Friday Findings

Good morming,
It's finally Friday. I read this article and wanted to abates it with you.  Racial Bias?

WILLIAM WIDMER FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES By BENEDICT CAREY and ERICA GOODE JULY 11, 2016
The recent string of racially charged police shootings, and the deadly response on Thursday in Dallas, have come despite efforts by police departments across the United States to train officers to recognize and reduce the effects of racial stereotypes in potentially violent situations.

Whether these bias reduction programs can lead to lasting change in policing is an unanswered question. Their effect on split-second decision making is extremely hard to measure — and experts say some programs may even backfire.

Studies find that police officers harbor the same unconscious biases toward minorities, particularly blacks, that the general American population does.

In one measure, called the implicit association test, study participants are asked to make rapid-fire associations between images of blacks, whites or other races, and threatening words or images. The pattern of responses is nearly universal: Blacks are more often and more quickly paired with threats. This tends to be true regardless of the ethnicity of the person doing the associating, or that person’s professed views on race.

Standard police training and walking a beat can reduce those biases, at least in a laboratory setting, research has found. In a landmark 2007 study that simulated threatening situations, researchers led by Joshua Correll, who is now at the University of Colorado, found that police officers showed no racial bias when choosing to shoot. By contrast, civilians were far more trigger-happy, and shot nearly three times the number of unarmed black men.

“This is contrary to what people assume,” Dr. Correll said, “but it’s important to keep in mind that these are simulations, in a lab, where everyone knows it’s a game.”

Out in the real world, a different dynamic takes hold.

“When people are out on the street, in high-pressure situations, we suspect they’re much more likely to fall back on gut reactions,” Dr. Correll said. “A simulation can’t capture all the factors involved in the real-life encounter — the fear, the behavior of the other person, all that.”

Two recent studies illustrate the difference. One, released last week by the Center for Policing Equity, a New York-based think tank, used data from police departments across the country and found that the police were 3.6 times as likely to use force against blacks than against whites. Among people who were arrested, 46 of every 1,000 blacks experienced violence, compared with 36 of every 1,000 whites.

The second study, by an economics professor at Harvard, Roland G. Fryer Jr., found that blacks were 50 percent more likely to be subjected to nonlethal uses of force by the police, like being handcuffed, pushed to the ground or hit with pepper spray. But the study found no racial differences in police shootings.

Metropolitan police departments have employed various approaches to improve officers’ judgment in threatening situations.

One such training program is called Fair and Impartial Policing, a course developed with Justice Department financing by Lorie Fridell, an associate professor of criminology at the University of South Florida. It incorporates role playing and small group discussion and has been adopted by hundreds of police departments in the United States and Canada, including Dallas, Miami, Milwaukee, Minneapolis and Philadelphia, Dr. Fridell said.

“The science clearly shows that the first step in reducing your bias is recognizing that it exists,” she said.

One part of the training that Dr. Fridell said was based on studies of implicit bias is directed at countering stereotypes. As an example, she said, an officer might be confronted with a series of situations in which people from a variety of races and ethnicities either present a threat or do not present a threat.

“If we did that over and over again, the officers would learn that ‘I need to not focus on demographics,’” she said, because the threat was just as likely to come from a white person or a woman as it was from a black person or a man.

Dr. Fridell said one of the central messages of the training was that “policing based on stereotypes and biases is unsafe, ineffective and unjust.”

“Maybe some officers are concerned about being unjust,” she said, “but let me tell you, they are all concerned about being effective and safe.”

While police officers have reported in written evaluations that the training helped them, no studies have examined its success in reducing bias or whether officers who have taken the training are less likely to be involved in shootings or other uses of force.

An increasing number of departments around the country also train officers on ways to defuse volatile situations before force is needed. Such training teaches officers to use time and distance to de-escalate tense interactions and reduce the likelihood that force will be used rashly.

One approach that does not work very well, Dr. Fridell said, is traditional diversity or “sensitivity” training, which teaches officers about other cultures and how to deal with them, but does not address implicit bias.

Dr. Correll, the Colorado researcher, said such programs could even backfire. “Some interventions you think would work, like having officers try really hard not to use bias, not to think of race — well, in the split-second in which they have to a make a decision, all they think about is race: ‘Ah, he’s black,’ and there’s no time to correct it. They exhibit more stereotyping behavior, not less.”

Bias reduction programs, in short, are at this point like experimental drugs, Dr. Correll said.

“They may work to reduce biased violence, they may do nothing, and they may cause harm,” he said. “We don’t know, because we haven’t really tested them in a rigorous way.