but no doubt Stanford will be looking for ways to prove that that isn't so.

Sorry .. but this study is more of a waste of time than not.

Stanford had absolutely NO NO NO business sticking their big arrogant nose into this problem, in a neighborhood they no virtually zilch about, and then offering no helpful suggestions!

An intrusive and rude thing to do, they wasted everyone's time and money.

[Portion removed.]
Joe- had you read the article toy would have read that the data came from the body cameras. The recordings would contain the entire interaction.
U believable - wrong also. They have every right to conduct the research and researchers are no supposed to offer helpful suggestions.

@Try Again:

> Joe- had you read the article toy would have read that the data came
> from the body cameras. The recordings would contain the entire interaction

That's what I understood from the article. What I wrote that you (@Try Again) did not read carefully, or understand, was my suggestion that "in the future" that this process could be automated, rather than having people sit and watch the videos. What objection do you have with that?

Any other objections to my objections to this clearly one-sided analysis of these Oakland police traffic stops?

PC gone too far. I want the researchers to experience being law enforcement officers for 5 years, and keep an open mind thereafter. Police officers are only human but people expect them to be superhuman. So often, the left are fighting for the wrong side. In my book, police officers accept the duty to serve the community and they should be respected. The psychologists should study the stress levels of being a police officer compared to their careers of pointing fingers.

Police put their lives on the line everyday. 99% of them are good cops, the 1% are caught on video doing bad things and the other 99% are stereotyped as bad people (speaking of bias !!) . Now we have people analyzing very word they say in the line of duty??

The people who most need cops are those that live in high crime areas yet seem to be the same ones giving them no support. The cops are the problem they say- really look at yourselves first.

I would love all you cop haters out there to walk in their shoes for a shift, i think you would feel differently.

This article does a rather poor job of describing the study's purpose and conclusions, which include 50 specific recommendations for police departments to consider. For a more thorough discussion, see this Stanford webpage: Web Link There, you can also access the full study.

From the Stanford article: "The Oakland Police Department has been under federal monitoring for more than a decade since the so-called Riders case involving police misconduct. The Stanford researchers ... were engaged to assist Oakland in complying with the federal order to collect and analyze stop data by race."

The article also points out that the same Stanford group has provided training workshops on the subject of bias to 90% of Oakland officers. The research and training are intended to help solve real-world problems for both the police and the people they serve.

Would be interesting to know how some Stanford academics with no real world policing experience are prepared to provide anything but academic recommendations to people whose lives are on the line daily?

Bet that this same group would not likely go into the Oakland "community" and begin to lecture Oakland residents about how to deal respectfully with the Oakland police.

Again .. the Oakland police department has had a lot of problems .. starting with the City Council, the numerous chiefs of police and all the way down to the lowest ranking officer. All organizational problems exist primarily because of management problems. The police are no different, except that they have to live with, react to, and somehow be better than the communities they serve.

Oakland suffered 68 murders in 2016. This comes to about 16/100K population. Compared to Chicago's 26/100K, Oakland is not the worst city in the US to police.
TV's Kozak once said: "A city gets the police it deserves". Maybe that was just a filler line for Kozak, but it seems to make a lot of sense in real life.

In the early 1990s, a wave of hysteria washed over our nation's police departments--many being accused of being "racist" when stopping black (mostly) motorists. Study after study after study was conducted, mostly by "academics"--with the result that these "studies" could not provide that the nation's police were "racist" when dealing with traffic stops.

Even Palo Alto got caught up in this craziness. Our police were tasked with keeping separate traffic stop data that was to be used by the critics of the police to prove how "racist" they were. After many attempts to prove the police were dealing with "people of color" differently than whites--no one could produce any evidence from the data collected by the police. Eventually, the police were relieved of this extra data keeping. Unfortunately, the people making the wild claims were never called before the City Council to hear that their claims were not proven by extensive efforts by the city police. These folks were able to rant and rave before our elected officials but were never made to face those same elected officials to let them know that their claims were hollow.

Looking back into the 1990s again, the Oakland School District endorsed the idea of "Ebonics" as a recognized language for use in the schools:

Web Link

While this idea did not gain much traction, it does suggest that "the king's English" might not be the standard in Oakland.

Pushing this thought a little further, wouldn't it make sense to determine a baseline of the vocabulary used by blacks and whites to see if the police were not simply showing deference to the cultural expectations of each motorist stopped?

Personally, I would prefer that a standard script of comments be used with all motorists. But given the wide range of vernacular English used by any so-called ethnic groups, it might not be possible for every officer to use the same words with every group effectively--particularly with illegals now having drivers licenses. English is not that well spoken by many immigrants, as well as other native-born with lower educational attainments.

It's really hard for people with respect for the police to listen to these folks from Stanford and believe they really know what they are talking about.