Representation, expectations, and citizen evaluations of police
研究发现，黑人公民对黑人警察使用武力的期望会影响他们对警察表现的评价，期望黑人警察使用更少武力的人反而给出更负面评价，尤其当黑人警察直接接触被拘留者时。
Symbolic Representation Theory hypothesizes that citizens will view the actions of government more positively when it includes members of their social group. Scholars have expected, therefore, that efforts to make police forces more representative will improve assessments of police and policing, but empirical evidence for this supposition has been decidedly mixed. We hypothesize that this is because the translation of shared race into expectations about the behavior of police officers is highly variable and that positive expectations about police behavior often produce negative evaluations of police performance. An experimental design in which black respondents evaluate the level of force used in actual arrests made by officers of different races confirms that those who expect black police officers to use less force than white officers rate police performance more negatively, particularly when black officers are the ones in physical contact with detainees. We conclude with a discussion of the implications for both the study of representation in policing as well as the substantive challenges of improving police-community relations.