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Are cops more trigger-happy when aiming guns at minorities? That’s not a new question, though it’s certainly one being asked more frequently as protests have rolled across the country since the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. Last month, USA Today reported that police in Ferguson arrested black people at a rate nearly three times higher than that of people of other races — and the stats for at least twenty law enforcement agencies across Colorado are nearly as bad, the paper says, with the Lakewood Police Department ranking the worst.
The results of that study were published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in July 2007, in a paper titled “The Thin Blue Line: Police Officers and Racial Bias in the Decision to Shoot.” As with the earlier CUSP study, community members displayed a greater willingness to shoot an African-American target than a white one. But while police officers still displayed discrepancies in speed of response depending on race, the study determined that they did not make the ultimate decision to shoot based on a target’s color. In fact, training not only affected whether they chose to fire at a target, but it made them less likely to shoot on the basis of race.
Continue for more about Denver Police Department Captain Tracie Keesee’s new duties.
Identifying those differences will be just part of the job of the new national institute. The consortium tackling that task includes not only the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, but also the Yale Law School, the CPE and the Urban Institute in partnership with the Justice Department, working with a board of advisers that includes national leaders from law enforcement, academia and faith-based groups, as well as community stakeholders and civil-rights advocates. The group will provide training for law enforcement and communities on bias reduction and procedural fairness at five pilot sites around the country; it will also establish a clearinghouse where information, research and technical assistance will be readily available to law enforcement and communities alike. “It a really holistic approach to this issue that’s breaking nationally,” Keesee says. “You have a large swath of the population that believes the system isn’t working for them — and police are the most visible arm of that.”
