Ghanaian Immigrants’ Experiences With and Perceptions of U.S. Police

Abstract

Focus groups help researchers obtain rich, experiential data in order to increase our sociological and psychological understanding of human interactions. In this study, I used qualitative data obtained from two focus groups, comprising 13 participants from the Ghanaian community, to understand Ghanaian immigrants’ personal experiences with and perceptions of the police in the United States. The rise in immigration from sub-Saharan Africa means that these immigrants’ views of and experiences with the police will become increasingly important to successful policing in local communities across the United States. The results of this study point to the need for U.S. police to employ procedural justice and distributive justice in their dealings with Ghanaian immigrants. These immigrants also believe that both their skin color and foreign accent pose a disadvantage when dealing with police. By addressing these concerns, the U.S. police would gain the trust and cooperation of the Ghanaian immigrant community. The policy implications of the findings are discussed.

Keywords

procedural justice distributive justice police performance cooperation with police Ghanaian immigrants qualitative study

This article contributes to the criminological literature by being the first to evaluate qualitatively the cognate concepts of police performance, procedural justice, and distributive justice and how these concepts engender cooperation with police among Ghanaian immigrants in the United States. The paucity of research on the relationship between the U.S. police and sub-Saharan African immigrant communities means that very little is known about this group’s interactions with the police. To close this gap in the extant literature, research on the relationship between the police and community members must extend beyond the majority community into different sociological or sociopolitical contexts to increase scholars’ understanding of all community members’ experiences with, assessments of, and beliefs about the police.

Ghanaian immigrants belong to a subgroup of community members born outside of the United States. When large numbers of these visible minorities move into a community, they bring about changes that affect culture, population distribution, and policing (Mercer, 1995). Due to increased immigration to the United States, rapid demographic changes are taking place in many U.S. communities, and these changes necessarily affect how the police prevent and fight crime, keep the peace, maintain law and order, and provide services. The U.S. immigrant population has grown rapidly in the last few decades, with a sizeable number emigrating from sub-Saharan Africa (Crosnoe & Lopez Turley, 2011). Today, several U.S. states have large African populations (U.S. Census Bureau, 2014). The Washington, DC, metropolitan area, for example, has the second largest African immigrant population in the United States¹ (U.S. Census Bureau, 2014), which is why the city of Alexandria, VA, located just outside of Washington, DC, was selected for this qualitative study. If Ghanaian immigrants are to also contribute to improved police–community relations, then their views of and experiences with local police should be evaluated and applied to police agency decision-making, which will, in turn, elicit group members’ cooperation with the police. To have an improved understanding of the role immigrant communities play in police–public relations in the United States, I discuss next the experiences of immigrants in Minnesota’s Hennepin county, and how rapid changes in that county’s demography affected policing in the community in the 1990s.

The Minnesota Experience

Between 1990 and 2000, Minnesota experienced a 130% increase in its immigrant population, with most of the new arrivals² settling in Hennepin county (Ankerfelt, Davis, & Futterer, 2011). This rapid demographic shift led to conflicts among the immigrants themselves as well as to conflicts between native-born Americans and the new arrivals (Ankerfelt et al., 2011). As the frequency of conflicts increased, officers from the Brooklyn Park, MN, Police Department (BPPD), located in Hennepin County, interviewed several people to understand the sources and nature of the conflicts (Ankerfelt et al., 2011). The BPPD discovered that these immigrants’ negative experiences with police in their home countries, differing religious beliefs and social values, and a lack of understanding of the U.S. legal and law enforcement apparatus were some of the reasons for the conflicts (Ankerfelt et al., 2011). To improve the new immigrants’ perceptions of the police, increase cooperation with police, and create mutual understanding between the locals and the new arrivals, the BPPD encouraged relationship building among all members of the Brooklyn Park community, provided the immigrants greater connectivity to social services, and developed better methods of communication among all parties (Ankerfelt et al., 2011).

Because most police departments historically do not assume leadership roles beyond public safety, the BPPD, the Hennepin County Probation Services, the Hennepin County Office of Multicultural Services, and the nonprofit Northwest Hennepin Human Services Council created the Joint Community Police Partnership to help integrate the newcomers (Ankerfelt et al., 2011). Evaluations of these police–community partnerships in Hennepin county showed positive results, as more than 200 police officers, 12 area local high schools, 60 nonprofit organizations, 10 health-care organizations, and two local community colleges participated in joint efforts to increase understanding and reduce conflicts among all members of the community (Ankerfelt et al., 2011). As was the case in Hennepin county, MN, demographic changes in many communities across the United States are leading to changes in how the police prevent and fight crime, maintain law and order, and provide services. Tethered to effective policing and immigrants’ willingness to cooperate with police are several related concepts—police performance, procedural justice, and distributive justice. By examining these concepts among a group of Ghanaian immigrants, both scholars and police practitioners are able to endorse policies that would improve police–immigrant partnerships.

The Ghanaian Immigrant Population in Alexandria, VA

The immigrant population from Africa residing in Alexandria, VA, has grown significantly in recent years. According to the Alexandria City Government (2010),
Although the black and African American population has remained roughly the same proportion of the total population of the City since 1980, both the location and the makeup of this population has changed in those 30 years. Emigration from Africa to the US grew rapidly in the 1990s as political turmoil spread in that continent, and since the 2000 census, the City’s black and African American population has included a substantial share of people born in Africa. Africa was the region of birth of 8,695 people, 27% of Alexandria’s foreign-born population, based on the 2006–2010 5-year average American Community Survey sample data. (p. 10)
According to the American Community Survey (2012), the African population in Alexandria grew from 8,695 in 2010 to 9,537 in 2012. Of the nearly 146,300 city residents in 2012, 32,625 (or 22.3%) were Black (this number included both native-born and foreign-born residents). Additionally, 24.5% of the city’s residents was foreign born (American Community Survey, 2012), which made the city an ideal place for studying Ghanaian immigrants’ experiences with and views of the police. Of those born in Africa, the population from Ghana was one of the largest, accounting for 1,209 of the 9,537 people who had emigrated from the African continent (American Community Survey, 2012). Thus, the aforementioned official data reflect the context in which Ghanaian immigrants in the City of Alexandria are situated, which underpins the complementariness of this study to the overall understanding of sub-Saharan African immigrants’ roles in improving policing in the United States.

The City of Alexandria Police Department

The city’s police comprise 320 sworn and 138 civilian employees, who provide an array of services to the city’s nearly 150,000 residents (Alexandria Police Department, 2016). As recently as January 2015, the City of Alexandria hosted a community forum on criminal justice and community partnership, which was designed to inform residents about the work of the city’s criminal justice agencies, and how these agencies could improve dialogue with city residents. It is not clear, however, if the city’s law enforcement agencies have ever held any specific public meetings with immigrant groups.

Literature Review

Police performance

Police performance is vital to effective policing because people logically assess the merits and demerits of following the orders of authority figures and will do so only if the merits outweigh the demerits (Tyler, Schulhofer, & Huq, 2010). Thus, in order to avoid punitive, unwelcome responses from the police, most community members make calculated decisions when they interact with the police because they are aware of the costs of a lack of cooperation or compliance (Sunshine & Tyler, 2003). Crime control and order maintenance are fundamental tasks of the police, so the level of success of the police in reducing crime and maintaining order would reflect police performance in some communities (Murphy, Hinds, & Fleming, 2008). According to Tankebe (2009), “the instrumentality of the people’s engagement with civic institutions seems to account for the particular significance of police effectiveness in shaping public cooperation with the police” (p. 1282) in Ghana. In other words, rather than assess police performance in terms of the obligation to do so and/or the police being procedurally fair, some community members would consider the police to be effective only if the police are able to provide individual and collective security in the community. Having lived under recurrent military dictatorships for many years between independence in March 1957 and a return to democratic rule in January 1993, many Ghanaians now domiciled in the United States may consider police performance an important antecedent of their willingness to cooperate with the police.

Procedural justice

Procedural justice theory suggests that citizens’ satisfaction during encounters with the police depends more on the procedure than on the outcome of the encounters (Sunshine & Tyler, 2003; Tyler et al., 2010). The literature on procedural justice suggests that the legitimacy of the police is intertwined with how citizens evaluate the manner in which police powers are exercised and deployed. Thus, according to Tyler (2004), procedural justice-based processes are quite “distinct from judgments about the effectiveness, valence, or fairness of the outcomes of those activities” (p. 91). Although favorable outcomes play a meaningful role in community members’ willingness to accept the decisions of the police (Hollander-Blumoff & Tyler, 2008; Stahl, Vermunt, & Ellemers, 2008), an outcome-based model of policing alone may be insufficient to engender public cooperation because the police are not able to make decisions that satisfy everyone they encounter during the course of their daily duties (Gau & Brunson, 2015; Johnson, Maguire, & Kuhns, 2014; Sunshine & Tyler, 2003). Because numerous prior studies have validated the element of procedural justice (Akinlabi, 2015; Bradford, Hohl, Jackson, & MacQueen, 2015; Gau, 2014; Mazerolle, Antrobus, Bennett, & Tyler, 2013; Murphy, 2009; Tyler, 2004) in engendering compliance and cooperation with the police, Ghanaian immigrants in this study were asked questions that evaluated their understanding of procedural justice.

Distributive justice

Distributive justice, defined as the outcomes that people receive (e.g., decisions to arrest or prosecute) as well as the fair distribution of police services (e.g., between Whites and Blacks; Tankebe, 2013), was also discussed in this study. Ghanaians’ views about distributive justice were evaluated because, coming from a postcolonial society where police services are generally the province of the affluent, these immigrants may discount the importance of distributive fairness, believing, incorrectly, that only the rich in U.S. society can expect the full gamut of police services. Whether or not this immigrant community subscribes to the belief that only the rich can expect the full range of police services should be important to scholars because, in principle, everyone is equal before the law in democratic societies, such as the United States, although the police may sometimes fall short in distributing their services equitably. Even in such cases where the police fall short, steps are generally taken to address the problems in order to avoid repeating them.³ In other words, the police in the United States attempt to live up to their regulatory role, even if they occasionally fall short of citizen expectations. The focus group members were thus asked questions that evaluated their understanding of police distributive justice.

Cooperation with police

Community members’ willingness to cooperate with the police is tied to how effectively the police are able to employ procedural justice and distributive justice in their work (Sunshine & Tyler, 2003; Tankebe, 2013). Tyler (2005) elucidated the need for “voluntary cooperation from members of the public with police efforts to combat crime and community problems, arguing that it is much more difficult for legal authorities to effectively manage the problems of community crime control without public cooperation” (p. 322). Essentially, public cooperation with police cannot be divorced from both trust and confidence in the police (Sunshine & Tyler, 2003; Tyler, 2005). Thus, cooperation with the police was an important component of the focus group study in this immigrant community.

Current Study

This study examined the impacts of the cognate concepts of police performance, procedural justice, and distributive justice on willingness to cooperate with police in a Ghanaian immigrant community in the United States. Notably, most of the research studies in this area of criminological inquiry are undergirded by rigorous quantitative methods (Johnson et al., 2014; Mazerolle et al., 2013; Sunshine & Tyler, 2003; Tankebe, 2009, 2013; Tyler et al., 2010; Tyler & Jackson, 2013). Thus, this qualitative study fills a gap in the literature by examining Ghanaian immigrants’ detailed and nuanced accounts, as they relate to their views of and experiences with the U.S. police. The results provide important insights and have policy implications for improving the relationship between the U.S. police and sub-Saharan African immigrant communities. In other words, the findings of this study provide a platform for future studies to assess the current findings and to also examine qualitatively the relationship between immigrant groups and the U.S. police by using larger sample sizes. The following research questions were posed to the study participants:
Research Question 1: Do you think that the police are effective at preventing and solving crime in your community? Are the police more effective at fighting one type of crime than another?

Research Question 2: Would it make any difference if the police listened to you first before you were issued a ticket? PROBE: How likely are you to cooperate with the police after being listened to even if you do not like the outcome?

Research Question 3: How do you think the police usually treat people in your community? PROBE: Do they treat everyone equally or give one group better treatment than another? PROBE: Do they treat people differently based on their racial or ethnic background? What about whether they are rich or poor? What about if they are an immigrant or born in the United States?

Research Question 4: Would you call the police to report a crime you either witnessed or knew about? PROBE: What factors make you more or less likely to report a crime to the police?

Data and Method

A total of 13 respondents participated in two focus groups, which evaluated the impacts of the associated concepts of police performance, procedural justice, and distributive justice on participants’ willingness to cooperate with police. Although this study’s sample size is small, Pryce (2016) found that Ghanaian immigrants in this city are a fairly homogeneous group; thus, their individual perceptions of the police may not be markedly different. This means that a larger sample may not produce markedly different results.

The respondents received specific ground rules about participation.⁴ Asbury (1995) ⁵ recommends that focus group participants possess a common background, considered crucial for research success, as well as “be of similar cultural experience” (p. 416). Thus, Ghanaian church attendees⁶ were chosen for this study. As a Black researcher, I am quite familiar with the Ghanaian immigrant population in Alexandria, VA. Thus, I may have gotten the study participants to open up in a way that would otherwise not have happened if I were a complete stranger.

Nonrandom Sample

By targeting church-going Ghanaian immigrants, my study yielded a nonprobability sample. A purposive or judgmental sample, which is a nonprobability sample, is useful when the population targeted is hard to reach (Babbie, 2007), such as Ghanaian immigrants in the United States. According to Devers and Frankel (2000), “Purposive sampling strategies are designed to enhance understandings of selected individuals or groups’ experience(s) or for developing theories and concepts” (p. 264). In their influential qualitative study that investigated the experiences of young males in St. Louis, MO, Gau and Brunson (2015) employed purposive sampling because they wanted to “target a sample of at-risk young men who had likely had experiences with police and whose experiences may have been unfavorable” (p. 137). The researchers added that obtaining a sample that was representative of all young persons in St. Louis’ poor neighborhoods was not their primary goal; rather, their participants’ stories mirrored those of other young males and likely made the research study generalizable (Gau & Brunson, 2015).

Senjo and Dhungana (2009) added that a purposive sample becomes important “when a subset of a population…highly resembles the greater population from which it is drawn” (p. 128). As a result, purposive sampling was appropriate for this study, but because of the small sample size, caution is required before generalizing the findings to the Ghanaian immigrant population or to other sub-Saharan African immigrant communities in the United States. The choice of church attendees was due to the fact that large numbers of Ghanaians can be found at these locations at specific times to engage them in research, very few other Ghana-leaning social organizations suitable for scholarly studies exist in this particular city, and these predominantly Ghanaian churches retain stable membership.

I interviewed between 4 and 10 members at one time. I recorded both focus group sessions with a voice recorder, which allowed me to actively participate in the interview process. Using a recorder also meant that I did not have to pause to take lengthy notes, which would have affected my ability to both connect properly with the study participants and observe fully their body language and facial cues. To add to the wealth of information that I had stored on the voice recorder from the focus groups, I also made some notes, which helped in my recalling participants’ incisive and atypical comments. Finally, I transcribed all of the focus group discussions to help in identifying patterns in the responses and to provide accurate assessments of the statements made by each of the participants.

I believe that the responses proffered by the focus group participants were poignant and relevant for a number of reasons. First, I was convinced that the focus group studies would help to garner in-depth information that a survey may be unable to provide because surveys tend to be closed ended. Second, the focus groups allowed the participants and me to hear, in the participants’ own voices, the assessments of and responses to the questions that I asked, which some qualitative researchers consider essential in this line of research (Mishler, 1986). For the sake of reliability and replicability of the study, I delivered the same set of scripted questions to all participants, with the added advantage of allowing them to review the questions as many times as necessary before providing their responses.

Data Collection and Respondent Demographics

Both focus group studies took place in April 2014, just 1 week apart. There were nine participants (five men and four women) in the first study and four participants (one man and three women) in the second study. Twelve of the 13 participants were born in Ghana and 1 participant was born in the United States. The participants ranged in age from 21 to 50 years; their length of stay in the United States ranged from 3 to 20 years; all were renters; their levels of education ranged from high school diploma to postgraduate degree; and their incomes ranged from US$20,000 to US$100,000. To ensure anonymity and confidentiality, the 13 participants are identified in this study using the following acronyms: RD, ME, KI, KH, JN, LA, EA, AA, AD, AE, TA, MA, and IC. Importantly, data collection was carried out in accordance with confidentiality rules established by the author’s former university’s institutional review board.

Results

Performance by U.S. Police

I evaluated the focus group participants’ understanding of police performance by asking the following questions: (1) Do you think that the police are effective at preventing and solving crime in your community? (2) Are the police more effective at fighting one type of crime than another?

In response to the question, IC noted:
For me, I think that they [the police] are doing an effective job, because I see them all around where I live; and I come to church most of the time during the night, and in the middle of the night, I also see them around. I think even their presence alone usually prevents bad people from coming around. So, I think it’s a good thing.
IC thus noted that police presence alone was enough to deter criminal activity. ME provided a similar response:
I do. I feel that, for the most part, in my community, the police are very effective [at controlling and preventing crime].
When I asked the respondents if they thought that the police were more effective at fighting one type of crime than another, ME, who nodded her head in agreement for what seemed like a full minute, responded:
Pertaining to schools, I feel like gun control, fighting, bickering, that type of thing, between adolescents, I think that they [the police] are okay at that. But in terms of battering women in our community, and maybe, like, in our [apartment] complexes, I don’t feel like they [the police] have kept that under control.
MA observed:
Yesterday, in my apartment complex (we have security 24 hours, but the police normally come around), and I don’t know if there was a robbery, but there were these young guys outside [around] midnight. When I closed from church, these young guys were outside, and it’s like a police car was parked there, and these young guys were holding flashlights and moving from car to car. I was thinking, maybe, the police will, like, come and see what the guys were doing, but they [the police] were just talking, until someone screamed, and then the police rushed to [where the kids were hanging out], and the kids just ignored the officers, saying that they were just hanging out with their lovers. But if I had been on the road and, maybe, one of my lights was off, the police would stop me. You know, your light is off, and instead of a warning, some [officers] will give you a ticket. When it comes to emergencies, the police respond [well]. A gas [line] broke, not far from the church, and, within a minute, the police were there. [Their quick] response was amazing.
AE thought that the police spend too much time issuing traffic tickets instead of focusing on more serious crimes:
I think so, in Virginia, at least. You get the police stopping you all the time. I think that’s what they’re good at. They [the police] stop you for nothing, for no reason. They’re doing a job, your tag is expired, but I bet you there’s a robbery going on somewhere, and they need them [the police]. And they are much more effective at doing that—saving people’s lives—than stopping people for and giving you a ticket for $100. Not that I’ve gotten a ticket, as I’ve not gotten a ticket in a long time, but I see a lot of [officers].
MA added:
Sometimes they’re helpful, especially for the kids—children who are outside running around. When they [the police] are around and see them [the children] like that, at least they [the police] protect them [the children]. They make sure that the children are in a safe place.
TA also commented:
In my community, I see police presence most of the time, so I don’t know if I have to take that to mean that they are preventing crime effectively in my community. I see them [the police] regularly.
Overall, it appears that the focus group respondents see the police as effective in the community, but they do not believe that the police are doing enough to protect battered women, for example, who may be afraid to get the police involved for fear those of them [immigrants] living illegally in the United States would be deported.

Procedural justice policing

I evaluated the focus group participants’ understanding of procedural justice policing by asking them to imagine that the police had stopped them for running a red light. I then asked two follow-up (PROBE) questions: (1) Would it make any difference if the police listened to you first before you were issued a ticket? (2) How likely are you to cooperate with the police after being listened to even if you don’t like the outcome?

The respondents’ answers generally support the importance of procedural justice policing, but some of the answers were quite surprising. For example, in her response to the first question, ME noted:
No. Because, honestly, right is right and wrong is wrong. You know you crossed the red light; this is not [the officer] anticipating it was yellow and it turned to red. You crossed a red light. So, no, listen to me or not, I was wrong. That I don’t have a problem with. But when I know I haven’t crossed a red light, you’re [the officer’s] gonna hear it from me!
On the one hand, ME believes that when people err or break the law, they ought to acknowledge their law-violating behavior, which takes the emphasis away from procedural justice policing. On the other hand, it appears that ME expects the police to explain their decisions to her if she believes that she has not broken the law. It appears therefore that procedural justice policing is a salient factor for increasing willingness to cooperate with police, provided that members of the public are allowed to explain themselves to the police, especially when these community members believe that they have not broken the law. In other words, when a situation is a gray area, and there is room for discretion, fair treatment may take on greater importance.

In response to this question, AA provided a slightly different assessment:
I believe I will really like it [if I am listened to], in the sense that they [the police] are coming with a preconceived mind. When they [the police] listen and you tell your point of view or your side of the story, they may not take it, but at least you have aired your views. And, whatever happens, at least you’ve been listened to.
IC added:
I will cooperate with them [police] because their main job is that they are here for our security. They are protecting us. Sometimes they [the police] will be doing something wrong to us, but, at the same time, it is for our own safety. When we go to sleep, they are protecting us from so many issues. So, for us to make their job easy for them, because we as civilians also need them, I think it is important that, whatever the case may be, we should cooperate with them.
AA’s comments indicate that it is important for the police to listen to community members, whether or not the police would accept any such accounts. If the police are willing to listen to community members they come into contact with, it will dispel the notion, at least in some immigrant communities, that the police always approach the public with preconceived ideas about who is innocent or who is guilty, and so on. Therefore, the police would enjoy greater cooperation if they allow members of the public to explain themselves, or share their points of view, when they interact with the police. Conversely, IC does not place any preconditions on why the public ought to cooperate with the police. Instead, IC believes that the public ought to cooperate with the police simply because the police are responsible for protecting society from criminals. In fact, IC seems to suggest that minor violations of citizens’ rights should be tolerated, if those violations lead to successful policing in the community.

KH added:
I believe if I run a red light, they [police officers] stop me, just keep quiet. Even if you didn’t run a red light, and they still stop you, arguing with [the officer] will worsen the case. In fact, he [the officer] is gonna charge you more—with different things. If he gives you the opportunity to talk, you just talk, you tell him your opinion. But if [the officer] does not take it [your explanation] and gives you a ticket, just take it and go to court. I believe that whatever happens [in court] will make you happy.
TA offered her own perspective as well:
If they are going to give me the ticket anyway or anyhow, then I don’t need any explanation from them [the police]. I know running a red light is dangerous, so if I run a red light and they give me a ticket, I don’t mind. But if they [the police] can forgive me for running a red light, if they’ll give me a warning for running a red light, then talking to them will be something I will appreciate. If they’re going to punish me for what I did, for being guilty, then I don’t need them to explain anything further. But if they are willing to listen to me, or pardon me for what I did, then communicating with me would be helpful. But sometimes people run red lights, not because of the wrong reasons; sometimes they run the red lights for something else. But I know it is dangerous, and we must have a law that nobody should cross the red light. But if the police are willing to pardon me for the offense, then [the police’s willingness to talk] to me would mean something to me.
TA’s comments appear to corroborate ME’s, who believes that the police need not emphasize her violation of the law, as long as she is aware of her own law-breaking behavior. In other words, people are able to normatively assess their own guilt, or the lack thereof, so the police may not have to go beyond a routine interaction with the public to explain law-violating behavior. ME noted that being listened to by the police would not matter if she knew that she had broken the law. Conversely, if she did not run a red light but was pulled over for doing so, then the police could expect her to vehemently contest their decision to charge her. AA observed that being listened to would be very important to him; thus, the police could dispel the negative views that sub-Saharan African immigrants have of them if these immigrants were listened to during encounters with the police.

Police distributive justice

To gauge the focus group participants’ understanding of police distributive justice, I asked the following questions: (1) How do you think the police usually treat people in your community? (2) PROBE: Do they treat everyone equally or give one group better treatment than another? (3) PROBE: Do they treat people differently based on their racial or ethnic background? What about whether they are rich or poor? What about if they are an immigrant or born in the United States?

In answering this question, ME observed:
I feel like a lot of Africans live in communities that are Section 8, and so they [the police] automatically treat you with that Section 8 mentality. What I mean by Section 8 mentality is, they think that you’re in the slums, you’re never going to go to school, you’re never going to get educated, you’re just an African hustler who came here to get money and be gone. Au contraire. Yes, you’re here to get your money, you are here to do a lot of things, but you’re also here to adapt to the culture. And so you should be accepted into [the mainstream culture]. That’s the only way you’re going to adapt into it. Yes, there is racial profiling, but in American society, they don’t see any difference [between Africans and African Americans]; we are all the same.
ME continued:
Before I open my mouth, I am not supposed to be educated, I am not supposed to be able to speak English, nothing like that. But African people are not ignorant, that’s what makes me upset. In every culture, there are people who are ignorant, let’s put it like that. I can give birth to a child right now, and as soon as that child enters elementary school, based only on the child’s looks, I can assure you that they are going to start asking if the child needs to be in ESL⁷ class. It happened to me as a child, although I was born here, [and did not have any language problems in kindergarten].
RD, visibly angry, added:
The point I want to make is, definitely, the police [are] very racist. The fact is that they just think that all Africans are so poor, and that we don’t know where our next meal is going to come from. What’s that? If an African is driving, the police [are] much more likely to stop you. But do you know how much a plane ticket from Africa to America costs? About $2,300! Can someone who can afford a $2,300 ticket be called poor?
I asked ME if she thought that the police treat her better than they treat Ghanaian immigrants born in Ghana. (ME is the only focus group participant born in the United States and subsequently speaks English fluently and without a foreign accent.) She responded:
When the police stop me, they assume, they assume (she repeated the last phrase slowly for emphasis), that I am African, ignorant, I can’t speak English. But when I open my mouth, I see them [the police officers] retract [as a sign of respect]. And then when they pull up my [driving] record [on their in-car computer], then they give me more respect. Supposedly, I look younger than my age—I am 28 years of age. I have been a law-abiding citizen for 28 years, but they [the police] automatically profile me. But once you have the African look, the Black look, as long as you look and sound African, I am sure that the treatment will be no different.
Asked if they thought that the police treat everyone equally in society or give one group better treatment than another, MA shared both her perception and experience:
They [the police] treat some people better than others. White people treat Black people different[ly] from Black people treating White people. I had a case where a White police officer came to my house, my kid was playing outside, and the officer asked, ‘Whose child is this?’ I said ‘Mine.’ The officer then asked why the child was playing by himself. I said, ‘But from the balcony to the front of the door, I am still watching the child.’ But the officer immediately called Social Services, and also called for backup, because I was arguing with him. When the African-American officer, who responded to the call for backup, asked what the matter was, I explained myself. The Black officer then turned to the White officer and asked him why he reported me to Social Services. The White officer [seemingly unhappy with the Black officer’s question] simply said to his fellow officer that he and I should deal with the issue! Because I was Black, the White officer was trying to treat me differently. But when the other officer, who was Black, came to the scene, perhaps his mind was different. So I think that some of them [officers] have their favorite people, and some of them too they just [mistreat] you, and don’t listen to you.
When I followed up with a question that asked the participants to show by hand if they thought that the police treat people differently based on their racial and/or ethnic background and accent, eight of the nine⁸ participants concurred. The only participant who dissented, KH, noted that not all officers project a bias in their interactions with immigrants. He described how, many years ago, an officer gave his wife a verbal warning, rather than a ticket, for driving her car with only one functioning taillight.

When I specifically asked the respondents if they thought, then, that the police favor White people over Black people, MA shared her views:
I believe that some White [officers] favor their own people [Whites], and some Black [officers] also favor their own people [Blacks].
When asked if they thought that the police favor the rich over the poor, MA shared her views once again:
Money speaks, so the rich, who have money, will do whatever [they] can to win [their cases].
Asked if they thought that immigrants were treated differently from those born in the United States, AE observed:
I don’t think that [the police] treat them [immigrants] differently; I feel like they [the police] don’t understand them [immigrants]. Like when they talk to them, like when they are trying to explain what the incident is, they don’t take their time to say, “Please speak slowly, I don’t understand your accent, so please take your time.” Because you’re not wrong when you say that [that is, ‘slow down because I don’t understand what you’re saying’]; just tell them I am not trying to be, um, offensive, but I need you to talk slowly so I can understand you. But because the other person has an American accent, they [the police] are eager to listen to that person and take their side, and the person who has the Ghanaian accent, you’re thrown on the other side because you can’t talk properly, and I think that’s wrong.
The responses from the focus group participants thus reveal that they do not believe that the “outcomes people receive (e.g., decisions to arrest or prosecute) are fair and that the distribution (emphasis in the original) of outcomes (as between rich/poor, different ethnic groups, male/female, etc.) is fair also” (Tankebe, 2013, p. 111). The findings from the focus groups support the notion that Ghanaian immigrants view police distributive justice as the preserve of the rich and powerful and thus an unattainable goal in their own communities. For example, ME observed that the police tend to assume, albeit incorrectly, that most Africans in the United States are uneducated and are beneficiaries of Section 8 housing; as a result, the police tend to look down on African immigrants. What the police forget, ME added, is that sub-Saharan African immigrants, like immigrants from other regions of the world, expect to assimilate into U.S. society. Sadly, however, the behavior of the police implies that these immigrants reside only on the fringes of society, which makes them susceptible to racial profiling by the police.

Some of the respondents were of the view that members of the sub-Saharan African immigrant community could expect poorer police services because they spoke with a foreign accent. One respondent was of the view that the rich get better services than the poor, and another respondent believed that the police have their own favorites: White officers tend to be nicer to White community members and Black officers tend to be nicer to Black community members. Overall, the focus group respondents thought that the police provide comparatively poor services to sub-Saharan African immigrants in the United States.

Cooperation with the police

To evaluate the focus group respondents’ understanding of cooperation with the police, I asked the following questions: (1) Would you call the police to report a crime you either witnessed or knew about? (2) PROBE: What factors make you more or less likely to report a crime to the police?

There were mixed responses from the participants. KI was first to respond:
Yes, I will do that because if I don’t do it, then the person who committed the crime is gonna go scot-free, so that will give the person a chance to do it again and again. So, I have to do my part as a citizen, or as a member of the community, to give the police any information that I may have.
RD, on the other hand, noted that he would not cooperate with the police:
I am not going to report anything. Like I said, the trust I had for the police is broken because of some personal experiences I had with them. If it is something that concerns another person, I will probably just mind my own business.
It appeared that RD is very unhappy with the police because he believes that he was profiled on more than one occasion. Pressed to share why he would not cooperate with the police, RD described a particularly humiliating experience he had with the police. He said it happened a few years earlier, when he was assisting a high school student to prepare for a college entrance exam. He explained:
I would go to her house and tutor her. There was this time that my car broke down, so I decided to walk [in this predominantly White neighborhood], while waiting for my dad to pick me up. It was not that I was not appropriately dressed, but before I knew it, the police showed up and accused me of loitering in the neighborhood. They assumed that I was carrying drugs. But for one of the men in the house who vouched for me, and who explained to the police that I came to their house regularly to teach the young student, I could have been arrested. I feel that they [the police] have a stereotypical view of Blacks. The fact that I am a young Black man does not mean that I had drugs on me. The fact that [some people in that community] saw me taking a stroll, while waiting for my father to pick me up, did not mean that I had drugs on me. Apparently, a homeowner in the community had called the police and lied that I was loitering in the neighborhood, and that I had drugs on me. Why should the police jump to conclusions even before they investigated the complaint filed by the anonymous caller?
Based on RD’s response, the police should pay attention to concerns about how they interact with sub-Saharan African immigrant community members. EA, like RD, stated that she would not cooperate with the police because the police had profiled her in the past. EA explained:
I had a personal experience, too. Racism plays a part in [our personal interactions with the police]. I had an experience, I was driving one day and a [large truck] crossed [my path], and we had an accident. As soon as the police [arrived], they gave me a ticket, but they let the other guy [a White male] go scot-free, without even asking me my side of the story. So, I really don’t trust the police. So, if I see something, I will just ignore it.
There were nuanced responses as well. For example, ME and EA stated that they would report a crime only if their names would not be disclosed to the press or the public, perhaps due to fear of reprisal from the criminals involved. ME observed:
Yes, I would; no, I wouldn’t. Yes, I would if I knew I would remain anonymous, if I don’t have to go to court, if my name will not be [made] public. No, because of racial profiling. Personally, I was born here, but because of my [dark skin] color and last name, I have not been treated [any better] because of my looks. I look African, I behave African, even though I was born in America, especially for someone like me with very dark skin. It’s like they fit you into a certain box. They expect me to have an accent and not be able to speak for myself, and do things for myself.
In addition, the chance to collect reward money appears to be an important factor for some Ghanaian immigrants in their willingness to report a crime to the police. EA would cooperate if there was reward money at stake:
Like ME said, if my face will not be on T.V., then I will report it. Also, if they will give me the reward money, and also not put my face on T.V.
One respondent, AE, noted that cooperation with the police was important because of the risk of terrorism in a post-9/11 United States:
Yes. I will call the police, especially in these times of terrorist activity—you just want to be careful.
AE’s response shows that an internalized sense of obligation plays just as important a role as police performance in Ghanaian immigrants’ willingness to report crime and criminal activity to the police.

When pressed to identify specific crimes that would likely cause them to call the police, MA noted that she would report domestic abuse:
I will call for domestic abuse. If my neighbors, if every day I hear them screaming, and I don’t know what is going on, for protection, I will call [the police].
TA added:
I will call police, especially when I suspect drug deals—in my neighborhood or anywhere else—especially when I am going throughout a neighborhood and I see suspicious, potential drug dealings going on. First of all, I fear for my life—when activities like that go on, they usually end in violence, and anybody could be victimized, including myself. I, personally, try to avoid such neighborhoods, but if I happen to be a resident of the neighborhood that has the [drug] problem, I would likely call [the police.]
IC shared MA’s opinion:
I will call the police for any suspicious activity that, in my view, is harmful to the community, or the people around. Sometimes, there may be somebody walking on the street and possessing a gun or a weapon, and then, uh, as a patriotic citizen, being in a community and living with people in the community, when you come across something like that, it is important that you let the police know, so that’s something that I will do.
ME, the only participant born in the United States, would generally cooperate with the police, provided her identity would be kept a secret (if she makes such a request), and she would also not have to testify in court. ME also appears to blame her hesitation to cooperate with the police on racial profiling because of her dark skin color. It appears, then, that the police would garner greater cooperation from the community of Ghanaian immigrants if the police address the perceived disparities in distributive justice, in spite of group members’ languid accent and dark skin color. In other words, there is a measure of belief by the focus group participants that they are being singled out unfairly because of their race/ethnicity. EA noted that her willingness to report a crime to the police would depend on the reward money available as well as the police’s willingness to shield her identity. In other words, Ghanaian immigrants would cooperate with the police more if the police treat them with respect, hide their identities (depending on the severity of the crime), and pay any reward money associated with a case.

Discussion and Conclusion

A study of the cognate concepts of police performance, police procedural justice, and police distributive justice, and their effects on the research participants’ willingness to cooperate with the police, is important because of the negative attitudes that police sometimes associate with people with Afrocentric physiognomies (Eberhardt, Davies, Purdie-Vaughns, & Johnson, 2006). Generally, increased policing takes place in predominantly African–American communities (Fagan & Davies, 2000; Geller & Fagan, 2010), which are similar to sub-Saharan African immigrant communities in terms of the physical and facial features members of both groups share.

According to the study participants, Ghanaian immigrants face a two-pronged risk: their dark skin color and foreign accent. ME, a vocal focus group participant, complained about the harm that profiling by the police does to the sub-Saharan African immigrant community and hopes that the police would not resort to this tactic in their everyday work. In fact, research has consistently shown that minorities generally do not trust the police to operate fairly in their communities (Gabbidon, Higgins, & Potter, 2011; Tyler, 2005; Wilson, Wilson, & Thou 2015). Because police officers tend to complain about the language barriers they sometimes face when dealing with immigrants—and thus the assumption that immigrants are not cooperative—the experiences of immigrants in Minnesota, discussed earlier in this paper, become an important template for the police to adopt to improve their relationship with immigrant communities. In the case of Ghanaian immigrants, their foreign accent may be a stumbling block in their dealings with the police, even though Ghana is an English-speaking country. This issue is important because it has policy ramifications, addressed below, for police–immigrant partnerships.

RD’s experience about being accused of loitering in a predominantly White neighborhood is supported by research. For example, scholars have argued that African Americans/Blacks are generally seen by others as prone to a life of criminality (Russell, 2002). Other scholars have argued that young Black males are viewed as criminal predators (Mauer, 1999) and are considered a physical threat to other groups (Chiricos & Eschholz, 2002). Not surprisingly, Ioimo, Tears, Meadows, Becton, and Charles (2007) have shown empirically that a fifth of all police officers believe that profiling of minorities is a regular practice in police departments, with the tactic tacitly approved by police agencies. Thus, this article should help to raise awareness about the dangers of alienating sub-Saharan African immigrants whose cooperation police agencies need to combat crime and threats of terrorism in communities across the United States.

One of the ways that immigrant perceptions of the police would shift toward the predominant perceptions of the U.S. police is through regular dialogues between the police and immigrant groups. As the police take the initiative to interact formally with immigrant groups, strongly held, albeit negative, views of the police imported from immigrants’ home countries would be discarded in favor of more positive views of the U.S. police, which should lead to increased police–immigrant cooperation in the long run. In these trying times when terrorism has become an essential focus of agents of formal social control, no member of the community—immigrant or native-born—should be marginalized, if the police are going to continue to keep U.S. communities safe.

Finally, this study should help to increase researchers’ understanding of hard-to-reach populations, whose views of the police are just as important as the views of larger immigrant populations and native-born citizens. Immigrant groups face many challenges, including language and accent barriers, self-seclusion, and mistrust of the police, so studying these groups would help to improve police–community member partnerships. Thus, this study provides a window into how other immigrant groups could be studied by using larger samples that would be generalizable to their respective populations.

Limitations

As with research generally, this study is not without limitations. First, this study looked at police performance, procedural justice, and distributive justice and their impacts on willingness to cooperate with the police in the eyes of Ghanaian immigrants in only one city. Because the sample was not designed to be representative of the entire Ghanaian immigrant population, future research exploring these concepts should be carried out with larger samples in other U.S. cities. Second, because of the small sample size, the findings of the current study may not be generalizable to the entire Ghanaian immigrant community or to other sub-Saharan African immigrant communities in the United States, even if most sub-Saharan African societies share a similar history of postcolonial police practices, including police corruption and brutality, and have similar cultural norms and practices. Third, the use of focus groups, which is a face-to-face study, means that social desirability, a situation in which a respondent attempts to embellish the truth, cannot be ruled out (see Maxfield & Babbie, 2006; Vandiver, Dial, & Worley, 2008). Fourth, the exploratory nature of this study allows for future research to test and confirm the current findings and to also test additional questions with larger sample sizes. Fifth, future research should include police officers’ views to provide a more detailed assessment of interactions between officers and sub-Saharan African community members.

Policy Implications

Although police departments in the past did not assume leadership roles beyond public safety (Ankerfelt et al., 2011), the continued influx of immigrants into the United States means that the police must begin to address immigrant community needs in order to increase safety and security for all community members. Benefits that redound from police–immigrant partnerships have included an increase in immigrants’ attendance at police–community events, less fear of the police among immigrants, and advice for the police on how to adapt police procedures when responding to calls in an immigrant community (Ankerfelt et al., 2011). Police agencies across the United States need to do more to reach out to sub-Saharan African immigrant communities, which is why the BPPD’s efforts should serve as a template for effective police–immigrant partnerships. In other words, the BPPD’s success should goad other police agencies across the United States to adopt similar strategies in dealing with their own burgeoning immigrant communities.

EA and LA, two of the study participants, complained that the police issue too many tickets. Procedural justice research has steadily pointed to community members’ willingness to assist the police if the former are treated with dignity and respect, not to mention these community members’ willingness to desist from offending (Bradford et al., 2015) and comply with police directives (Murphy, 2003, 2004). As a result, it is recommended that U.S. police thoroughly explain their decisions to sub-Saharan African immigrant drivers during traffic stops, as these immigrants could wrongly assume that their dark skin color and foreign accent were the primary reasons an officer issued them a ticket. Here, the police should combine elements of procedural justice and distributive justice in their interactions with sub-Saharan African immigrants, which would lead to increased police legitimacy and a greater willingness to cooperate with the police in the long term.

In addition, it is suggested that the police interact formally (e.g., by organizing regular forums) with Ghanaian and other sub-Saharan African immigrant communities where these community members can learn about police roles and procedures. Because many immigrants have an unfounded fear of the U.S. police, police–immigrant relationships would be improved through formal, yet friendly, interactions between both parties. These interactions, if done properly, can be cost-effective. Moreover, I argue that many immigrants would welcome the opportunity for formal interactions with the police because they expect to assimilate in U.S. society, as clearly articulated by ME, one of the focus group participants. In other words, immigrants’ permanent presence in the United States means that they are likely to experience contact with the police at some point in their lives, which is why developing a relationship based on trust between the police and immigrants would be vital to successful policing in the United States.

Finally, because “a gap exists between the requirements of official law and police behavior on the beat” (Tankebe, 2013, p. 109; see also Herbert, 1998), immigrants need to be educated on the importance of reporting police abuse, without fear of reprisal or retaliation, at least in principle. The police, like other agents of formal authority, are subject to the laws of society, so it is important that immigrants, especially those with a rudimentary understanding of police roles and procedures, be educated in police–citizen meetings to empower them to report suspected police abuse.

Footnotes

Author's Note

The ORCID number of Daniel K. Pryce, is

Acknowledgment

The author is grateful to the three anonymous reviewers for their time and valuable comments. He also thanks Dr. Devon Johnson and Dr. James Willis of the Criminology, Law & Society Department at George Mason University for their support over the years.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

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