Primed to (re)act: Can changes in procedural language prevent adverse events between police and minority male youth?

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broadcast police communications (BPC). Our long-term goals are (1) to assess the viability of BPC for understanding how LEOs perceive MMY both ?in the moment? via the pre-reflective procedural language used before and during LEO-MMY encounters and ?at rest? via development of a survey instrument measuring LEO identification with minority youth, and (2) to determine if BPC may be used in lieu of non-public data sources to study police behavior by developing a novel computational strategy for extracting meaningful information from BPC via, among other strategies, a first-of-its-kind automatic speech recognition (ASR) model and large scale (>100 hours) training corpus of transcribed BPC for use by computational social scientists and ASR researchers. Our previous research revealed that a complex set of psychosocial mechanisms govern the developmental trajectories of MMYs, indicating MMYs adopt reactive coping strategies to particular stressful events (e.g. encounters with police) that can be maladaptive (e.g. hypermasculinity) depending on context of interactions. Our work also suggests that all humans are subject to similar processes. Since the outcomes of LEO-MMY encounters are ultimately the responsibility of LEOs, this project seeks to improve the quality of these encounters (i.e. reduce youth trauma) by studying a little acknowledged LEO reactive coping strategy: the character of procedural language used to provide LEOs with incident-specific information via BPC. This conceptual approach derives from our theoretical framing (i.e. Spencer?s phenomenological variant of ecological systems theory, or PVEST) that highlights the development and utilization of reactive coping strategies in response?particularly?to MMY associated stress. It is our premise that BPC can prime LEOs to inaccurately interpret the behavior of MMY as threatening, increasing the potential for adverse events. Such inaccurate assessments are hard to combat since LEOs are acting on the best information available. As a result, the procedural language of BPC pose unacknowledged risks to the well- being of MMY. This study will thus perform a first-of-its-kind analysis of BPC to simultaneously assess its viability for determining racial discrimination in policing and develop a novel survey instrument measuring LEOs ability to identify with MMY for use by researchers and policing organizations across the country.