If you were to contact police departments in the U.S. to file a complaint against an officer, would you be treated the same if you were black or white?

It turns out, you would be treated worse if you were black!

This paper ran an experiment on U.S. police departments to show this.

In the experiment, researchers reached out to police departments with a simple question: "how do I make a complaint against an officer?"

They randomly assigned police departments to receive the request from someone with a name predominantly had by black people (based on data from the Census) or a request from someone with a name predominantly had by white people. (They also looked at hispanic dominant names and male v.s. female.)

It held everything else about the correspondence constant. The only difference was the names of the senders.

They found that police departments were A LOT less likely to respond to help people with ostensibly black names.