It\u2019s widely assumed that white police officers are more likely to shoot black suspects as a result of racial bias, but recent research suggests the opposite is true.<\/p>\n
An innovative US study published in the Journal of Experimental Criminology found that participants in realistic simulations felt more threatened by black suspects yet took longer to pull the trigger on black men than on white or Hispanic men.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis behavioral \u2018counter-bias\u2019 might be rooted in people\u2019s concerns about the social and legal consequences of shooting a member of a historically oppressed racial or ethnic group,\u201d said the paper, which went practically unnoticed when it was published online on May 22, but took on new significance in the wake of a series of high-profile police-involved shootings involving black victims over the summer.<\/p>\n
The results back up what one of the researchers, University of Missouri-St. Louis professor David Klinger, has found after independently interviewing more than 300 police officers: While they don\u2019t want to shoot anybody, they really don\u2019t want to shoot black suspects.<\/p>\n
\u201cAcross these 300 interviews, I have multiple officers telling me that they didn\u2019t shoot only because the suspect was black or the suspect was a woman, or something that would not be consistent with this narrative of cops out there running and gunning,\u201d said Mr. Klinger, a former cop and author of \u201cInto the Kill Zone: A Cop\u2019s Eye View of Deadly Force\u201d (2006).<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen it comes to the issue of race, I\u2019ve never had a single officer tell me, \u2018I didn\u2019t shoot a guy because he was white.\u2019 I\u2019ve had multiple officers tell me, \u2018I didn\u2019t shoot a guy because he was black,\u2019 \u201d Mr. Klinger said. \u201cAnd this is 10, even 20 years ago. Officers are alert to the fact that if they shoot a black individual, the odds of social outcry are far greater than if they shoot a white individual.\u201d<\/p>\n
In fact, he said, officers involved in shootings have told him that they were actually relieved that the person they shot was white, not black.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe second things is, I\u2019ve had multiple officers tell me they were worried in the wake of a shooting because they shot a black person, and I\u2019ve had multiple officers tell me that they were glad that the person they shot was white,\u201d Mr. Klinger said. \u201cBecause then they knew they weren\u2019t going to have to be subject to the racial harangue.\u201d<\/p>\n
The interviews, which he conducted for a book he\u2019s planning to finish this year, run directly counter to the prevailing view pushed by social justice groups, politicians and others: that shooting victims such as 18-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson were victims at least in part of racial discrimination against blacks among cops.<\/p>\n
\u201cPolice officers \u2014 at least the ones I interviewed \u2014 are very sensitive to the race issue, but not in the way this popular narrative is running, i.e., cops are out there trying to find young black men who don\u2019t have guns so they can shoot them down like dogs in the street,\u201d Mr. Klinger said. \u201cThat just isn\u2019t anything I\u2019ve found in any of the research that I\u2019ve done.\u201d<\/p>\n
The study, \u201cRacial and ethnic bias in decisions to shoot seen through a stronger lens: experimental results from high-fidelity laboratory simulations,\u201d was conducted by Mr. Klinger and Washington State University assistant research professor Lois James and criminal justice and criminology professor Bryan Vila.<\/p>\n
For their research, the authors used a pioneering WSU simulation involving full-size, high-definition video instead of photos and handguns modified to shoot infrared beams instead of the \u201cshoot\u201d buttons typically used in deadly-force studies.<\/p>\n
About a third of the scenarios in the study were \u201cno shoot\u201d situations in which perpetrators of different races held cellphones or wallets, while the rest were \u201cshoot\u201d situations in which suspects were armed with knives or guns.<\/p>\n
The study found that the 48 participants waited longest before firing on black suspects in \u201cshoot\u201d scenarios, even though the participants exhibited \u201cstronger threat responses\u201d when facing black suspects than with white or Hispanic suspects.<\/p>\n
Eighty-five percent of the participants were white, and none was a police officer. At the same time, a 2013 study led by Ms. James using active police, military and the general public found the same phenomenon: All three groups took longer to shoot black suspects, and participants were also more likely to fire on unarmed whites and Hispanics than blacks.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn other words, there was significant bias favoring blacks where decisions to shoot were concerned,\u201d the 2013 study said, according to WSU News.<\/p>\n
The findings challenge not only popular assumptions but also previous social science research suggesting that whites, including police officers, have an \u201cimplicit bias\u201d against blacks. The drawback with such implicit-bias studies is that they use the push-button model and less realistic scenarios, said Mr. Klinger.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat\u2019s important research. It\u2019s good research,\u201d Mr. Klinger said. \u201cThe problem is it bears absolutely no relationship with actual shooting events. And people are not reading all the caveats that the authors put into the article saying, \u2018This is not real life, this is a laboratory, we don\u2019t know about external validity,\u2019 and so on.\u201d<\/p>\n
So why are blacks shot more often by police? While the FBI\u2019s national database has been widely criticized as incomplete, data compiled by Mr. Klinger in St. Louis over the past decade shows that 90 percent of police shootings involve blacks, even though they only make up 49 percent of the city\u2019s population.<\/p>\n
At the same time, he said, that figure is commensurate with the percentage of blacks involved in violent crime. Roughly 90 percent of those killed each year in St. Louis are black, and 90 percent of them are shot by other blacks, he said.<\/p>\n
What\u2019s more, he said, black SWAT officers make up about one-third of the St. Louis force \u2014 and they commit on average about one-third of the shootings each year.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd this is consistent with every other study that\u2019s ever been done,\u201d said Mr. Klinger, who, as a rookie officer in Los Angeles, fatally shot a black man armed with a knife who had stabbed his partner, Dennis Azevedo, in the chest.<\/p>\n
\u201cOnce you start looking at levels of violence, levels of threat, blacks are not shot in manners that are disproportionate to their involvement in illegal activity,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd it doesn\u2019t matter if the cop is black, white or Hispanic, police officers presented with deadly threats use deadly force. Period, paragraph, end of story.\u201d<\/p>\n
Source:\u00a0www.washingtontimes.com<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It\u2019s widely assumed that white police officers are more likely to shoot black suspects as a result of racial bias, but recent research suggests the opposite is true. An innovative US study published in the Journal of Experimental Criminology found that participants in realistic simulations felt more threatened by black suspects yet took longer to … Continue reading “The real racial bias: Cops more willing to shoot whites than blacks”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2961,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,10],"tags":[9427,10823,6952,2017,157,3648,140],"class_list":["post-17383","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","category-united-states","tag-black-crime","tag-cops","tag-police-officers","tag-racial-bias","tag-racism","tag-shootings","tag-violence"],"cc_featured_image_caption":{"caption_text":false,"source_text":false,"source_url":false},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17383","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2961"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=17383"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17383\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17384,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17383\/revisions\/17384"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=17383"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=17383"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=17383"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}