Officials Urge Public To Cooperate With Police Following Days Of Violence

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“Policing in black & white”
Police departments are eager for ways to reduce racial disparities—and psychological research is beginning to find answers

By Kirsten Weir
December 2016, Vol 47, No. 11

There’s evidence of racial disparities at many levels of law enforcement, from traffic stops to drug-related arrests to use of force. But the roots of those disparities aren’t always clear. Experts point to systemic problems as well as the implicit (largely unconscious) biases mentioned in the debate. To be sure, those biases aren’t unique to police. But in matters of criminal justice, implicit bias can have life-altering implications.

Social media has turned a spotlight on cases of racial discrimination. As the list of black citizens killed by nonblack officers grows, tensions between black communities and police are running high. “It’s a nuanced problem but people continue to take a polarized view,” says Jack Glaser, PhD, a social psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley. “It’s not productive to demonize police.”

Glaser says police departments are eager for solutions that will reduce racial disparities. “Police chiefs know what the stakes are,” he says. Policymakers, too, are keen to take action. In October, for instance, the New Jersey attorney general issued a directive requiring mandatory classes in racial bias for police officers in the state. Psychologists, meanwhile, have the skills to understand discrimination and point to evidence-based solutions. “This is an area that’s worth a lot of investment in research, and important for psychologists to think about,” Glaser says.

“Evidence of inequality” Policing in black & white”
With more than 15,000 law enforcement agencies across the country operating at the federal, state and local levels, there is no “typical” police department. Still, evidence for racial disparities is growing. Most of those data focus on the treatment of black civilians by white officers. In an analysis of national police-­shootings data from 2011–14, for example, Cody T. Ross, a doctoral student in anthropology at the University of California, Davis, concluded there is “evidence of a significant bias in the killing of unarmed black Americans relative to unarmed white Americans.” The probability of being black, unarmed and shot by police is about 3.5 times the probability of being white, unarmed and shot by police, he found (PLOS One, 2015).

Other studies conflict with that finding. Harvard University economist Roland G. Fryer Jr., PhD, examined more than 1,000 shootings in 10 major police departments and found no racial differences in officer-involved shootings. Fryer did, however, find that black civilians are more likely to experience other types of force, including being handcuffed without arrest, ­pepper-sprayed or pushed to the ground by an officer (National Bureau of Economic Research, 2016).

Those disparities don’t seem to arise from the fact that black Americans are more likely to commit crimes. Supporting this point is research by Phillip Atiba Goff, PhD, a social psychologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, co-founder of the Center for Policing Equity. Goff, Glaser and colleagues reviewed data from 12 police departments and found that black residents were more often subjected to police force than white residents, even after adjusting for whether the person had been arrested for violent crimes (Center for Policing Equity, 2016).

Other data show that black people are also more likely to be stopped by police. Stanford University social psychologist Jennifer Eberhardt, PhD, and colleagues analyzed data from the police department in Oakland, California, and found that while black residents make up 28 percent of the Oakland population, they accounted for 60 percent of police stops. What’s more, black men were four times more likely than white men to be searched during a traffic stop, even though officers were no more likely to recover contraband when searching black suspects (Stanford SPARQ, 2016).

And in Falcon Heights, Minnesota, where cafeteria worker Philando Castile was fatally shot by a nonblack officer in July after being pulled over for a broken taillight, statistics released by the local St. Anthony Police Department showed that about 7 percent of residents in the area are black, but they account for 47 percent of arrests.

“The police officer’s dilemma”
Many factors can account for the differences in treatment at the hands of police. In some jurisdictions, explicit prejudice still occurs, says John Dovidio, PhD, a social psychologist at Yale University who studies both implicit and explicit prejudice. Many police departments and officers take a paramilitary approach to law and order, and sometimes adopt an “us-versus- them” attitude toward black communities, he says. “There can be a lot of dehumanization that occurs in the conversations people have, and that’s explicit.”

In many cases, however, the biases come from unconscious or unintentional beliefs. “A large proportion of white Americans have these [implicit] biases, and it’s hard to expect police officers to be any different,” Dovidio says.

Implicit biases are attitudes or stereotypes that can influence our beliefs, actions and decisions, even though we’re not consciously aware of them and don’t express those beliefs verbally to ourselves or others. One of the most well-demonstrated types of implicit bias is the unconscious association between black individuals and crime. That association can influence an officer’s behavior, even if he or she doesn’t hold or express explicitly racist beliefs.

Goff describes implicit bias as a kind of identity trap. “They’re situations that trap us into behaving in ways that are not consistent with our values,” he says.

Joshua Correll, PhD, a psychologist at the University of Colorado, has explored one facet of implicit racial bias in a series of laboratory studies since 2000. He developed and tested a paradigm known as “the police officer’s dilemma,” using a first-person-shooter video game. Participants are presented with images of young men, white and black, holding either guns or innocuous objects such as cellphones or soda cans. The goal is to shoot armed targets but not unarmed targets.

The researchers found that participants shoot armed targets more often and more quickly if they’re black rather than white, and refrain from shooting more often when the target is white. The most common mistakes are shooting an unarmed black target and failing to shoot an armed white target (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2002).

But experiments with police officers show a more complex pattern. Similar to community participants, officers showed evidence of bias in their reaction times, more quickly reacting to armed black targets and unarmed white targets—in other words, targets that aligned with racial stereotypes. But those biases evident in their reaction times did not translate to their ultimate decision to shoot or not shoot (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2007). Still, that’s only part of the story. In later work, Correll found special unit officers who regularly interact with minority gang members were more likely to exhibit racial bias in their decision to shoot. When officers’ training and experiences confirm racial stereotypes, those biases appear to hold more sway over their behavior (Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 2013).

“Bad habits”
While research points to some patterns in implicit bias, we still have a lot to learn about the ways that biases influence people’s decisions and behavior in the real world, says David M. Corey, PhD, a police psychologist and founding president of the American Board of Police and Public Safety Psychology. “Yes, implicit bias can affect us. The more important questions are, which persons are affected, and under what conditions?”

Yet while those questions remain unanswered, many police departments and policymakers have skipped ahead to a different one: What can be done to reduce implicit bias? “The police officers I’ve worked with are looking for effective ways to reduce implicit or unintended bias, and they welcome advice based on psychological evidence, not politics,” says Corey.

Under pressure from the public, many police departments have implemented implicit bias workshops and trainings. That could be premature, says Corey. “We feel like we have to do something, but sometimes the action we take proves to be merely window dressing,” he says. “My worry is that could cause a police agency to think they’re doing enough, or that the monies being spent will prohibit spending for other areas, including research.”

That hasn’t stopped some departments from moving forward, however—a step that concerns Glaser and others who think evidence should come before implementation. “There are contractors that provide [implicit bias training], but there’s zero evidence that what they do has an impact,” Glaser says. “We don’t know how to lastingly change implicit biases, particularly those as robust and prevalent as race and crime—and not for lack of trying.”