PALO ALTO — Body camera footage from hundreds of Oakland police officers shows the officers are more respectful toward white people during traffic stops than they are in interactions with black people, according to a new Stanford University study.

The research, published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is thought to be the first comprehensive analysis of police body camera footage as it relates to everyday interactions with the public. Rather than simply serving as archival evidence to be used after the fact, the study shows body camera footage has an important role to play in shaping future interactions with members of the public, and potentially, improving police-community relations, the authors said in the study.

Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf agrees. In a statement released Tuesday, Schaaf reiterated her commitment to ending racial disparities in policing and said the Stanford study is helping the city do just that.

“Words are power,” she said, “and this study shows that the words police officers use are consequential.”

Over the past several years, body camera footage showing the sometimes-lethal escalation of traffic stops and other interactions between black citizens and police officers has fueled protests and calls for racial equity in policing nationwide, but instead of focusing on the most fraught cases, the researchers took a look at the mundane, everyday interactions of officers with the public.

Those interactions are critical, they said, in building or eroding trust.

“Being treated with respect builds trust in the fairness of an officer’s behavior, whereas rude or disrespectful treatment can erode trust,” the authors said.

The researchers examined 183 hours of footage, collected from 981 stops conducted by 245 different officers during the month of April 2014. Within the hours of footage, the researchers were able glean more than 36,700 utterances to analyze.

To define respectfulness, the researchers invited human participants who were not told the race of the stopped drivers, to rate the interactions on a four-point scale for how respectful, polite, friendly, formal and impartial each officer was in the exchange. They then built statistical models based on key words in defining politeness, power and social distance, such as apologizing for the stop, addressing people by formal titles, providing reassurance or gratitude, giving commands and other indicators.

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They used those models to then rate each interaction. Even after controlling for potentially confounding factors, such as the race of the officer, the severity of the infraction, the location of the stop and the outcome of the stop, the researchers found significant racial disparities in the way officers behaved.

White citizens were 57 percent more likely than their black counterparts to hear officers say words like “thank you,” or “sir” and “ma’am.” At the same time, black residents were 61 percent more likely than white residents to hear officers use informal titles, such as “dude” and “bro,” or give commands, such as “hands on the wheel.”

Although none of the officers cursed, Dan Jurafsky, a study co-author and Stanford professor of linguistics, said those subtle differences still add up.

“These were well-behaved officers,” he said in a news release issued Monday. “But the many small differences in how they spoke with community members added up to pervasive racial disparities.”

Improved training for Oakland officers is already in the works, said Oakland police Deputy Chief LeRonne Armstrong. A new training program aimed at building community trust began in May 2014, the month after the department turned over its body camera footage to the Stanford researchers, he said.

The first phase of that training, which every officer and all other nonsworn employees completed by mid-2016, provided a conceptual overview of “giving people a voice, being respectful, being neutral in your decisions, and then, lastly, trying to achieve trustworthiness,” Armstrong said. Next, the agency will begin its second phase of the program, which will create real-world scenarios that officers will have to navigate.

Anecdotally, Armstrong said those efforts already appear to be paying off. He said the department has already invited Stanford to take another look at its body camera footage to see if the training is working.

“We needed to buy in and understand the importance of every single interaction, and that it matters to people,” he said. “And, we’ve been able to convey that in a way that officers are confident in doing that.”