Harun Nasrullah
Nearly 20 per cent of Muslims in the US report having been harassed by police specifically because of their religion – more than four times as many as people of other faiths, according to research from sociologists at Rice University and West Virginia University
The study, titled Religion, Race and Perceptions of Police Harassment, appears in a recent issue of Social Problems journal. “Sociologists understand how race impacts experiences with police.
However, there is less work examining how religion specifically shapes people’s experiences with police,” said lead author Jauhara Ferguson, a PhD student in sociology at Rice and a graduate fellow of Rice’s Religion and Public Life Program.
“We believe it’s an important topic to explore, and it can help us understand the connections between religion and race in experiences with police harassment.” The study found that Black, Middle Eastern, Arab, or North African (MENA) Muslims are more likely than Muslims who identify as White to report being harassed by police because of their religion.
Black and MENA individuals are also more likely to report being harassed because of their religion, regardless of their religious affiliation – which the researchers suggest may be due to the fact that they are more likely than Whites to report police harassment based on their race and that MENA individuals are perceived as Muslims regardless of their actual religious background.
“These results reveal the consequential and overlapping nature of racial and religious identities,” said Elaine Howard Ecklund, the Herbert Autrey Chair in Social Sciences at Rice and Director of the university’s Boniuk Institute for Religious Tolerance. The researchers hope the study will shed light on the relationship between race and religion and how they can compound during law enforcement interactions.
“Ultimately, our findings show that religion, both in itself and in its interaction with race, is relevant to conversations about how the police are perceived and how they interact with their communities,” said co-author Christopher Scheitle, Associate Professor of Sociology at West Virginia University.
