The Problem of Bias in Policing
From 2015-2016, 1,146 victims of police violence lost their lives. More disturbingly, however, is that 38.5% of them were minorities, mainly African Americans (Bui, Coates & Matthay, 2018). This is problematic because African Americans do not even make up 25% of the population of the U.S., according to the U.S. Census Bureau (2018). All the same African Americans are over 50% more likely to be killed by police than their demographic indicates should be an equal ratio. Why are black men more likely to be shot by police than any other demographic? James (2018) notes simply that “research on police officers has found that they tend to associate African Americans with threat” (p. 30). Yet James (2018) has also noted that implicit bias is not the only factor in determining outcomes when police run into minorities in their line of work: other variables are impactful; simple things such as the amount of sleep the officer had the night before can reduce or inflame the officer’s implicit bias with regard to associations of African Americans and possession of weapons (James, 2018). What this suggests is that there are other conscious and unconscious elements to how an officer may handle his own implicit bias and whether he allows it to master him or whether he masters it.
Hehman, Flake and Calanchini (2018) have shown that disproportionate use of lethal force by police officers against black men has been linked with regional racial biases of residents as measured by the use of Harvard’s Project Implicit study—a study that offers participants the opportunity to take an Implicit Attitudes Test. Hehman et al. (2018) argued that the results of these tests in different parts of the country show that cultural sociological factors are part of the psychological phenomenon of implicit bias. Some researchers seek to find ways to mitigate the risk of implicit bias by advocating for the use of body cameras or by modifying procedural justice...
Yet, as James, Fridell and Straub (2016) discuss, most psychosocial studies focus on reducing bias without ever fully understanding where the bias comes from in the first place.
What affects the decision to shoot or not shoot is race-based and part of a feature of implicit bias in police officers that stems from cultural and psychological inputs, but it is also determined by other external factors, such as stress and the impact of physical factors (James, 2018). Racial bias is only one aspect of the situation. Stress, culture, attitudes, and in the influence of peers, media, and groups is also a factor (Bandura, 2018). Gender is also an issue, as most blacks shot by police are males, as males carry a higher threat risk for officers than females, so the perception goes (Hehman et al., 2018). Thus, the decision to shoot or not to shoot is often made in the spur of the moment based on a variety of issues. The recent case of the black security guard who was shot by police is one example of how a variety of inputs can lead to death for the black person: the black security guard had his gun drawn on the suspect; when the white police officer arrived, he saw the gun—which represents the threat of violence to the police officer—and coupled that input with the race of the person holding the gun—which also represents a threat to most officers as a result of their implicit bias (Hehman et al., 2018), and the third input was the chaos of the setting—the bar where violence had broken out. People were also shouting at the officer and though they were shouting that the man with the gun was security, it had no effect on the white officer: he was unable to communicate effectively with the security guard and so opened fire killing the black guard (Runge & Hall, 2018).
As much as one hears about it in the media, the fact is that shootings of innocent black men by police are still…
