Benjamin A.t. Graham
2026
The Subjectivity of Respect in Police Traffic Stops: Modeling Community Perspectives in Body-Worn Camera Footage
Preni Golazizian | Elnaz Rahmati | Jackson Trager | Zhivar Sourati | Nona Ghazizadeh | Georgios Chochlakis | Jose J. Alcocer | Kerby Bennett | Aarya Vijay Devnani | Parsa Hejabi | Harry G. Muttram | Akshay Kiran Padte | Mehrshad Saadatinia | Chenhao Wu | Alireza Salkhordeh Ziabari | Michael Sierra-Ar\'evalo | Nicholas Weller | Shrikanth Narayanan | Benjamin A.t. Graham | Morteza Dehghani
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Preni Golazizian | Elnaz Rahmati | Jackson Trager | Zhivar Sourati | Nona Ghazizadeh | Georgios Chochlakis | Jose J. Alcocer | Kerby Bennett | Aarya Vijay Devnani | Parsa Hejabi | Harry G. Muttram | Akshay Kiran Padte | Mehrshad Saadatinia | Chenhao Wu | Alireza Salkhordeh Ziabari | Michael Sierra-Ar\'evalo | Nicholas Weller | Shrikanth Narayanan | Benjamin A.t. Graham | Morteza Dehghani
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Traffic stops are among the most frequent police–civilian interactions, and body-worn cameras (BWCs) provide a unique record of how these encounters unfold. Respect is a central dimension of these interactions, shaping public trust and perceived legitimacy, yet its interpretation is inherently subjective and shaped by lived experience, rendering community-specific perspectives a critical consideration. Leveraging unprecedented access to Los Angeles Police Department BWC footage, we introduce the first large-scale traffic-stop dataset annotated with respect ratings and free-text rationales from multiple perspectives. By sampling annotators from police-affiliated, justice-system-impacted, and non-affiliated Los Angeles residents, we enable the systematic study of perceptual differences across diverse communities. To this end, (i) we develop a domain-specific evaluation rubric grounded in procedural justice theory, LAPD training materials, and extensive fieldwork; (ii) we introduce a criterion-driven preference data construction framework for perspective-consistent alignment, and (ii) we propose a perspective-aware modeling framework that predicts personalized respect ratings and generates annotator-specific rationales for both officers and civilian drivers from traffic-stop transcripts. Across all three annotator groups, our approach improves both rating prediction performance and rationale alignment. Our perspective-aware framework enables law enforcement to better understand diverse community expectations, providing a vital tool for building public trust and procedural legitimacy.