LaEscopeta
Member
(Disclaimer; I neither believe nor disbelieve the information listed below. Read it yourself and make up you own mind. Also I don’t know what is up with the cats-in-the-twilight-light-mist background on the first web site.)
http://www.world-science.net/exclusives/070703_police.htm
http://www.apa.org/journals/releases/psp9261006.pdf
http://www.world-science.net/exclusives/070703_police.htm
Link to the original study:Cops racist in shooting? Not as much as many of us.
July 3, 2007
Special to World Science
Scientific evidence lends only weak, or no, support to the popular idea that police shoot unarmed black people more readily than unarmed whites, a new study suggests. Instead, the study turned up a surprise: it’s the rest of us who, on average, show more racist, trigger-happy tendencies in situations like those cops face.
But practice reduces that tendency, they found—suggesting that for both groups, the common factor may be that training hones judgement and tames bias.
The researchers reported no evidence that police are any less prejudiced personally than civilians. In fact, they said, it was hard to get honest answers from officers about their racial views. “Despite our assurances of anonymity, several officers were unwilling to complete” questionnaires on this, they wrote in a paper on the study. “Others told us, rather bluntly, that they would not respond honestly to these sensitive questions.”
Nonetheless, computer simulations found that cops’ choices whether or not to shoot “are less susceptible to racial bias than are the decisions of community members,” wrote the researchers, Joshua Correll of the University of Chicago and colleagues, in the June issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
Seeking to shed light on an issue that has caused polarizing and bitter debates in many U.S. cities after police shootings of unarmed blacks, Correll’s team recruited about 260 participants for the multifaceted study. Roughly a third, respectively, were members of the Denver Police Department; police departments throughout the United States; and civilian Denver residents.
The researchers subjected the group to a battery of tests, including a videogame in which various black and white men, armed and unarmed, appeared. A player had to decide as quickly as possible whether to shoot or not.
Civilians were more “trigger-happy” than police overall, and also showed significant racial bias, the investigators found.
The Denver police results were also in the direction of a slight bias, but not quite statistically significant, they found. And national police showed no bias at all—though the researchers noted that the sam*ple of these officers wasn’t random. They had been recruited from among attendees at voluntary training seminars.
Overall, bias in shooting decisions “was weaker, or even nonexistent,” for cops—most of whom were patrol officers—com*pared to civilians, wrote the researchers.
On the other hand, they found, police showed a residual form of bias in which they made decisions more easily and quickly for targets that matched racial stereotypes. That is, they chose faster to shoot when an armed target was black, and to not shoot when an un*armed target was white. Civilians showed a similar tendency, wrote the researchers.
They also found that continued practice could reduce or eliminate the civilian bias in ultimate shooting decisions; but these effects were temporary, suggesting it would take intensive and long term training to wipe out bias permanently. Nonetheless, the finding raises the possibility that the lack of shooting decision bias among the police is a function of training, according to the researchers.
http://www.apa.org/journals/releases/psp9261006.pdf
