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The Reverse Racism Effect: Are Cops More Hesitant to Shoot Black Than White Suspects?
Abstract
Research Summary
Race-related debates often assume that implicit racial bias will result in racially biased decisions to shoot. Previous research has examined racial bias in police decisions by pressing “shoot” or “don't-shoot” buttons in response to pictures of armed and unarmed suspects. As a result of its lack of external validity, however, this methodology provides limited insight into officer behavior in the field. In response, we conducted the first series of experimental research studies that tested police officers and civilians in strikingly realistic deadly force simulators.
Policy Implications
This article reports the results of our most recent experiment, which tested 80 police patrol officers by applying this leading edge method. We found that, despite clear evidence of implicit bias against Black suspects, officers were slower to shoot armed Black suspects than armed White suspects, and they were less likely to shoot unarmed Black suspects than unarmed White suspects. These findings challenge the assumption that implicit racial bias affects police behavior in deadly encounters with Black suspects.
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1745-9133.12187/abstract
... Traditional decision-making studies often place respondents in static situations where a "shoot" or "don't shoot" response is elicited for motionless images; however, these endeavors do not create situational stimuli or immersion (Correll et al. 2002;James et al. 2016). In fact, decisionmaking is not organic in these conditions because participants are unlikely to experience biopsychological impairments (James et al. 2016). ...
... Traditional decision-making studies often place respondents in static situations where a "shoot" or "don't shoot" response is elicited for motionless images; however, these endeavors do not create situational stimuli or immersion (Correll et al. 2002;James et al. 2016). In fact, decisionmaking is not organic in these conditions because participants are unlikely to experience biopsychological impairments (James et al. 2016). As such, non-simulator-based studies do not create realistic conditions that foster participant engagement or investment (James et al. 2016). ...
... In fact, decisionmaking is not organic in these conditions because participants are unlikely to experience biopsychological impairments (James et al. 2016). As such, non-simulator-based studies do not create realistic conditions that foster participant engagement or investment (James et al. 2016). ...
The objective of this manuscript is to explore demographic, legal, and situational considerations on use-of-force decisions. The influence of implicit bias was measured in real time using a police training simulator in an experimental study with university students (n = 115). Participants were randomly assigned to one of four scenarios which varied according to the on-screen actor’s race (e.g., White/Black) and behavior (i.e., compliance/attack). Bivariate and multivariate regression models were used to estimate the effect of implicit bias on the decision to consider and use simulated lethal force. Actor behavior, independent of actor race, most influenced participant responses. These results suggest that simulated police-public interactions offer significant value in the assessment of implicit bias, particularly in the context of use-of-force decisions. Furthermore, absence of bias is inconsistent with current news and social media narratives about the existence of bias in officer decision-making.
... Additionally, these simulators generally have the capability to collect response time and marksmanship data that allow the trainee's performance to be evaluated (i.e., number of shots fired, shot placement). As a research tool, interactive video-based simulators are perceived to offer a high level of ecological validity (James et al., 2016). Although researchers typically use commercially available simulators, some researchers have used improvised simulators to capture police behavior (e.g., Timm, 1991;Timm & Urban, 1993;Ward et al., 2011). ...
... This approach is similar to research examining deadly force decisionmaking with interactive video-based simulators in that both approaches allow the researcher to examine officers' deadly force decision-making. However, James et al. (2016) noted several limitations of computer-based button-pushing methods that evaluate police performance, primarily due to the methodology bearing "so little resemblance to a real-life, officer involved shooting" (p. 460). ...
... 460). For example, James et al. (2016) noted that pressing a don't-shoot button (e.g., on a keyboard) requires the same action as pressing a shoot button; however, when an officer decides to refrain from discharging their firearm, no action (i.e., trigger press) is required. Thus, deadly force decision-making research that requires pressing buttons on a computer has a different perception-action coupling compared to studies that use an interactive video-based simulator with a replica firearm. ...
Objectives
The purpose of this study was to identify, synthesize, and discuss interactive video-based simulator usage and operationalization of performance in law enforcement performance research.
Methods
Eleven databases were searched following the PRISMA-ScR guidelines. The databases included the social, behavioral, forensic, and ergonomic sciences. Eligibility criteria included studies with performance metrics, law enforcement officers as participants, and contextual scenarios.
Results
Critical aspects of simulator usage (i.e., scenario selection, handling the branching aspect of scenarios) were underreported which brings to question the generalizability of law enforcement performance research. A disproportionate amount of research favors shoot scenarios to don’t-shoot scenarios which may unintentionally prime officers to expect the use of deadly force in an unrealistic manner. Performance metrics included cognitive, judgment and decision-making, marksmanship, psychophysiological, and process.
Conclusions
Researchers could improve transparency and generalizability of their research by considering the findings from the current study and following the checklist we developed.
... They also found that training improved performance all around. James et al. (2016) found that LEOs were slower to shoot armed and less likely to shoot unarmed, Black suspects, regardless of their implicit bias scores; however, in this case, the purpose of the study may have impacted results as the officers received the implicit association tests prior to the "shoot/do not shoot" scenario. Correll and colleagues (2014) conducted a literature review of shoot/no shoot scenarios and concluded that police officers perform better on simulated deadly force situations than community members. ...
... Given that Black males are more likely to be perceived as a threat (Fridell and Lim 2016), Black faces more likely to be associated with weapons (Erickson et al. 2022;Greenwald et al. 1998), and there are numerous studies where unarmed Black subjects were more likely to be shot than White subjects (Mekawi and Bresin 2015), it is reasonable to suspect that Black individuals holding a firearm are more likely to be accidental victims of shootings than their White counterparts. What is less known, however, is whether mindfulness will impact shoot/do not shoot scenarios when weapon identification and race are factors using a dynamic, face-to-face simulation rather than a video game-based shooter bias task (Cornell et al. 2002) or live-sized video (James et al. 2016). More specifically, participants armed with a simulated firearm will engage in a live simulation involving a target pointing a simulated gun or harmless item (cell phone) in a face-to-face police training scenario involving a Black or White role player. ...
... More specifically, participants actively engaged in this study by requesting the confederate turn around. While this provides a more realistic simulation than Correll et al. (2002) or James et al. (2016), the nature of the participants' engagement makes it impossible to assess reaction time without technology like eye tracking. Future studies could consider replicating this study with eye-tracking tools to determine reaction time. ...
The aim of this study was to explore the impact of mindfulness, race, and the decision to use deadly force in a law enforcement shooting simulation. A sample of 41 college students completed a mindfulness measure and then assumed the role of a police officer in a deadly force–related training scenario. Participants armed with a simulated firearm were directed to assess and respond as a law enforcement official to a male suspect (Black or White) holding an object (cell phone or weapon) within a short time frame. There was no significant difference in the number of unarmed Black and White targets that were shot; however, armed Black targets were shot significantly more than armed White targets. Notably, all participants fired on the armed Black targets. Mindfulness was associated with reduced likelihood of shooting unarmed targets. Participants who shot the unarmed Black target displayed significantly lower mindfulness than those who shot the unarmed White target or those that did not shoot at all. Mindfulness did not vary across groups when the target was armed. Mindfulness was associated with improved decision making in simulated deadly force-related scenarios.
... Much of the existing research on police lethal force decisionmaking is based on laboratory data collected on undergraduates (Cox et al., 2014) or full of methodological confounds that have led to concerning trends in the interpretation of the data (James et al., 2016;Johnson et al., 2019). The most concerning interpretation on police lethal force decision-making comes from a U.S.-based experiment that purports an anti-White "reverse racism effect" (James et al., 2016). ...
... Much of the existing research on police lethal force decisionmaking is based on laboratory data collected on undergraduates (Cox et al., 2014) or full of methodological confounds that have led to concerning trends in the interpretation of the data (James et al., 2016;Johnson et al., 2019). The most concerning interpretation on police lethal force decision-making comes from a U.S.-based experiment that purports an anti-White "reverse racism effect" (James et al., 2016). Conducted in a virtual simulator with proportionately more trials featuring a White suspect, James et al. (2016) has been cited in U.S. House Committee meetings of the Judiciary and undermines the very real anti-Black disparities observed in police UOF (Edwards et al., 2019;Ross, 2015). ...
... The most concerning interpretation on police lethal force decision-making comes from a U.S.-based experiment that purports an anti-White "reverse racism effect" (James et al., 2016). Conducted in a virtual simulator with proportionately more trials featuring a White suspect, James et al. (2016) has been cited in U.S. House Committee meetings of the Judiciary and undermines the very real anti-Black disparities observed in police UOF (Edwards et al., 2019;Ross, 2015). ...
Résumé
Les données démographiques révèlent qu’au Canada, les Noirs sont plus souvent arrêtés, accusés, abattus et tués par la police que les Blancs. Compte tenu des effets traumatisants de la force létale de la police, il est urgent de comprendre les causes potentielles des disparités raciales observées et de mettre au point des interventions visant à réduire efficacement les erreurs de force létale dans l’ensemble, en particulier dans les communautés touchées de manière disproportionnée. S’appuyant sur des études antérieures en laboratoire, Andersen et coll. (2023) ont observé une discrimation envers les Noirs dans un échantillon (n = 187) de policiers canadiens lors de leurs évaluations annuelles de requalification. La fréquence absolue des erreurs de recours à la force létale était plus élevée dans les simulations mettant en scène un suspect noir et les résultats du test d’association implicite (IAT) indiquaient une discrimination envers les Noirs. Toutefois, les scores de l’IAT ne permettaient pas de prédire les comportements racistes, ce qui souligne la nécessité de revoir la façon dont sont mesurées les performances et les attitudes implicites de la police. Andersen et coll. ont également démystifié l’affirmation préoccupante et erronée dans la littérature de recherche américaine d’une discrimination envers les Blancs dans la force létale de la police. L’article actuel est une réponse à un commentaire de Williams et coll. (2023) qui déforme les principales conclusions d’Andersen et coll. et utilise des informations factuellement inexactes dans le but de discréditer l’étude et l’équipe de recherche. Nous demandons une amélioration du professionnalisme et de l’exactitude tant dans la composition des articles de commentaires que dans le processus d’examen par les pairs qui les approuve pour publication. En se basant sur les données empiriques et la littérature actuelle (Hagiwara et coll., 2020), nous concluons par des recommandations exploitables, fondées sur des preuves, visant à réduire les erreurs liées à la force létale, les disparités raciales et les préjugés raciaux.
... A few research studies conducted in high-pressure environments (HPE) suggest that HPEs induce stress and compromise general decision-making in the use of lethal force (Heusler & Sutter, 2022;Landman et al., 2016;Neiuwenhaus & Oudejans, 2010;Neiuwenhaus et al., 2012;Taylor, 2020;Taylor, 2021); studies that specifically examine the role of race and racism in HPEs are sparse and inconclusive (Akinola & Mendes, 2012;Cox et al., 2014;James et al., 2016;James et al., 2013;Luini & Marucci, 2015). One approach researchers have used to simulate HPEs is to have participants engage with live "opponents" who have the capacity to shoot back fake bullets (i.e., soap cartridges), which cause a sensation of pain (Neiuwenhaus & Oudejans, 2010;Landman et al., 2016). ...
... Only a few studies have examined the role of race and racism in police officers' decisions to use lethal force within HPEs, and the results are somewhat contradictory (Akinola & Mendes, 2012;Cox et al., 2014;James et al., 2016;James et al., 2013;Luini & Marucci, 2015). In one study, civilian and police officer participants who completed a stress-inducing task before completing a task similar to Correll's paradigm had faster response times shooting Black suspects relative to White suspects (Luini & Marucci, 2015). ...
... In another study using a similar design, participants who were under stress before completing Correll's shooting task were more likely to shoot Black armed targets compared to White armed targets; however, higher levels of stress (as indicated by increased cortisol levels) correlated with fewer errors with Black armed (but not White armed) suspects, as well as greater ability to differentiate armed from unarmed Black suspects (Akinola & Mendes, 2012). In a series of studies, James and colleagues had participants interact with on-screen actors in a series of suspect encounters with branching simulations inside of a sound-isolated shooting range on a high-definition monitor; they found that unarmed White were more likely to be shot than unarmed Black suspects, and that participants were slower to shoot Black than White suspects (James et al., 2016;James et al., 2013). Cox et al. (2014) study using video simulations also found more errors and faster shooting times with White suspects compared to Black suspects. ...
Here we investigated the role of physiological stress on participants' lethal force decisions with Black suspects using a novel virtual reality (VR) paradigm. We examined the conditional and mediational roles of implicit racism and visual attention to Black suspects. For this study, we filmed a series of high-risk suspect-police interactions with a 360° video camera which, when viewed through the VR headset, embeds the participants in these scenarios from the perspective of a police officer. Embedded eye tracking in the VR enabled assessment of both physiological stress (through pupil dilation) and attention (through gaze location). Analysis of these behavioral data with criminal justice majors ( N = 39) revealed a facilitative function of physiological stress for improving accuracy in lethal force decisions, specifically among those with low levels of implicit racism. Findings also indicated that dysregulated attention—characterized by either disorganized or fixated attentional patterns—compromised lethal force decision making. Results are discussed in relation to future applications of VR to inform our understanding of cognitive and affective precursors of poor decision making. Implications include the promise of cognitive-behavioral interventions for mitigating dysregulated attention patterns, ultimately towards the end of reducing unwarranted uses of lethal force against Black men and women.
... As stated by Cesario et al. (2019, p. 587), "Insofar as Blacks and Whites have different police exposure rates, a more correct benchmark to calculate racial disparity in fatal police shootings is not population proportions but instead rates of police exposure." Other studies have found that police officers are less likely to shoot unarmed or armed Black civilians than White civilians (Fryer, 2016;James et al., 2016;James et al., 2013;Worrall et al., 2018). For example, using officer-involved shooting data from the Dallas Police Department (2003)(2004)(2005)(2006)(2007)(2008)(2009)(2010)(2011)(2012)(2013)(2014)(2015)(2016), Wheeler et al. (2018) found that Black civilians were 45% less likely to be shot than similarly-situated Whites. ...
... For example, using officer-involved shooting data from the Dallas Police Department (2003)(2004)(2005)(2006)(2007)(2008)(2009)(2010)(2011)(2012)(2013)(2014)(2015)(2016), Wheeler et al. (2018) found that Black civilians were 45% less likely to be shot than similarly-situated Whites. Likewise, studies have also found that officers take significantly more time (0.20-1.34 seconds) to shoot armed Black civilians than Whites in video simulations of "shoot-don't-shoot" decision scenarios (James et al., 2016;James et al., 2013). Lastly, Johnson et al. (2018) found that providing civilian race information to officers during a simulation experiment reduced racial biases in decisions to shoot. ...
... While the majority of studies have examined racial disparities, a few studies have also examined ethnic disparities in officer-involved shootings (see Edwards et al., 2019;Fagan & Campbell, 2020;Fryer, 2016;James et al., 2016;James et al., 2013;Johnson et al., 2019). While the studies by Fryer (2016) and James et al. (2013) found no significant difference in the likelihood of police officer shootings of both armed and unarmed Hispanic and White civilians, other scholars have found ethnic disparities in officer-involved shootings. ...
The current study provides findings from a systematic review of the police use of deadly force literature over the most recently completed decade (2011–2020). After an exhaustive search of four scientific databases, 1,190 peer-reviewed articles related to the use of force were identified. Of these, 181 articles specifically examined deadly force, with 86 of them drawing on such force as the dependent variable. We found that the number of articles examining police use of deadly force increased dramatically over the course of the study period and encompassed a wide range of determinants of behavior. Citizen possession of a weapon continues to be the most consistent risk factor of police use of deadly force across decades of policing literature. Additionally, while many studies have attempted to examine the link between race and lethal force, a determination of such a relationship is difficult given both mixed findings and a lack of available national data.
... FTS technologies have been used to study variables relevant to officer performance in deadly force situations, including the impact of suspect race (e.g. James et al., 2016), officer fatigue (e.g. James et al., 2018b), and psychophysiological indicators (Johnson et al., 2014). ...
... This study contributed to the literature on officer decision-making during high-risk encounters with the public and extended the methodologies previously used to study officer behaviour in simulated environments (e.g. James et al., 2016). We addressed two key research questions: to determine whether there was a relationship between the scenario outcomes and the scenario itself (RQ1), and we analysed officers' self-reported situational factors in the deadly force scenarios to parse out salient characteristics (RQ2). ...
... Cowell et al., 2021) have cautioned officers against the reliance on individual factors to inform their actions in deadly force situations. The participants in this study limitedly reported using such descriptors to inform their decision, suggesting that factors other than individual characteristics were more relevant in these scenarios (James et al., 2013(James et al., , 2016. ...
In the USA, police officer–citizen encounters are routine, and while rare, high-profile shootings underscore the acute strains that exist between the police and communities when force is inappropriately applied. This collaborative partnership explored the situational contexts that impact officer decision-making in deadly force encounters in order to inform training and practice initiatives. In this study, we analysed 39 officers’ responses to 233 simulated encounters with the public using a firearms training system. We coded participants’ performance into one of the five possible outcomes (pass, missed target, suspect shot first, shot victim, and shot too soon). The most commonly occurring outcome was pass (44.6%), followed by suspect shooting first (29.6%), and missed target (12.9%). Content analysis of self-identified situational factors revealed that across all scenarios, the officers’ decision was most commonly informed by suspect cues, environmental factors, and the presence of a firearm. Implications of the findings are discussed.
... In order to analyze it adequately, we proceed as follows: In Sect. 2, we first give a brief overview of the mounting evidence in support of the existence of shooting bias among police officers, especially but not exclusively in the US, and then we introduce two studies by James et al., (2016) and Fryer (2019) that question the existence of such bias. Although the authors confirm that there is widespread racism in non-lethal police use of force, they claim that their research could not reveal racial bias in officers' shooting decisions. ...
... Lind, 2016). However, a simulation study conducted by James et al., (2016) and an analysis of police reports by Fryer (2019) both claim that they could not reveal any racial bias in officers' shooting decisions. Thus, they dissent from a very well-confirmed and established consensus on this issue. ...
... Using what they call "state-of-the-art simulators similar to those used by law enforcement agencies in the United States and around the world to conduct deadly force judgment and decision-making training" (p. 461), James et al., (2016) aim to test the shooting bias hypothesis in a better, more realistic simulation, which would count as a proxy for police encounters with armed and unarmed subjects. ...
The shooting bias hypothesis aims to explain the disproportionate number of minorities killed by police. We present the evidence mounting in support of the existence of shooting bias and then focus on two dissenting studies. We examine these studies in light of Biddle and Leuschner’s (2015) “inductive risk account of epistemically detrimental dissent” and conclude that, although they meet this account only partially, the studies are in fact epistemically and socially detrimental as they contribute to racism in society and to a social atmosphere that is hostile to science as scholars working on issues of racism come under attack. We emphasize this final point via recourse to Kitcher’s “Millian argument against the freedom of research.”
... Conflicting results highlight the complexity of racial bias in police UOF and the potential for alternate interpretations of UOF statistics. Similarly, experimental studies investigating the association between racial bias and police UOF suffer from methodological confounds and limitations (e.g., Cox et al., 2014;James et al., 2016;Johnson et al., 2018). Further, most real-world and experimental studies of racial bias in police UOF are based in the U.S., which highlights the need for a Canadian investigation of this urgent issue. ...
... In a follow-up study with 80 officers, James et al. (2016) report findings that officers made no-shoot errors (i.e., incorrectly shot a suspect) in only 1% of scenarios with a Black suspect, but in 14% of scenarios with White suspects. Taken together, the authors (James et al) interpret their findings as a "reverse racism effect," which is a controversial statement given the observed anti-Black racial disparities reported in real-world (Edwards et al., 2019;Ross, 2015;Ross et al., 2021;Singh, 2020;Wortley & Jung, 2020) and other lab-based studies (Correll et al., 2007;Peruche & Plant, 2006;Plant & Peruche, 2005). ...
... The potential implications of James et al. (2013James et al. ( , 2016 findings of a "reverse racism" effect are to provide evidence against anti-Black biases in policing, which categorically exist in both American and Canadian contexts (Edwards et al., 2019;Ross, 2015;Singh, 2020;Wortley & Jung, 2020). The present study aims to utilize even more ecologically valid and consistent methodological approaches to clarify the relationship between observable lethal force behavior and implicit attitudes toward Black males by Canadian police. ...
L’examen scientifique des disparités raciales dans les fusillades policières montre des preuves contradictoires de préjugés anti-noirs, anti-blancs ou d’absence de préjugés raciaux. Les études expérimentales qui tentent de contrôler des facteurs extérieurs manquent souvent de validité écologique et ont des approches incohérentes pour mesurer les préjugés raciaux. Compte tenu du tollé croissant en faveur d’une réforme de la police, y compris les recommandations en matière de dépistage des préjugés raciaux et de formation, il est urgent de clarifier la relation entre les comportements observables en matière de force létale et les préjugés raciaux implicites. S’appuyant sur la littérature existante limitée, la présente étude a examiné les disparités raciales dans la prise de décision de tirer ou de ne pas tirer chez les policiers canadiens (n = 187) lors de l’évaluation annuelle de recertification de leur service qui manipulait la race du suspect (Noir ou Blanc) dans des scénarios par ailleurs identiques. Les erreurs de force létale ont été comparées aux scores de préjugés raciaux implicites obtenus au test d'association implicite (IAT) et à d’autres variables démographiques, notamment le sexe, l’âge, les années d’expérience et la race du policier. Nous n’avons constaté aucune différence statistiquement significative dans les taux d’erreur pour les simulations impliquant un suspect noir ou blanc pour les scénarios avec tir (2,5 %, 3,1 %, respectivement) ou sans tir (4,6 %, 3,0 %, respectivement). Les erreurs liées à la force létale n’étaient pas prédites par la race du suspect, le degré d’éveil autonome ou les scores de l’IAT. Toutefois, les fréquences absolues des erreurs de force létale étaient plus élevées dans les scénarios impliquant des suspects noirs. Les résultats actuels suggèrent qu’une réforme généralisée de la formation de la police est nécessaire de toute urgence pour réduire les disparités raciales dans l’usage de la force (UOF) et les erreurs de force létale en général.
... In policing, stereotypes that associate people of color, and especially Black people, with violence and other criminal behavior may lead law enforcement personnel to act unknowingly on the basis of such bias. Among patrol officers in Spokane, Washington, all but 4% exhibited an anti-Black unconscious bias on the race-weapons Implicit Association Test; the association was moderate in magnitude for 40% and strong for 38% of officers (James et al., 2016; also see James, 2018;James et al., 2013James et al., , 2014. Other analyses of the speed with which participants performed a first-person shoot/do not shoot task found that police officers and civilian community members alike manifested unconscious bias by shooting an armed target more quickly when he was Black rather than White; they also took longer to accurately not shoot an unarmed target who was Black rather than White (Correll et al., 2007; also see Correll et al., 2014;Eberhardt et al., 2004). ...
... Meta-analyses of studies examining the link between implicit bias and actual discriminatory behavior have found small effects that vary with the form of behavior (Kurdi et al., 2019; also see Oswald et al., 2013), but no systematic empirical research has established a direct connection between implicit bias, on one hand, and police enforcement behavior that disfavors Black people or people from other racial and ethnic minority groups, on the other hand. James et al. (2016) cast doubt on this connection with a study that improved the verisimilitude of the shooter task. Specifically, they placed research subjects-including police officers-in use-of-force simulators such as those that police agencies use for training. ...
Objective: The purpose of this study was to estimate the behavioral impacts of training police officers in implicit bias awareness and management. Hypotheses: Training police in implicit bias reduces racial and ethnic disparities in stops, arrests, summonses, frisks, searches, and/or use of force. Method: A cluster randomized controlled trial using the stepped wedge design was applied to 14,471 officers in the New York City Police Department, with a 1-day training delivered to clusters of police commands between May 2018 and April 2019 and outcomes measured with police records of individual events from April 2018 to May 2019. Police records were supplemented with survey data on 1,973 officers matched to administrative data. For each type of enforcement action, the likelihood that the action involved or was taken against Black or Hispanic suspects, respectively, relative to White suspects was estimated, controlling for potential confounders. Additional analysis allowed for estimating training effects of different magnitudes for Black, Hispanic, and White officers and for officers with greater motivation to act without prejudice or greater concern about discrimination. Results: None of the estimated training effects achieved statistical significance at the .05 level. Conclusions: Isolated and weak evidence of behavioral impacts of the training was detected. Several explanations for the null findings are considered.
... Particularly noteworthy are the studies carried out by James and her colleagues. Interestingly, they report results that are drastically different from many of the studies included in the reported meta-analysis (e.g., evidence for a shooting bias against White individuals rather than Black individuals; James et al., 2016). Consistent with this meta-analysis, however, James et al. (2016) found that measures of implicit biases were not predictive of shooting biases. ...
... Interestingly, they report results that are drastically different from many of the studies included in the reported meta-analysis (e.g., evidence for a shooting bias against White individuals rather than Black individuals; James et al., 2016). Consistent with this meta-analysis, however, James et al. (2016) found that measures of implicit biases were not predictive of shooting biases. police-public interactions (e.g., . ...
... For example, officers' preoccupation with danger (Sierra-Arévalo, 2021;Skolnick, 1966) might make them more prone to draw and point their firearms when performing certain activities (e.g., serving warrants, making arrests) or being dispatched to certain calls for service (e.g., domestic disputes; see . Meanwhile, the science of implicit biases and stereotype threats raises concerns that a suspect's race may influence officers' decisions to draw and point their firearms (James et al., 2016;Kahn et al., 2016;Smith & Alpert, 2007;Trinkner et al., 2019). And finally, the "policing as a craft" argument (Bayley & Bittner, 1984) suggests that with experience, officers become more adept at dealing with people and resolving conflicts without relying on coercion (Bayley & Garofalo, 1989;Paoline & Terrill, 2007). ...
... 2. For exceptions, see a series of simulated experiments by Lois James and colleagues (James et al., 2013(James et al., , 2014(James et al., , 2016(James et al., , 2018a(James et al., , 2018b. See also Fryer (2019). ...
The power to use force is a defining characteristic of policing, one that is accompanied by a responsibility to exercise these powers in the circumstances deemed necessary. This study analyzes data from four policing agencies to predict the likelihood of an officer drawing and pointing their firearm at a use of force incident. Findings suggest that situational factors were important in influencing whether an officer may draw and point their firearm. However, a priming effect, in which officers were more likely to draw their firearms when dispatched to an incident, may also be present. The rate that officers drew and pointed their firearms varied between jurisdictions, as did the nature of the incidents. Caution should be exercised in generalizing the results of single-site studies on police use of force, or introducing research into policy beyond the jurisdiction in which it was performed.
... Threat-perception failures can occur due to several contextual factors such as priming from a dispatch call (Mitchell & Flin, 2007;Taylor, 2020), previous experience/knowledge of a suspect, suspect race (James et al., 2016), or apparent deceptive and threatening behavior from a suspect (Aveni, 2003). Situational factors at the scene of an incident can further affect an officer's perception and action. ...
... Researchers across multiple domains are interested in threat-perception failures. For example, factors influencing police use of force that have been examined include suspect race (James et al., 2016), expertise (Boulton & Cole, 2016), and dispatch priming (Mitchell & Flin, 2007;Taylor, 2020). Recently, threat-perception failures have also been examined from the perspective of perceptual-cognitive expertise (Scott & Suss, 2019;Suss & Raushel, 2019). ...
The few perceptual–cognitive expertise and deception studies in the domain of law enforcement have yet to examine perceptual–cognitive expertise differences of police trainees and police officers. The current study uses methods from the perceptual–cognitive expertise and deception models. Participants watched temporally occluded videos of actors honestly drawing a weapon and deceptively drawing a non-weapon from a concealed location on their body. Participants determined if the actor was holding a weapon or a non-weapon. Using signal-detection metrics—sensitivity and response bias—we did not find evidence of perceptual–cognitive expertise; performance measures did not differ significantly between police trainees and experienced officers. However, consistent with the hypotheses, we did find that both police trainees and police officers became more sensitive in identifying the object as occlusion points progressed. Additionally, we found that across police trainees and police officers, their response bias became more liberal (i.e., more likely to identify the object as a weapon) as occlusion points progressed. This information has potential impacts for law enforcement practices and additional research.
... Particularly noteworthy are the studies carried out by James and her colleagues. Interestingly, they report results that are drastically different from many of the studies included in the reported meta-analysis (e.g., evidence for a shooting bias against White individuals rather than Black individuals; James et al., 2016). Consistent with this meta-analysis, however, James et al. (2016) found that measures of implicit biases were not predictive of shooting biases. ...
... Interestingly, they report results that are drastically different from many of the studies included in the reported meta-analysis (e.g., evidence for a shooting bias against White individuals rather than Black individuals; James et al., 2016). Consistent with this meta-analysis, however, James et al. (2016) found that measures of implicit biases were not predictive of shooting biases. ...
We conducted a narrative review of existing literature to identify the knowledge, skills, and abilities (KSAs) necessary for officers who police in democratic societies to successfully manage potentially volatile police–public interactions. This review revealed 10 such KSAs that are frequently discussed in the literature. These KSAs include: (1) knowledge of policies and laws; (2) an understanding of mental health-related issues; (3) an ability to interact effectively with, and show respect for, individuals from diverse community groups; (4) awareness and management of stress effects; (5) communication skills; (6) decision-making and problem-solving skills; (7) perceptual skills; (8) motor skills related to use-of-force; (9) emotion and behavior regulation; and (10) an ability to treat people in a procedurally just manner. Following our review, we conducted semi-structured interviews (N = 7) with researchers who specialize in police training and adult education, interactions with individuals in crisis, and racialized policing, as well as two police trainers with expertise in de-escalation and use-of-force training. These interviews confirmed the importance of the 10 KSAs and highlighted two additional KSAs that are likely to be critical: understanding the role of policing in a free and democratic society and tactical knowledge and skills. To ensure that police–public interactions are managed effectively, police trainers may want to focus on the development and evaluation of these KSAs—something that is not always done currently.
... The term implies that the police were more aware of the watchful eyes the public and the readiness to record them on the job, thus they were less likely to be proactive in their duties. The outcome may even result in a "Reverse Racism" effect wherein White police officers become more hesitant to shoot Black suspects, thus police shootings were not about racial inequality but rather officers trying their hardest not to shoot Black suspects (James et al., 2016). The authors report: ...
... According to Critical Race Theorist Derrick Bell (1980), his concept of interest convergence highlights when Whites have taken policy interest, it has occurred at times when it is actually more beneficial for Whites rather than people of color. Such a statement does not discount the need for White allies but recognizes many Whites still do not see such levels of differential enforcement as a problem or express a desire to act on the data available (Bonilla-Silva, 2018;Klinger et al., 2016). 2 Despite a long and brutal history of policing involving communities of color, many White academics, as a general theme and supported by these citations, were in denial in trying to explain all the reasons as to why racial bias in policing does not exist (James et al., 2016;Klinger et al., 2016;Shane et al., 2017;Shjarback & Nix, 2020;Worrall et al., 2018Worrall et al., , 2020. Sociologist Stanley Cohen (2001) described denial as a societal problem. ...
The tragic killing of George Floyd at the hands of the police resulted in hundreds of thousands of protestors marching in the streets demanding change. The call for change criticized the killing of Blacks by law enforcement and challenged White supremacy as an institution of social control and racial violence. A key component of the marches and protests was a message to the residents of the United States: “Black Lives Matter.” As society grapples with a reckoning, researchers studying police violence for the past 6 decades have been empirically and theoretically debating the reasons why use of force by law enforcement continues to have a higher proportion of Black and Brown victims compared to Whites. Although the research on fatal police killings was studied by only a small number of individuals prior to 2014, after the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri the research in different areas of the country increased rapidly as did the forms of analysis and research disciplines making their own contributions. The Washington Post and Guardian news agencies established that deaths at the hands of the police were occurring for at least 900 to 1100 individual deaths per year for which firearms resulted in the greatest cause of death. As US government agencies failed to produce a national data source on police involved killings, the media took a leading role in providing greater national understanding. The authors examine what role academic researchers contribute to the discussion for solutions, particularly those from marginalized backgrounds. As protestors march, lawyers sue and defend, and politicians create new forms of legislation, researchers need to play a more important role initiating critical studies, making sense of the data, and providing a theoretical framework for which police violence can be understood. This article will provide an overview of the literature on racialized police violence, point out key patterns involving racial and ethnic disparities, and emphasize how researchers can play a more important role in advocating for change.
... This struggle can lead to conflict and other racist behavior, from which the term reverse racism is developed. According to James et al. (2016) and Roussell et al. (2017), reverse racism makes the subordination of blacks replaced by the subordination of whites in all social life aspects. ...
This research employs a sociological approach to literature, drawing on Georg Simmel's social interaction theory and Karl Marx's class struggle concepts, to analyze the dynamics between the upper-class Crosses and the lower-class Noughts in the novel Noughts & Crosses. The study identifies five forms and six types of social interactions, encompassing superordination and subordination, exchange, conflict, prostitution, and sociability, along with character-based classifications such as the miser, the spendthrift, the stranger, the adventurer, the nobility, and the poor. The central focus lies in understanding the struggles of the Noughts in their pursuit of social equality within a deeply divided society. Despite collective and individual efforts, fueled by class consciousness and the formation of the Liberation Militia, the research concludes that achieving equality remains elusive. The powerful Crosses, driven by hidden manipulations and a desire to maintain the existing system, thwart the Noughts' endeavors, underscoring the persistent challenges faced by the lower class in a society marked by reverse racism.
... I will be talking about a highly "unrealistic" paradigm whose compensating advantage is better isolation of the causal factors in a laboratory setting. The opposite approach, trying for a high degree of realism using police personnel as subjects with realistic videos as stimuli, has been investigated by Lois James at Washington State University (James & Vila, 2016). ...
This book argues that there is a joint in nature between seeing and thinking, perception, and cognition. Perception is constitutively iconic, nonconceptual, and nonpropositional, whereas cognition does not have these properties constitutively. The book does not appeal to “intuitions,” as is common in philosophy, but to empirical evidence, including experiments in neuroscience and psychology. The book argues that cognition affects perception, i.e., that perception is cognitively penetrable, but that this does not impugn the joint in nature. A key part of the argument is that we perceive not only low-level properties like colors, shapes, and textures but also high-level properties such as faces and causation. Along the way, the book explains the difference between perception and perceptual memory, the differences between format and content, and whether perception is probabilistic despite our lack of awareness of probabilistic properties. The book argues for perceptual categories that are not concepts, that perception need not be singular, that perceptual attribution and perceptual discrimination are equally fundamental, and that basic features of the mind known as “core cognition” are not a third category in between perception and cognition. The chapter on consciousness leverages these results to argue against some of the most widely accepted theories of consciousness. Although only one chapter is about consciousness, much of the rest of the book repurposes work on consciousness to isolate the scientific basis of perception.
... Progress addressing stereotype threat requires acknowledging that, even though police officers may be wellinformed and well-intended (Worden et al., 2020), Black people's risk of being stereotyped as criminal by police is real (e.g., 96% of James et al., 2016; mostly White police officer sample demonstrated anti-Black bias on an implicit raceweapon categorization task like the one used by Nosek et al., 2007), and it is entirely rational that Black people experience stereotype threat as a psychological reaction. Further, as Brownlow (2022, p. 15) noted, "the onus is not on Black Americans to change how they are coping … Given that Black individuals' experience of racial stress is a systemic problem, it will require systemic solutions." ...
Cultural stereotypes that link Black race to crime in the United States originated with and are perpetuated by policies that result in the disproportionate criminalization and punishment of Black people. The scientific record is replete with evidence that these stereotypes impact perceivers’ perceptions, information processing, and decision-making in ways that produce more negative criminal legal outcomes for Black people than White people. However, relatively scant attention has been paid to understanding how situations that present a risk of being evaluated through the lens of crime-related stereotypes also directly affect Black people. In this article, I consider one situation in particular: encounters with police. I draw on social psychological research on stereotype threat generally as well as the few existing studies of crime-related stereotype threat specifically to illuminate how the cultural context creates psychologically distinct experiences of police encounters for Black people as compared to White people. I further consider the potential ramifications of stereotype threat effects on police officers’ judgments and treatment of Black people as well as for Black people’s safety and well-being in other criminal legal contexts and throughout their lives. Finally, I conclude with a call for increased scholarly attention to crime-related stereotype threat and the role it plays in contributing to racial disparities in policing outcomes, particularly with regard to diverse racial, ethnic, and intersectional identities and personal vulnerability factors, and the systemic changes that might mitigate its deleterious effects.
... However, evidence suggests that socialization processes could better explain minority officers' behavior (e.g., Wilkins & Williams, 2008), and police officers may not disproportionately target minority suspects (Menifield et al., 2019). In an experiment on police shooting decisions, James et al. (2016) found the "reverse racism effect" whereby police officers are slower to shoot armed Black suspects and less likely to shoot unarmed Black suspects compared to White suspects. Further, the evidence of symbolic representation from individual-level data appears not as solid as expected (Headley et al., 2021;Lee & Nicholson-Crotty, 2021), implying that increasing minority representation itself may not be enough to improve policing equity. ...
This essay explores the notion of social equity as a public value underpinning public administration and public policy. Despite being regarded as one of the pillars of public administration, social equity is loosely defined and conceptualized in various ways and challenged by measurement issues. The concept of social equity is evolving and being constantly constructed; therefore, not all equity issues are given the same degree of attention and support by the general public and policymakers in political institutions and governments. This article is an effort to reflect on equity considerations as social constructs and highlight the equity-enhancing role of public bureaucrats at different ranks within the bureaucratic hierarchy.
This study first identifies and defines social equity practices and explores prominent inequities in six areas: education, housing, welfare, environment, policing, and immigration. Social equity is conceptualized as diminishing discrimination, providing the minimum safety net, increasing access for minorities, closing and leveling gaps or disparities, and improving the social justice system. The conceptual diversity and measurement issues lead to diverging perceptions of the problems and solutions, oversimplifying social issues, and setting a deceptive or hostile environment toward marginalized social groups.
Second, this essay explores the roles and capacities of public bureaucrats at different ranks within the bureaucratic hierarchy. Although both bureaucrats and politicians are embedded in the current institutional arrangements and policy environments, bureaucrats in the administrative arena could effectively address inequities among social groups compared to elected officials. Marginalized groups are often negatively constructed and not organized enough to voice their concerns to their political representatives. This study reveals bureaucrats’ significant potential to progress social equity in diverse areas by redefining identity groups with finer social constructions, changing perceptions of deservingness, and reducing administrative burden.
... Thus, while several studies provide evidence for shooter biases of police officers, the evidence appears inconsistent with regard to the outcome variables in which the biases occur. This inconsistency is also evident in studies that demonstrated shooter bias effects only in initial task trials but not in later trials (e.g., , studies which did not demonstrate racial bias among police officers in any outcome variable (Cox et al., 2014), or studies which observed reversed biases, apparently "favoring Black suspects" (James et al., 2013, p. 189, Experiment 3;James et al., 2016). Taken together, previous lab research suggests mixed findings. ...
The present research assesses potential correlates of discriminatory police behavior, comparing police and civilian participants in a first person shooter task (FPST) as well as on various self-report measures of intergroup contact, intergroup attitudes, and ideological beliefs in three preregistered studies. Study 1 (N = 330), using a FPST with a short response window (630 ms), did not observe shooter biases in reaction times, error rates and signal detection parameters in neither police nor civilian participants. Study 2a (N = 290), using a longer response window (850 ms), observed a shooter bias in reaction times, error rates, and response criterion in both civilian and police participants. These shooter biases were largely driven by faster reactions, fewer errors, and more liberal shoot decisions for armed Arab (vs. White) targets. Study 2b (N = 191; 850 ms response window) closely replicated shooter biases in reaction times, error rates, and response criterion in a sample of civilian online participants. Across studies, we observed similar results in the shooter task for police and civilian samples. Furthermore, both police and civilian participants expressed anti-Muslim and anti-Arab attitudes across a variety of self-report measures. However, compared to civilians, police participants reported higher levels of anti-Muslim attitudes on some measures as well as higher levels of social dominance orientation, which might pose additional risk factors for discriminatory behavior. Lastly, while we observed reliable individual differences in self-reported intergroup attitudes, ideologies, and intergroup contact, none of these characteristics correlated with shooter biases.
... Thus, while several studies provide evidence for shooter biases of police officers, the evidence appears inconsistent with regard to the outcome variables in which the biases occur. This inconsistency is also evident in studies that demonstrated shooter bias effects only in initial task trials but not in later trials (e.g., , studies which did not demonstrate racial bias among police officers in any outcome variable (Cox et al., 2014), or studies which observed reversed biases, apparently "favoring Black suspects" (James et al., 2013, p. 189, Experiment 3;James et al., 2016). Taken together, previous lab research suggests mixed findings. ...
The present research assesses potential correlates of discriminatory police behavior, comparing police and civilian participants’ in a first person shooter task (FPST) as well as on various self-report measures of intergroup contact, intergroup attitudes, and ideological beliefs in three preregistered studies. Study 1 (N = 330), using a FPST with a short response window (630 ms), did not observe shooter biases in reaction times, error rates and signal detection parameters in neither police nor civilian participants. Study 2a (N = 290), using a longer response window (850 ms), observed a shooter bias in reaction times, error rates, and response criterion in both civilian and police participants. These shooter biases were largely driven by faster reactions, fewer errors, and less hesitant shoot decisions for armed Arab (vs. White) targets. Study 2b (N = 191; 850 ms response window) closely replicated shooter biases in reaction times, error rates, and response criterion in a sample of civilian online participants. Across all studies, we observed similar results in the shooter task for police and civilian samples. Furthermore, both police and civilian participants expressed anti-Muslim and anti-Arab attitudes across a variety of self-report measures. However, compared to civilians, police participants reported higher levels of anti-Muslim attitudes on some measures as well as higher levels of social dominance orientation, which might pose additional risk factors for discriminatory behavior. Lastly, while we observed reliable individual differences in self-reported intergroup attitudes, ideologies, and intergroup contact, none of these characteristics correlated with shooter biases.
... These social psychological biases affect adults of color as well. James et al. (2016) found that 78% of patrol officers exhibited a moderate or strong anti-Black unconscious bias on an implicit association test by more quickly associating weapons with Black This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers. ...
Objectives:
In October 2021, the American Psychological Association (APA) passed a resolution addressing ways psychologists could work to dismantle systemic racism in criminal legal systems. In the present report, developed to inform APA's policy resolution, we detail the scope of the problem and offer recommendations for policy makers and psychologists to address the issue by advancing related science and practice. Specifically, we acknowledge the roots of modern-day racial and ethnic disparities in rates of criminalization and punishment for people of color compared with White people. Next, we review existing theory and research that helps explain the underlying psychological mechanisms driving racial and ethnic disparities in criminal legal systems (e.g., endorsement of negative stereotypes, explicit and implicit bias). We also elucidate how racially disparate treatment generates downstream negative mental health consequences for people of color.
Conclusions:
Evidence-based recommendations to work toward eliminating systemic racism in the criminal legal systems include (a) rigorous measurement and analysis of disparities; (b) targeted changes in policy, practice, and law; (c) increased access to culturally aware and competent services and interventions; (d) design and promotion of education and training programs regarding racial bias; (e) increased attention to issues of intersectionality; and (f) promotion of diversity and fair-mindedness among criminal legal actors. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).
... Officers possess a variety of means to escalate and/ or control a situation; de-policing may inhibit an officer's decisions within an encounter. In some situations, one may see officers demonstrate a hesitancy to use force (James et al., 2016;Worrall et al., 2018). If officers change their use of force behaviour, there may be both negative and positive consequences to this behavioural shift. ...
Contemporary discussions on policing focus on the impact of intense external scrutiny on proactive policing practices. Some commentators suggest negative feedback directed at law enforcement inhibits police willingness to engage in proactive police practices. This effect, known as 'de-policing' , endangers communities due to officer disengagement in crime prevention techniques. To examine this effect, previous research relies on crime data to examine de-policing; few studies explore how officer-initiated actions, such as a stop, shift in the wake of a de-policing effect. Using data from the Stanford Open Policing Project, this paper examines how officer-initiated behaviour (vehicle and pedestrian stops) changes after a negative public scrutiny shock (in this case, the shooting of Michael Brown). Further, the study examines how crime rates changed after Brown's death. The findings of this paper suggest police proactivity declined and crime increased after Michael Brown's death in Ferguson, Missouri. Policy implications, future research avenues, and theoretical enhancements to de-policing are discussed.
... The three actors were all white men of approximately the same age. Race in particular was controlled among the actors in the stimuli to prevent any biases due to racial influences (Correll, Park, Judd, & Wittenbrink, 2002; but see also James, James, & Vila, 2016;Ma & Correll, 2011). Detailed analyses of threat rating differences for these different individual stimuli have been reported elsewhere (Biggs, Pettijohn, & Gardony, 2021); those analyses represent and describe distinct outcomes from the work presented here. ...
The use of lethal force is a combination of threat perception and individual judgment that sometimes warrants a behavioral response. This simplified description implicates perceptual factors and individual differences in lethal force decision making, which ongoing research continues to address. However, personality-based factors have been less explored as to how they might affect either threat perception or behavioral responses in a lethal force decision. The current investigation examined multiple personality traits with the potential to influence lethal force decision making, including aggression, impulsivity, and the Big Five traits. These measures were compared to threat perception and behavioral responses made to a variety of lethal force stimuli broadly categorized as clear threats, ambiguous threats, and clear nonthreats. Samples were recruited from combat-trained infantry, military recruits, and the civilian community to control for prior lethal force training. Although there was a strong omnibus relationship between threat perception and the likelihood of a behavioral response, neither military training nor personality differences had any impact on threat perception or a binary (e.g., shoot/don't-shoot) behavioral response. Therefore, we conclude that perception dominates personality in lethal force decision making when the threat assessment decision is limited to factors such as weapon presence or posture rather than emotion.
... This effect, now known as "the police officer's dilemma," has been shown experimentally as well. A large body of research that has examined racial bias in shoot/ don't shoot scenarios using college students, community members, and police officers demonstrates that implicit attitudes influence the decision to shoot (for a review, see Kahn & McMahon, 2015; but see James et al., 2016, for an alternative perspective). In sum, police officers use stereotypes-implicitly and/or explicitly-to identify suspects and those stereotypes influence the treatment "suspects" receive. ...
Police officers partially rely on implicit and explicit stereotypes in their interactions with the public. We investigated if these attitudes are reciprocated, specifically, if people of color implicitly fear police, and whether the events of the summer of 2020 changed the public's attitudes about police. Seven hundred and fifty‐nine college students (235 BIPOC) participated, 373 in 2019, 386 in fall 2020. BIPOC participants more readily implicitly associated police officers with threat; implicit police‐as‐threat scores increased after the summer of 2020 regardless of race. Explicit attitudes showed the same pattern: BIPOC participants had less favorable attitudes of police; participants in Fall 2020 had less favorable attitudes of police. Implicit attitudes were predicted by race, time, the experience of being treated with (dis)respect, and an emphasis on the binding aspect of morality. Explicit attitudes were predicted by the same variables, as well as specific community variables, the moral foundation of individualizing, and implicit attitudes.
... Not all studies implicate a shooter bias, however.Correll et al. (2007b) compared trained police officers to a sample of college students and found the police did not exhibit such a bias against unarmed African Americans, andJames et al. (2016) found that officers are less likely to shoot African Americans whether armed or unarmed. ...
Much research has found that implicit associations between Black male faces and aggression affect dispositional judgments and decision-making, but there have been few investigations into downstream effects on explicit episodic memory. The current experiment tested whether such implicit associations interact with explicit recognition memory using an associative memory paradigm in younger and older adults. Participants studied image pairs featuring faces (of Black or White males) alongside handheld objects (uncategorized, kitchenware, or weapons) and later were tested on their recognition memory for faces, objects, and face/object pairings. Younger adults were further divided into full and divided attention encoding groups. All participants then took the race faces implicit association test. Memory for image pairs was poorer than memory for individual face or object images, particularly among older adults, extending the empirical support for the age-related associative memory deficit hypothesis (Naveh-Benjamin in J Exp Psychol Learn Mem Cognit 26:1170–1187, 2000) to associations between racial faces and objects. Our primary hypothesis—that older adults’ associative memory deficit would be reduced under Black/weapon pairings due to their being schematically related stimuli—was not confirmed. Younger adults and especially older ones, who were predominantly White, exhibited an own-race recognition bias. In addition, older adults showed more negative implicit bias toward Black faces. Importantly, mixed linear analyses revealed that negative implicit associations for Black faces predicted increased explicit associative memory false alarm rates among older adults. Such a pattern may have implications for the criminal justice system, particularly when weighting eyewitness testimony from older adults.
... Indeed, implicit racial associations and stereotypes about Black people tend to be more negative than explicitly reported attitudes, and they are pervasive, some even among Black people . Implicit anti-Black associations are also prevalent among police officers, with studies using implicit association tests revealing that 73% of officers automatically linked Black race to negative concepts (Andersen et al., 2021) and 96% exhibited racial bias on a weapon categorization task (James et al., 2016). ...
We call for psychologists to expand their thinking on fair and just public safety by engaging with the “Abolition Democracy” framework that W. E. B. Du Bois articulated as the need to dissolve slavery while simultaneously taking affirmative steps to rid its toxic consequences from the body politic. Because the legacies of slavery continue to produce disparities in public safety in the United States, both harming Black people and the institutions that could keep them safe, psychologists must take seriously questions of history and structure in addition to immediate situations. In this article, we consider the state of knowledge regarding psychological processes that contribute to discriminatory public safety. We also identify ways in which theorizing about discriminatory public safety can be improved by appreciating the historical and sociopolitical context in which policing occurs. © 2021 The Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues
... Second, at least two situational variables are likely salient to police executives as they decide what steps to take in the aftermath of such an event: the race of the citizen involved and whether he or she was armed. In recent years there has been substantial academic and political debate over the (implicit or explicit) role of citizen race in officers' decision-makingespecially regarding the use of deadly force (Edwards et al., 2019;Goff et al., 2016;James et al., 2016;Nix, Campbell, Byers, & Alpert, 2017;Ross, 2015). On the one hand, the findings from many prior studies (e.g., Fryer, 2016) are difficult to make sense of because they condition on mediator variables (stops, arrests, or fatal shootings), which biases the relationship between citizen race and outcomes of interest Ross et al., 2018). ...
... The current evidence also contributes to a growing understanding about the psychological processes involved in use-of-force. The most thorough evidence of decision biases thus far has been documenting the role of prejudices and stereotypes in affecting bias during a threat response [61][62][63][64][65][66] . For use-of-force training implications, threatening contexts can produce more reliable learning effects than non-threatening contexts 67 and inducing stress or emotion can actually aid identification in certain tasks [68][69][70] . ...
Stress can impact perception, especially during use-of-force. Research efforts can thus advance both theory and practice by examining how perception during use-of-force might drive behavior. The current study explored the relationship between perceptual judgments and performance during novel close-combat training. Analyses included perceptual judgments from close-combat assessments conducted pre-training and post-training that required realistic use-of-force decisions in addition to an artificially construed stress-inoculation event used as a training exercise. Participants demonstrated significant reductions in situational awareness while under direct fire, which correlated to increased physiological stress. The initial likelihood of firing upon an unarmed person predicted the perceptual shortcomings of later stress-inoculation training. Subsequently, likelihood of firing upon an unarmed person was reduced following the stress-inoculation training. These preliminary findings have several implications for low or zero-cost solutions that might help trainers identify individuals who are underprepared for field responsibilities.
Research points to implicit bias as one factor driving racial disparities in enforcement activities. Addressing implicit bias is essential to promote equity and integrity in policing and to building trust and legitimacy in communities, according to the President’s Task Force on 21 st Century Policing. However, investigations into the efficacy of implicit bias training for police are sparse. This study evaluates in-service implicit bias training, examining the impact on trainees’ knowledge, attitudes, and self-professed likelihood of applying antibias strategies to mitigate the effects of implicit bias. We found significant improvements to officers’ knowledge of how implicit bias works and its consequences, an increased attribution to procedural justice, and officers reported being more likely, following the training, to apply strategies to reduce the effects of implicit bias during encounters with public. Results benefit police departments that seek to reduce unconscious prejudice, ensure impartiality and equity, and develop better relations with minority communities.
The concept of “defunding the police” calls for municipalities to divert monetary resources away from police departments toward other social services to limit the scope of police response. Although this approach has gained traction, current research fails to gauge how police officers perceive “defunding arguments” and the feasibility of diverting calls to other social service providers. This study utilized 15 semi-structured in-depth interviews to investigate police perceptions of the defund the police movement. Using thematic analysis, we identified three emergent themes across the interviews. These themes included distrust of the police, extended scope of the police, and caution toward redirecting mental health calls away from police departments. This study offers insight into the complexity of diverting mental health calls away from police departments. It also sheds light on the recurring nature of domestic violence responses within their respective communities.
Scholars have increasingly argued for the merits of advocacy-based research versus research considered from the pursuit of objective truth. In this essay, I seek to extend Tsang's Journal of Management Inquiry essay (2022) and suggest that political advocacy has replaced the pursuit of objective truth in management research. Through the use of example, I suggest that this focus on politically based advocacy will be detrimental to the continued professional development of the management discipline.
In Illinois vs. Wardlow (2000), the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that presence in a “high‐crime” area is one factor that police can consider when establishing reasonable suspicion to justify a Terry stop. Some legal scholars argue that through this decision the Court propagated inequity in police stops by setting a lower evidentiary standard for establishing reasonable suspicion in neighborhoods with greater numbers Black residents, which are more likely than White neighborhoods to be considered crime hot spots. To assess these claims, I analyze pedestrian stop data from the Chicago Police Department for the years 2016 and 2017. Using spatial regression techniques, I evaluate relationships between neighborhood measures of Black disadvantage, police stop justifications, and “hit rates” of stops. The results suggest that reasonable suspicion is uniquely constructed in disadvantaged Black neighborhoods but that this does not result in significantly different enforcement rates. Based on these results, I argue that policing scholars must reconsider sources of inequity in policing and, in particular, consider the role of the law in shaping these outcomes.
This brief review article focuses on police‐perpetrated racism against African American and Black (AAB) communities, typically in the form of police brutality, police violence, and aggressive policing. We assert that police‐perpetrated racism constitutes a racial justice and public health problem. A growing body of literature supports this assertion, with the consequences and correlates of direct police contact, vicarious police contact, and place‐based exposure to aggressive policing including mental health (e.g., anxiety symptoms, depressive symptoms, trauma) and physical health (e.g., poorer self‐rated health, hypertension) sequelae. We assert that eradicating police‐perpetrated racism requires acknowledgement of the historical landscape of policing as well as the ways in which police‐perpetrated racism maintains racial hierarchies. We conclude by making recommendations for promoting racial equity in policing.
Instances of racial disparities are well documented in the United States' criminal justice system. This study reviewed the literature and conducted quantitative analyses on the role of race in forensic decision making among practitioners and other stakeholders in the criminal justice system. We hypothesized that Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) individuals will be significantly more likely to be associated with adverse outcomes than White individuals. A search strategy was developed and registered before the study commenced. Quantitative data were extracted from eligible studies to estimate the pooled effect size (odds ratio) for the effects of race. A final sample of 11 data sources (published study or dataset) was identified. Decision making by all stakeholders in the criminal justice system, including forensic practitioners, case investigators, and juries were evaluated in these studies. Two datasets evaluated the decision-making process involving forensic psychology or psychiatry, three focused on forensic evidence, four on forensic pathology, one involved forensic anthropology cases, and one involved clinical forensic medicine cases. The pooled odds ratio was estimated to be 1.10 (95% confidence interval: 0.67-1.81), indicating a trivial or negligible effect of race (i.e., BIPOC individuals were no more likely to be associated with adverse outcomes given the current evidence). Importantly, the results of this study do not indicate that bias or disparity related to race does not exist in forensic decision making in the criminal justice system. More research into systemic bias in forensic decision making, especially in relation to race, is needed. Forensic anthropologists are uniquely positioned to study and address racial disparities in the criminal justice system involving forensic science because of its interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary nature. This study highlights the need for further research and advocates for forensic anthropologists to be more involved in the study of the science and the impacts of forensic science rather than focusing on methodological advancement.
The objective of this study was to use interval-level metrics to code a random sample of body worn camera footage from a large ( N ∼ 700) municipal police department in 2019. Just over 1,100 videos were coded for (1) community member factors; (2) officer behaviors—including an overall “performance” score; and (3) encounter outcomes. Our goal was to answer the following: Do police receive higher overall performance scores when interacting with some types of community members compared to others? Which community member factors significantly predict specific officer behaviors? Which community member factors significantly predict encounter outcomes? We found that officers received higher performance scores when interacting with women, and with community members with mental illness. We found that socio-economic-status and gender were the most common predictors of officer behaviors, while race and ethnicity, socio-economic-status, gender, and armed status predicted encounter outcomes. The policy implications of these findings are discussed.
The Oxford Handbook of Moral Responsibility is a collection of 33 articles by leading international scholars on the topic of moral responsibility and its main forms, praiseworthiness and blameworthiness. The articles in the volume provide a comprehensive survey on scholarship on this topic since 1960, with a focus on the past three decades. Chapters address the nature of moral responsibility—whether it is fundamentally a matter of deserved blame and praise; or whether it is grounded anticipated good consequences, such as moral education and formation; or whether there are different kinds of moral responsibility. They examine responsibility for both actions and omissions, whether responsibility comes in degrees, and whether groups such as corporations can be responsible. The traditional debates about this issue focus on threats to moral responsibility from causal determinism, and from the absence of the ability to do otherwise that may result; and chapters in the volume appraise the most recent developments in these debates. They also discuss how physics, neuroscience, and psychological research on topics such as addiction and implicit bias illuminate the ways and degrees to which we might be responsible. Philosophical reflection on personal relationships and moral responsibility has been especially intense over the past two decades, and a number of chapters reflect this development. Blameworthiness is often linked to attitudes such as moral resentment and indignation, and the role of these attitudes in relationships is explored. Forgiveness and reconciliation also have an important role in personal relationships, and chapters in the volume explore these responsibility-related notions.
When a police officer uses deadly physical force, the public often questions this behavior. There may be times, however, when deadly force might be expected by the public. For example, as first responders to terrorist and active shooter events, officers are expected to quickly end the confrontation, and deadly force may be the only option available. Contemporary scholarship, however, does not explore the public’s view of when the use of deadly force is acceptable or expected. This chapter offers an exploratory examination of when deadly force is acceptable to the American public. A vignette research design was used that described an active shooter event, integrating four contextual dimensions that might influence the use of deadly force. A convenience sample of college students responded to an online survey to explore the public’s views of the need to use deadly force. Results indicate that respondents receiving vignettes in which the officer uses deadly force, rather than not, are more likely to agree with this behavior. Further, non-White students are less likely to agree with the immediate use of deadly force.KeywordsDeadly forcePolice shootingsVignette researchActive shooter
We use an altmetric aggregator, the Altmetric Attention Score (AAS), to rank the influence of articles published in Criminology & Public Policy from the journal's inception through July 31, 2022. We also rank articles based on specific AAS components, namely, Twitter, news, and policy document mentions. Last, we regress AASs on article‐level predictors, including research category, funding, open access type, and time since publication. With few exceptions, policing scholarship far outweighs other categories of research in terms of AAS‐measured societal impact. In contrast to bibliometrics (e.g., citation counts), altmetrics measure scholarship's societal impact, including its influence on policy. Since Criminology & Public Policy was initially created with the intention of influencing crime‐related policy, it is important to gauge the extent to which that has occurred. Other policy‐oriented (or perhaps all) criminal justice/criminology journals should evaluate their influence via altmetrics.
Em ambientes dinâmicos com elevado grau de incerteza, o tempo de resposta é menor, porquanto o processo antecipatório simplifica o processo de seleção da informação, foca-se no alvo e em simultâneo usa estratégias de controlo do ambiente, onde a intuição ou instinto, sempre que recorrem à memória de trabalho de longo prazo e se aliam à maior experiência, prática e perícia, aumentam a eficiência da decisão, cujo sucesso é tanto maior, quanto mais próximo da realidade estiver o “scanning ambiente” (Tenenbaum, 2004). Considerados alguns ambientes policiais complexos e geradores de stress (e.g., buscas, revistas, detenções de criminosos, rixas), exige-se do investigador criminal a capacidade de gerir a imprevisibilidade e risco associado, e de decidir com rapidez a partir da selecção e tratamento da informação situacional, apenas possível se houver organizacionalmente elevados índices de formação e treino frequente, com enfoque para os exercícios de tiro com simulador porque mais próximos da realidade. O processo decisório do polícia é, pelos motivos invocados, complexo e condicionado por variáveis psicofisiológicas, ambientais e de tarefa (Davies, 2015). Sistemas sociais complexos, exigem elevadas competências técnicas ao nível do tiro de polícia e inerentemente da TD dos investigadores criminais da P.J., cujo desempenho, através do único estudo conhecido em Portugal com estas variáveis, deverá ser objeto de reflexão por evidenciar dados pouco consentâneos com os resultados de excelência pretendidos.
This article theorizes the contemporary meaning and significance of populism in Black politics. It is based on a reading of the mass protests characteristic of the Black Lives Matter movement across the US during 2020. The argument developed suggests contemporary Black populism evidenced by its multicultural and multiracial mobilizations during 2020 comprised and catalyzed several strategic social orientations, organized around the public ventilation of critical affective repertoires of Black feeling. The idea of Black feeling is emphasized historically and curatorially via the public mourning of Black families over the police killing of Black people and the public rage of Black protesters. The article also develops the idea of a populism of Black feeling involved in activating and influencing a marking and critique of white sovereignty that split white solidarity into supporters and opponents of BLM. In highlighting this split in whiteness as symptomatic of a post-civil rights crisis of white sovereignty, the article suggests Black populism is now a significant dimension of entrenching that crisis.
How police officers exercise their unique power to use deadly force continues to be a topic of interest among academics and has recently become arguably the most visible public policy issue related to the criminal justice system in the United States. Academic interest in officers’ use of deadly force includes attention to how officers make the decision to discharge their firearms during encounters with citizens. Binder and Scharf posited that actions and decisions made by officers early in a high-risk police-citizen encounter can impact their decision to use deadly force at the conclusion of the encounter. This decision-making model, however, has been subject to very little empirical scrutiny in the decades since it was proposed (see Fridell & Binder; Scharf & Binder for notable exceptions). To bring their comprehensive framework back to the forefront and provide additional empirical assessment, the authors used the Binder and Scharf model as a framework to examine 82 officers’ decisions to shoot or hold fire in incidents that involved multiple officers who ultimately made different decisions regarding lethal force. Results from the qualitative analysis suggest that the presence and actions of other officers on scene can have a notable impact on officers’ decision-making during a high-risk police-citizen encounter. Furthermore, findings from this study extend the Binder-Scharf model by highlighting the role of conscious and unconscious decision-making and the impact of social roles on officers’ choices during an officer-involved shooting.
We endorse Cesario's call for more research into the complexities of “real-world” decisions and the comparative power of different causes of group disparities. Unfortunately, these reasonable suggestions are overshadowed by a barrage of non sequiturs, misdirected criticisms of methodology, and unsubstantiated claims about the assumptions and inferences of social psychologists.
In psychology, causal inference – both the transport from lab estimates to the real world and estimation on the basis of observational data – is often pursued in a casual manner. Underlying assumptions remain unarticulated; potential pitfalls are compiled in post-hoc lists of flaws. The field should move on to coherent frameworks of causal inference and generalizability that have been developed elsewhere.
This commentary expands the discussion of Cesario's Missing Forces Flaw by identifying and discussing variables that influence police shooting decisions but are often absent from bias-based research. Additionally, the closing identifies novel recommendations for future contextually related research.
This article examines focus group responses from an England Police Force Independent Advisory Group (IAG). It explores the role played by IAG members in advising police on cultural matters associated with Honour Based Abuse (HBA), Forced Marriage (FM) and Female Genital Mutilation (FGM). Findings illustrate that IAG members, largely ethnic minority female in composition, possess a wealth of knowledge, skills, and experience. They adeptly scrutinise officer decision-making, provide useful case management interventions and challenge the dominant narrative. They propose that statutory services inadvertently perpetuate racial stereotypes by tokenistic use of ethnic minority professionals. IAGs expose that health professionals hold vital information about FGM adult victims, which under current UK guidance they are not obligated to disclose. IAGs are an untapped operational resource, capable of supporting professionals (and thereby victims) within Multi Agency Risk Assessment Conferences. Documenting of IAG decisions is necessary to evaluate their consistency, value, and long term impact.
The recruitment of women and minority group members was intended to move Canadian police forces towards societal representation and to enhance services provided to, and improve relations with, women and racially marginalized groups. This review contemplates progress towards these goals at a time of extraordinary public dissatisfaction with Western policing. A rationale is offered for reconsidering the 50% representation target for women and it is emphasized just how little we yet know about racial bias in policing. The review ends with a call for rigorous, apolitical, research to untangle the complex interactions underscoring the considered questions within.
Blacks, Latinx, and American Indians are killed by police at a disproportionately higher rate than Whites and Asians, but whether racial discrimination accounts for these killings remains disputed. We contribute to this debate by examining structural conditions in U.S. metropolitan areas that are associated with the expected count of police-caused killings. Using an economic competition model, we find that the size of the metropolitan Black population (relative to the White population) positively predicts the expected count of police-caused killings for Blacks. Moreover, the size of the Latinx population (relative to Whites) predicts the expected count of police-caused killings of Latinx civilians. Furthermore, we find that metropolitan areas with more mixed-race neighborhoods experience higher expected counts of police-caused killings, specifically, for all, Black and White civilians. Finally, we find that overall population size also predicts the expected number of people killed by the police but violent crime does not, calling into question accounts that deaths are a function of crime. Our findings suggest, first, that the underlying conditions that lead to the deaths of Black and Latinx people at the hands of police are different than police-caused deaths of people of other races. Second, in developing solutions to the serious social problem of police-caused deaths, we need to look beyond the proximal causes of these deaths (i.e., the police) to the distal factors operating at the metropolitan level that promote White supremacy.
Using a simple videogame, the effect of ethnicity on shoot/ don't shoot decisions was examined. African American or White targets, holding guns or other objects, appeared in complex backgrounds. Participants were told to “shoot” armed targets and to “not shoot” unarmed targets. In Study 1, White participants made the correct decision to shoot an armed target more quickly if the target was African American than if he was White, but decided to “not shoot” an unarmed target more quickly if he was White. Study 2 used a shorter time window, forcing this effect into error rates. Study 3 replicated Study 1's effects and showed that the magnitude of bias varied with perceptions of the cultural stereotype and with levels of contact, but not with personal racial prejudice. Study 4 revealed equivalent levels of bias among both African American and White participants in a community sample. Implications and potential underlying mechanisms are discussed.
We found the PPD’s policies to be in need of significant refinement. Officers need more less-lethal options.
In addition, the department’s use of force policies need to be more explicit and officers need more training
on them. Regarding training, it is essential that the PPD establish a field training officer (FTO) program. We
also found that much of the PPD’s training on use of force concepts and tactics is too infrequent, lacks the
appropriate concepts, and, at times, lacks standards, which leaves officers inadequately prepared to make
decisions in an increasingly complex environment. The PPD’s investigations of deadly force incidents need
to be completed in a more timely fashion. In particular, discharging officers should be interviewed within
72 hours of an incident. Furthermore, the scope of the investigation and reporting on the administrative
side needs to be expanded to reflect the goals of the use of force review board. The PPD’s review process
needs to enable the department to hold officers accountable, learn from deadly force incidents, selfcritique,
and change as a result. Last, in an effort to maximize transparency, the PPD should request the
independent investigation of unarmed officer-involved shooting (OIS) incidents from another capable
and legitimate authority. The department also needs to improve its relations with the police advisory
commission and be more forthcoming with deadly force investigative files and data.
Background Research on racial bias in the United States includes findings that Americans tend to view blacks as more dangerous than whites. Some have argued that this bias provides a likely explanation for the disproportionate number of ethnic and racial minorities shot by police. One piece of evidence for this proposition comes from experimental work in which research participants push “shoot” or “don’t shoot” buttons when still images of people and objects that may or may not be weapons are presented in rapid succession. These studies have established that participants tend to subconsciously pair black individuals with weapons and white individuals with neutral objects. However, it is not clear from these studies that the subconscious racial bias identified by researchers affects actual decisions to shoot, perhaps because the techniques used to assess the bias-shooting link bear so little resemblance to real-world shootings. Methods This paper reports on the results of a novel laboratory experiment designed to overcome this critical limitation by using high-fidelity deadly force judgment and decision-making simulators to assess both subconscious and behavioral bias among 48 research participants, recruited from the general population. Results Study results suggest that subconscious associations between race and threat exhibited by participants are not linked to their shooting behavior. Conclusions The implications of this finding for understanding how race and ethnicity affect decisions to shoot, and for conducting empirical research on this important topic, are discussed.
Objective: To demonstrate that psychophysiology may have applications for objective assessment of expertise development in deadly force judgment and decision making (DFJDM).
Background: Modern training techniques focus on improving decision-making skills with participative assessment between trainees and subject matter experts primarily through subjective observation. Objective metrics need to be developed. The current proof of concept study explored the potential for psychophysiological metrics in deadly force judgment contexts.
Method: Twenty-four participants (novice, expert) were recruited. All wore a wireless Electroencephalography (EEG) device to collect psychophysiological data during high-fidelity simulated deadly force judgment and decision-making simulations using a modified Glock firearm. Participants were exposed to 27 video scenarios, one-third of which would have justified use of deadly force. Pass/fail was determined by whether the participant used deadly force appropriately.
Results: Experts had a significantly higher pass rate compared to novices (p < 0.05). Multiple metrics were shown to distinguish novices from experts. Hierarchical regression analyses indicate that psychophysiological variables are able to explain 72% of the variability in expert performance, but only 37% in novices. Discriminant function analysis (DFA) using psychophysiological metrics was able to discern between experts and novices with 72.6% accuracy.
Conclusion: While limited due to small sample size, the results suggest that psychophysiology may be developed for use as an objective measure of expertise in DFDJM. Specifically, discriminant function measures may have the potential to objectively identify expert skill acquisition.
Application: Psychophysiological metrics may create a performance model with the potential to optimize simulator-based DFJDM training. These performance models could be used for trainee feedback, and/or by the instructor to assess performance objectively.
Prior research has sought to identify appropriate mechanisms that can effectively control police officers' decisions to use deadly force. Using data from Philadelphia for a period of more than two decades, this article employs interrupted time series analysis (ARIMA) to examine the impact of two changes in administrative policy on monthly levels of deadly force in Philadelphia. Findings support prior deadly force research suggesting that administrative policy can be an effective deadly force discretion control, but the Philadelphia experience indicates that formal policy can be outweighed by the personal philosophies and policies of the chief, and that its impact is limited to elective encounters.
The connection between police use of deadly force and the criminal homicide rate has long been recognized in the literature. Their temporal relationship, however, has seldom been examined. The present study suggests that earlier research has underestimated the importance of the temporal relationship between the homicides that present the greatest level of public danger and police use of deadly force. This research suggests that police use of deadly force can best be understood through a "ratio-threat" version of the danger-perception theory. Through a time-series analysis of data from the Federal Bureau of Investigation's Supplementary Homicide Reports over a 21-year period, the ratio-threat hypothesis is confirmed. The results suggest that, on a national level, there exists a temporal connection between predatory crime and police use of deadly force. Implications for theory and future research are discussed.
Political or threat explanations for the state's use of internal violence suggest that killings committed by the police should be greatest in stratified jurisdictions with more minorities. Additional political effects such as race of the city's mayor or reform political arrangements are examined. The level of interpersonal violence the police encounter and other problems in departmental environments should account for these killing rates as well. Tobit analyses of 170 cities show that racial inequality explains police killings. Interpersonal violence measured by the murder rate also accounts for this use of lethal force. Separate analyses of police killings of blacks show that cities with more blacks and a recent growth in the black population have higher police killing rates of blacks, but the presence of a black mayor reduces these killings. Such findings support latent and direct political explanations for the internal use of lethal force to preserve order.
Objective
Advance the methodological techniques used to examine the influence of suspect race and ethnicity on participant decisions to shoot in an experimental setting.
Methods
After developing and testing a novel set of 60 realistic, high definition video deadly force scenarios based on 30 years of official data on officer-involved shootings in the United States, three separate experiments were conducted testing police (n = 36), civilian (n= 72) and military (n = 6) responses (n = 1,812) to the scenarios in high-fidelity computerized training simulators. Participants’ responses to White, Black and Hispanic suspects in potentially deadly situations were analyzed using a multi-level mixed methods strategy. Key response variables were reaction time to shoot and shooting errors.
Results
In all three experiments using a more externally valid research method than previous studies, we found that participants took longer to shoot Black suspects than White or Hispanic suspects. In addition, where errors were made, participants across experiments were more likely to shoot unarmed White suspects than unarmed Black or Hispanic suspects, and were more likely to fail to shoot armed Black suspects than armed White or Hispanic suspects. In sum, this research found that participants displayed significant bias favoring Black suspects in their decisions to shoot.
Conclusions
The results of these three experiments challenge the results of less robust experimental designs and shed additional light on the broad issue of the role that status characteristics, such as race and ethnicity, play in the criminal justice system. Future research should explore the generalizability of these findings, determine whether bias favoring Black suspects is a consequence of administrative measures (e.g., education, training, policies, and laws), and identify the cognitive processes that underlie this phenomenon.
The current work proposes an approach for eliminating automatic bias by repeatedly exposing people to social stimuli where group membership (e.g., race) is unrelated to stereotypicality (e.g., being a violent criminal). Participants completed a computer program where they pretended they were police officers and decided as quickly as possible whether to shoot at Black and White suspects. Although initial responses to the program were biased by the race of the suspect, extensive practice with the program where race was unrelated to the presence or absence of a gun eliminated race biases immediately after practice (Study 1) and 24 h later (Study 2). However, this elimination of bias did not occur when race was related to the presence of a gun (Study 3). The final study (Study 4) revealed that extensive practice on the program led to the inhibition of racial concepts. The findings are discussed in terms of their implications for the elimination of automatic forms of bias.
Using a simple videogame, the effect of ethnicity on shoot/don't shoot decisions was examined. African American or White targets, holding guns or other objects, appeared in complex backgrounds. Participants were told to "shoot" armed targets and to "not shoot" unarmed targets. In Study 1, White participants made the correct decision to shoot an armed target more quickly if the target was African American than if he was White, but decided to "not shoot" an unarmed target more quickly if he was White. Study 2 used a shorter time window, forcing this effect into error rates. Study 3 replicated Study 1's effects and showed that the magnitude of bias varied with perceptions of the cultural stereotype and with levels of contact, but not with personal racial prejudice. Study 4 revealed equivalent levels of bias among both African American and White participants in a community sample. Implications and potential underlying mechanisms are discussed.
The current work examined police officers' decisions to shoot Black and White criminal suspects in a computer simulation. Responses to the simulation revealed that upon initial exposure to the program, the officers were more likely to mistakenly shoot unarmed Black compared with unarmed White suspects. However, after extensive training with the program, in which the race of the suspect was unrelated to the presence of a weapon, the officers were able to eliminate this bias. These findings are discussed in terms of their implications for the elimination of racial biases and the training of police officers.
Police officers were compared with community members in terms of the speed and accuracy with which they made simulated decisions to shoot (or not shoot) Black and White targets. Both samples exhibited robust racial bias in response speed. Officers outperformed community members on a number of measures, including overall speed and accuracy. Moreover, although community respondents set the decision criterion lower for Black targets than for White targets (indicating bias), police officers did not. The authors suggest that training may not affect the speed with which stereotype-incongruent targets are processed but that it does affect the ultimate decision (particularly the placement of the decision criterion). Findings from a study in which a college sample received training support this conclusion.
Judges, lawyers, and court staff have long recognized that explicit, or consciously endorsed, racial prejudices have no place in the American justice system. However, more subtle biases or prejudices can operate automatically, without awareness, intent, or conscious control. Members of the court community are beginning to identify this subtler form of racial bias, or implicit racial bias, as a partial explanation for persistent racial disparities in the criminal justice system. In the absence of empirically vetted interventions, some judges have created and currently use their own specialized jury instructions in hopes of minimizing expressions of such bias in juror judgment. However, depending on how these instructions are crafted, they may produce unintended, undesirable effects (e.g., by increasing expressions of bias against socially disadvantaged group members among certain types of individuals, or by making jurors feel more confident about their decision(s) without actually reducing expressions of bias in judgment). To prevent the distribution and implementation of jury instructions that may do more harm than good, any instruction of this kind must be carefully evaluated. In the present study, the authors sought to examine the efficacy of one specialized implicit bias jury instruction. Mock jurors who received the specialized instruction evaluated the strength of the defense’s case in subtly different ways from those who received a control instruction, but the instruction did not appear to significantly influence juror verdict preference, confidence, or sentence severity. Interestingly, the authors were unable to replicate with this sample the traditional baseline pattern of juror bias observed in other similar studies (c.f., Sommers & Ellsworth, 2000; Sommers & Ellsworth, 2001), which prevented a complete test of the value of the instructional intervention. Authors address several possible explanations for this failure to replicate, explore the possibility of shifts in cultural awareness and in the spontaneous correction for bias, and discuss implications for future work.
We examined implicit race biases in the decision to shoot potentially hostile targets in a multiethnic context. Results of two studies showed that college‐aged participants and police officers showed anti‐Black racial bias in their response times: they were quicker to correctly shoot armed Black targets and to indicate “don't shoot” for unarmed Latino, Asian, and White targets. In addition, police officers showed racial biases in response times toward Latinos versus Asians or Whites, and surprisingly, toward Whites versus Asians. Results also showed that the accuracy of decisions to shoot was higher for Black and Latino targets than for White and Asian targets. Finally, the degree of bias shown by police officers toward Blacks was related to contact, attitudes, and stereotypes. Overestimation of community violent crime correlated with greater bias toward Latinos but less toward Whites. Implications for police training to ameliorate biases are discussed.
The February 2012 killing of Trayvon Martin has slowly reignited the national conversation about race and violence. Despite the sheer volume of debate arising from this tragedy, insufficient attention has been paid to the potentially deadly mix of guns and implicit bias. Evidence of implicit bias, and its power to alter real-world behavior, is stronger now than ever. A growing body of research on “shooter bias” reveals that, as a result of implicit bias, White and Black Americans are more likely to shoot unarmed Black men than unarmed White men. The problem has been diagnosed. What remains to be determined is the solution. While defusing implicit bias is a daunting task, the stakes are too high to ignore the problem. States, responsible for laws regulating gun ownership and use, must help defuse implicit bias before it becomes deadly.
In this article, the authors identify three methodological short-comings of the classic Princeton trilogy studies: (a) ambiguity of the instructions given to respondents, (b) no assessment of respondents' level of prejudice, and (c) use of an outdated list of adjectives. These shortcomings are addressed in the authors' assessment of the stereotype and personal beliefs of a sample of University of Wisconsin students. In contrast to the commonly espoused fading stereotype proposition, data suggest that there exists a consistent and negative contemporary stereotype of Blacks. Comparing the data from the Princeton trilogy studies with those of the present study, the authors conclude that the Princeton trilogy studies actually measured respondents' personal beliefs, not (as typically assumed) their knowledge of the Black stereotype. Consistent with Devine's model, high- and low-prejudiced individuals did not differ in their knowledge of the stereotype of Blacks but diverged sharply in their endorsement of the stereotype.
Normal Accidents analyzes the social side of technological risk. Charles Perrow argues that the conventional engineering approach to ensuring safety--building in more warnings and safeguards--fails because systems complexity makes failures inevitable. He asserts that typical precautions, by adding to complexity, may help create new categories of accidents. (At Chernobyl, tests of a new safety system helped produce the meltdown and subsequent fire.) By recognizing two dimensions of risk--complex versus linear interactions, and tight versus loose coupling--this book provides a powerful framework for analyzing risks and the organizations that insist we run them. The first edition fulfilled one reviewer's prediction that it "may mark the beginning of accident research." In the new afterword to this edition Perrow reviews the extensive work on the major accidents of the last fifteen years, including Bhopal, Chernobyl, and the Challenger disaster. The new postscript probes what the author considers to be the "quintessential 'Normal Accident'" of our time: the Y2K computer problem.
This paper tests two perspectives on the use of deadly force by police officers: the “community violence” and the “conflict” hypotheses. From descriptive data on felons killed in the Supplemental Homicide Reports it appears that police-caused homicides are predictable responses to acts or threatened acts of violence. An examination of the largest U.S. cities revealed a strong relationship between levels of economic inequality and the rate of felon killing by police officers as well as a weaker, yet consistent relationship between percent black and felon killing, supporting the conflict hypothesis. A relationship exists between violent crime rates and felon killing, but violent crime most often plays an intervening role between other social factors and the rate of felon killing. Our findings suggest that economic inequality should be included in any macro-level explanation of police-caused homicide.
This paper1 reports on a study of police officers killed in the line of duty and civilians killed by the police. The study was originated in 1971 in reaction to news reporting on the several mass media outlets at the local and national levels which focused on FBI statistics indicating police officers were being ‘assassinated’ at an alarming rate. A police reporter for an educational television station alarmed viewers with a report that 125 law enforcement officers had been killed in 1971, an increase of almost two and one-half times over 1963 when only 55 police officers were killed in all of that year. Police killings of citizens, however, were reported as isolated events. Although the death of civilians at the hands of police occurred from time to time, no news analyst attempted to show this as a national phenomenon.
Shooting incidents involving patrol officers are examined for the effect of suspect race and degree of hazard in the number of shots fired and hits made on suspects. Additional tests examine frequencies of shooting incidents among Blacks and Whites with respect to city population and various measures of police-citizen contact. Finally, fatalities are examined with respect to involvement in shooting and arrest rates. The results suggest an effect for degree of hazard; however, there was no evidence to suggest police bias against Blacks.
Using a videogame to simulate encounters with potentially hostile targets, three studies tested a model in which racial bias in shoot/don't-shoot decisions reflects accessibility of the stereotype linking Blacks to danger. Study 1 experimentally manipulated the race-danger association by asking participants to read newspaper stories about Black (vs. White) criminals. As predicted, exposure to stories concerning Black criminals increased bias in the decision to shoot. Studies 2 and 3 manipulated the number of White and Black targets with and without guns in the context of the videogame itself. As predicted, frequent presentation of stereotypic (vs. counterstereotypic) targets exacerbated bias (Study 2) and—consistent with our process account—rendered stereotypes more accessible (Study 3). Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Participants played a videogame in which they were required to make speeded shoot/don’t-shoot decisions in response to armed and unarmed targets, half of whom were Black, half of whom were White. Event-related brain potentials (ERPs), recorded during the game, assessed attentional processes related to target race and object type. Early ERP components (i.e., the P200 and N200) differentiated between Black and White targets, as well as between armed and unarmed targets. Explicitly measured cultural stereotypes predicted both this racial ERP differentiation and racial bias in the game. Most importantly, the degree of racial differentiation in the early ERP components predicted behavioral bias in the videogame and mediated the relationship between cultural stereotypes and bias.
Thesis--State University of New York at Albany. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 543-560). Photocopy of typescript.
The Effectiveness of Use of Force Simulation Training Final Report
- Craig Bennell
- Natalie J Jones
Bennell, Craig and Natalie J. Jones. 2005. The Effectiveness of Use of Force Simulation Training
Final Report. Psychology Department, Carleton University, Ottowa, Canada.
Policing and Homicide, 1976-98: Justifiable Homicide by Police, Police Officers Murdered by Felons
- Jodi Brown
- Patrick Langan
Brown, Jodi and Patrick Langan. 2001. Policing and Homicide, 1976-98: Justifiable Homicide by Police, Police Officers Murdered by Felons. Washington, DC: Bureau of Justice
Statistics, U.S. Department of Justice.
Deadly Force: What We Know: A Practitioner's Desk Reference on Police-Involved Shootings
- William A Geller
- Michael Scott
Geller, William A. and Michael Scott. 1992. Deadly Force: What We Know: A Practitioner's
Desk Reference on Police-Involved Shootings. Washington, DC: Police Executive Research
Forum.
Into the Kill Zone: A Cop's Eye View of Deadly Force
- David Klinger
Klinger, David. 2004. Into the Kill Zone: A Cop's Eye View of Deadly Force. San Francisco,
CA: Jossey-Bass.
Specifying and testing the threat hypothesis: Police use of deadly force
- Alan E Liska
- Jiang Yu
Liska, Alan E. and Jiang Yu. 1992. Specifying and testing the threat hypothesis: Police use
of deadly force. In (Alan E. Liska, ed.), Social Threat and Social Control. Albany: State
University of New York Press.
Reducing Inherent Danger: Report of the Task Force on Police-on-Police Shootings
- Christopher Stone
- Zachary Carter
- Thomas Belfiore
- Ella M Bully-Cummings
- Herbert Daughtry
- Michael J Farrell
- George Gascon
- Arva Rice
- Lew Rice
- Damon T Hewitt
Stone, Christopher, Zachary Carter, Thomas Belfiore, Ella M. Bully-Cummings, Herbert
Daughtry, Michael J. Farrell, George Gascon, Arva Rice, Lew Rice, and Damon T.
Hewitt. 2010. Reducing Inherent Danger: Report of the Task Force on Police-on-Police
Shootings. New York: New York State Task Force on Police-on-Police Shootings.
Final Report: Developing a Common Metric for Evaluating Police Performance in Deadly Force Situations
- Bryan J Vila
- Lois James
- Stephen M James
- Lauren B Waggoner
Vila, Bryan J., Lois James, Stephen M. James, and Lauren B. Waggoner. 2012. Final
Report: Developing a Common Metric for Evaluating Police Performance in Deadly Force
Situations. Washington, DC: National Institute of Justice.
is an assistant professor at the Washington State University (WSU) College of Nursing, and is a core faculty member in the WSU Sleep and Performance Research Center (SPRC) She has a BA in Psychology from Trinity College Dublin, and received her Ph.D. in Criminal Justice from WSU in 2011
- Lois James
Lois James, Ph.D. is an assistant professor at the Washington State University (WSU)
College of Nursing, and is a core faculty member in the WSU Sleep and Performance
Research Center (SPRC). She has a BA in Psychology from Trinity College Dublin, and
received her Ph.D. in Criminal Justice from WSU in 2011. During her time at WSU, Dr. L.
James's research focus is on understanding the impact of fatigue and other stressors on human performance. His particular area of expertise is on the impact of fatigue and distraction on officer driving performance
- S Dr
Dr. S. James's research focus is on understanding the impact of fatigue and other stressors
on human performance. His particular area of expertise is on the impact of fatigue and
distraction on officer driving performance.
Shots fired: A typological examination of New York City police firearms discharges, 1971-75. Unpublished PhD dissertation submitted to SUNY
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Fyfe, James J. 1978. Shots fired: A typological examination of New York City police firearms
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Reducing Inherent Danger: Report of the Task Force on Police-on-Police Shootings
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Stereotypes and racial bias in the decision to shoot
- Correll
- Vila Bryan J.