Sticks and Stones May Break Your Bones, But Words CAN Hurt You Too

Publication

Martaindale, M. H., Sandel, W. L., Duron, A., & Blair, J. P. (2023). @#%$!: The Impact of Officer Profanity on Civilians’ Perception of What Constitutes Reasonable Use of Force. Police Quarterly, 26(2), 194-212. https://doi.org/10.1177/10986111221111332

What Was the Issue?

The idea for this study came from an event that happened near us. A use of force expert in our area was asked to review a case to see if he thought it should be referred for prosecution. The officer involved had already been fired for excessive use of force. The expert reviewed the video and was amazed. In his opinion, the grounds for the arrest were clear. The techniques used to overcome resistance came right out of the commonly taught Pressure Points Control Tactics (PPCT) manual. The officer used a palm heel strike to the side of the suspect’s neck and followed that with an angle kick to the suspect’s thigh as the suspect began to fall. Officers are commonly taught to couple their strikes because a single hit may not be enough. After the suspect fell, the officer then quickly hand cuffed the offender and placed him in his car. The suspect wasn’t injured. The only issue the expert could see with the entire event was that the officer was swearing the entire time (even before he got out of the car to encounter the suspect). The suspect was very fond of the F-word and averaged at least 10 Fs per minute.

The expert hypothesized that it was the swearing that made people look at the event as an excessive use of force. He tested this hypothesis on some friends by having them view the video with or without sound. His friends were much more likely to suggest that the incident was excessive when the audio was on and they could hear the swearing. This was a more formal test of the expert’s hypothesis.

How Did They Test It?

The authors recruited 234 students for the study. These students were randomly assigned to watch one of two videos taken from publicly available police interactions where the officer used physical force to arrest the suspect.  The audio was removed from both videos and subtitles were added to create a version of each video with or without profanity. This created four conditions (video 1 with profanity, video 1 without profanity, video 2 with profanity, and video 2 without profanity). After watching the a video in one of the four conditions, the students judged how reasonable the use of force was.

What Did They Find?

The figure below shows the overall findings. On the left are the ratings without profanity and on the right are the ratings with profanity. You can clearly see that the participants rated the videos with profanity as less reasonable than those without. This difference was statistically significant and suggested a medium to large effect for profanity. Also notice that the non-profane versions were viewed differently. One video involved more force than the other, so this was not surprising. What is really interesting is that the profanity versions of both the videos were viewed as being about the same. The profanity appears to have stopped the participants from discerning the actual differences in the amount of force used!

So What?

This study shows that profanity can cause people to view a use of force situation as less reasonable (a few other studies have shown this as well). If I were a police officer whose livelihood could be impacted by public perceptions of the reasonableness of my uses of force, I would stop swearing. If I was a supervisor, I would have a policy against swearing. Not only to improve the public’s perception of my officers, but also to protect my officers from the negative impact that swearing has on perceptions of force.