The recent protests regarding the state of policing in the United States clearly demonstrate that how the police do their job creates a salient potential for harm to the public. This study applies a multidimensional paradigm of risk perception to quantify evaluations of police-caused harm. Using data from a national (U.S.) convenience sample (n = 1,890) that oversampled individuals who self-identified as black or Muslim, we tested whether these evaluations vary systematically (using confidence intervals), whether they covary with police legitimacy (using structural equation modeling), and the extent to which that covariance differs by demographic status (using multiple groups structural equation modeling). Our results suggest that black and Muslim individuals evaluate police-caused harm differently than do majority group members (white and Christian) on most, but not all, of the measured dimensions. We also find that those evaluations are predictive of trust and provide evidence of some level of consistency across communities.

最近有关美国维持治安状况的抗议活动清楚地表明，警察的工作方式会给公众带来潜在的重大伤害。这项研究应用了风险感知的多维范式来量化对警察造成的伤害的评估。使用来自美国国家便利样本的数据（n= 1,890）对自我识别为黑人或穆斯林的个人进行了过度抽样，我们测试了这些评估是否系统地变化（使用置信区间），是否与警察合法性有关（使用结构方程模型）以及该协方差在多大程度上有所不同人口统计状况（使用多组结构方程建模）。我们的研究结果表明，黑人和穆斯林个体在大多数（但不是全部）测量范围内对警察造成的伤害的评价与多数群体成员（白人和基督教徒）的评价不同。我们还发现，这些评估是对信任的预测，并为整个社区的某种程度的一致性提供了证据。