The Issue Of Racial Bias In Police Training

The journal article Understanding Police and Expert Performance: When Training Attenuates (vs. Exacerbates) Stereotypic Bias in the Decision to Shoot by Jessica J. Sim, Joshua Correll, and Melody S. Sadler discusses several studies that were done to address problems police officers are facing where they have shot individuals of color who were unarmed. Experiments were performed on participants and officers to see whether certain criteria was associated with Blacks and Whites having a presence or absence of a weapon or another object. The main question they are tackling is if more Blacks are targets of police force when unarmed or innocent, compared to Whites. When race is related to the presence or absence of a weapon, it raises ethical questions as to whether police training is teaching unreasonable actions towards individuals of target.

In regards of doing a short study, social psychologists and researchers wanted to address the question concerning racial bias in the decision to shoot. They did this by doing a first-person-shooter task (FPST) where participants viewed male targets who were either Black or White and holding a gun or another object (Correll, Sadler & Sim, 2013). When the target appeared on screen, they were to either press a button labeled shoot when armed or don’t shoot when unarmed. They found that race of the target did have a lot to do with the effects of shooting or not shooting (Correll et.al., 2013). Some of the participants were undergraduate students and they were faster to shoot armed targets when they were Black rather than White (Correll et.al., 2013). They were also fasted to choose don’t shoot for unarmed targets when they were White (Correll et.al., 2013). These results tell us that race did have a profound impact in the participants willingness to shoot.

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The article states, “This pattern of bias seems to reflect the accessibility of stereotypes that link Blacks to the concept of danger” (Correll et.al., 2013, pg. 292). Researchers wanted to address this question about if we tend to link Blacks to danger by doing another short study where participants read newspaper articles summarizing a series of violent crimes. The articles described the suspect as either White or Black and had attachments of police reports and sketches of the suspects (Correll et.al., 2013). After reading the articles, the participants performed the FPST. Researchers found that participants who read about Black criminals had a more extreme triggering criterion compared to those to had a conservative criterion for Whites (Correll et.al., 2013). Participants also showed no bias when experimenters diminished the Black-danger association by exposing them to articles about White criminals (Correll et.al., 2013). These studies suggest that better training may help officers and people who want to go into the police force overcome the stereotypes and reduce bias overall.

Experiment I was built on previous research where participants read newspaper articles describing crimes committed by Blacks or Whites. They wanted to test the impact of accessibility manipulation on the performance of undergraduates, expert undergraduates and officers (Correll et.al., 2013). They went about this by selecting 75 undergraduates and 52 officers. It’s important to note that the reported results are based on the performance participants who were not Black (Correll et.al., 2013). Undergraduates were then placed under two training conditions, novice or expert, and each group, including the officers, were set to read one of the two fabricated newspaper articles about Black-criminal or White-criminal (Correll et.al., 2013). Each group did the FPST test and points were either awarded or penalized by correctly shooting when necessary or having a false alarm (Correll et.al., 2013). Each group finished 16 practices and 100 test trials (Correll et.al., 2013).

The groups were then required to to read either a White-Criminal or Black-criminal article and had 5 minutes to study the article. They then had to recall as many details as they could and afterwards, performed the FPST (Correll et.al., 2013). Many variables were tested during this experiment and a formula was conducted to simplify and understand the results. Researchers calculated c and d for Black and White targets and computed the difference and average of both (Correll et.al., 2013). After doing computations for each group, results told researchers that participants showed a great amount of racial bias (Correll et.al., 2013). Participants revealed more sensitivity to Black that White targets. Overall, the results summed up what the researchers thought all along, that participants showed a greater bias towards Blacks and a greater willingness to shoot.

To sum it up, as