The Stereotypes Of Police Brutality

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Recently the issue of police brutality has come to the attention of the public. With the rise of technology and social media people have had more access to footage of these violent acts. Thus, people have started to take notice of the excessive force being used by the police on people of color even when they are unarmed. This leaves the public to wonder, why it is that police react more critically with Black suspects than White suspects? A recent study derived from these observations, shows that if a toy gun is associated with a Black person rather than a white person, people are further inclined to incorrectly recognize the toy weapon as a real gun (Charis-Carlson, 2016). Although, it does not completely answer the question, it definitely …show more content…
Therefore, it does not imply causation but instead a positive correlation between seeing the face of a black boy and associating it with threatening stimuli. However, the article did not state any statistics and the readers are not aware of how strong the correlation is and to what extent they are perceived as more threatening. It also did not give the readers any measures of central tendency. The data is qualitative and is most likely ordinal level data. Therefore, it is the second lowest level of measurement between variables. I believe that the researchers probably used a Likert scale to have the participants rate how threatening they found the stimulus to be after viewing the face. Consequently, they had to have used either the median or the mode as a form of central tendency since the mean cannot be determined from ordinal level data. There was also no mention of the variability of the scores. It would be good to know the range (the distance between the biggest and smallest number) because the would provide the audience with an idea of how near or far most of the numbers are to the average. The range is not the best measure of variability since it is not sensitive to the intermediate score. However, I am unsure about the mean given the level of measurement and it might not be possible to calculate deviation, sums of squares, variance, and standard

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