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The conflict theory of law stipulates that strategies of crime control regulate threats to the interests of dominant groups. Aggregate-level research on policing has generally supported this proposition, showing that measures of minority threat are related to legal mechanisms of crime control. Police brutality (i.e., use of excessive physical force) constitutes an extra-legal mechanism of control that has yet to be examined in this theoretical framework. This study extends research in the area theoretically and substantively by testing the hypothesis that the greater the number of threatening acts and people, the greater the number of police brutality civil rights criminal complaints filed with the U.S. Department of Justice. The findings show that measures of the presence of threatening people (percent black, percent Hispanic (in the Southwest], and majority/minority income inequality) were related positively to average annual civil rights criminal complaints.
Perhaps no political tenet is held more dearly in the United States, at least among dominant group members, than the belief in equal justice. Yet some agents of the institutions of justice inevitably challenge that premise by discriminating against racial and ethnic minorities. It is hardly surprising that many minority citizens distrust the criminal justice system, just as many criminal justice agents distrust them. Nowhere is that tension more apparent than in the relations between minorities and the police. Scholars have long expressed concern about police reactions to ethnic minorities (e.g., Blauner, 1972; Feagin, 1991; Irwin, 1985; Myrdal, 1944.; Sellin,1930; Westley,1953,1970), and it is becoming increasingly clear that the roots of police-minority hostility are deeply embedded into the social structure (Jackson, 1989).
The conflict theory of law maintains that crime control is an instrument used by powerful groups to regulate threats to their interests, thereby maintaining the existing social structure (e.g., Turk, 1969). In this view, the police function to control the "dangerous classes" of immigrants, racial minorities, and the poor. Structural-level studies of police-minority relations in this tradition have addressed the issue of whether aggregate measures of minority threat (e.g., percent nonwhite) predict the use of mechanisms of crime control by the police. That research generally has supported the hypothesis that minority threat is related to crime control (e.g., Jackson, 1985; Jackson and Carroll, 1981; Jacobs, 1979; Jacobs and O'Brien, 1998; Liska and...