Police Researcher: Officers Have Similar Biases Regardless Of Race

[rpannier]

One common recommendation for reducing police brutality against people of color is to have police departments mirror a given area's racial makeup.

snip

Rashawn Ray, a fellow at the Brookings Institution and a sociology professor at the University of Maryland, studies race and policing. He says that diversity helps but that "officers, regardless of their race or gender, have similar implicit biases, particularly about Black people." Ray says it's not enough to have Black cops in a Black neighborhood if they don't know the area.

snip

That's exactly right. So the optics look good, but we can't make the assumption that simply because a person is Black that they're going to know about the neighborhood. Part of the fundamental problem when it comes to policing that I've noticed is that when police officers interact with a white person, there is a pause, a slight pause, a slight benefit of the doubt. The reason why that exists is because subconsciously, implicitly, when they interact with that person, they see their neighbor, a parent at their kids' school, and when they interact with a Black person, they are less likely to have what we call in sociology those "social scripts" that allow them to view people in those multitude of ways.

And if we're going to change this, one big recommendation I have: Police officers need housing assistance that mandates that they live in the metropolitan area where they are policing. Because community policing isn't about getting out, playing basketball with a kid in uniform. Community policing oftentimes is what you do when you're not on duty. The way that you're investing in a neighborhood.

https://www.npr.org/sections/live-updates-protests-for-racial-justice/2020/06/22/881643215/police-researcher-officers-have-similar-biases-regardless-of-race

[Nevilledog]

1. So cop culture is pervasive enough to make black officers prejudiced against other POC.

I believe it and it's fucked up.

It's next level brainwashing.

[StarfishSaver]

3. Nothing new

One of the reasons that slave masters often gave slaves the job of overseer and the SS guards put Jews in charge of the barracks.

If degraded and abused enough, oppressed people will sometimes take on the characteristics and attitudes of their oppressor. Several scholars, including John Blassingame, documented this phenomenon. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Slave_Community

[Nevilledog]

4. Absolutely.

[Blue_true]

6. The type of person recruited into policing matters also, big IMO.

I view police as former kids that were good at something, just not good enough to be part of the cool kids, whether that was top of the line jocks or top students academically. So there was likely some resentment and envy that play in how they police citizens.

[ecstatic]

5. We're all blanketed with media that's full of biased messaging and racist stereotypes

which can affect all of us on a subconscious level, so that sets the stage for the next level brainwashing that occurs in cop culture.

Also, I wonder if part of it might be that *some* officers (not all) treat civilians the way they are treated by other officers? Sort of like a cycle of abuse?

[uponit7771]

2. Yep, Ice Cube wrote about this years ago. Black cops showin out for the white cops to fit in.

[Igel]

8. It's worse than that.

Years ago a USC study was sent for review. Looked at how white people reacted (fMRI study, so no actual questions were asked) when they viewed a series of pictures. Black men, various ages, various garbs; white men, same set of ages, same garb. So 18-year-old black (and white) men in the same suit/buttonshirt/t-shirt/hoodie.

As expected, the white men and women reacted quickly with fear or worry about the young black men, esp. in "gang" clothes (whatever that meant in the late 1990s around USC).

Obvious conclusion was white racism.

Except a review said not so fast--you need a control.

So they reran the same stimuli, same setup, with controls. Black people, from the area. Same mix of ages and male/female.

They reached the same conclusion, which took some work. Because they couldn't tell the data apart. The black men and women reacted the same way, to the same extent, seeing black men of varying ages in various outfits, as the white people did. If you didn't know the labels for the data sets you wouldn't see a difference. The researchers worked hard to explain this, and they concluded that what was *really* shown was that the black men and women had been so exposed to white-oriented representations of black men that they'd internalized the white viewpoint and prejudices perfectly. There are other, simpler, explanations.

The actual "correct" finding was simply that the responses were the same--everything after that was political and social commentary so that the researchers could feel "relevant"; the research itself had no data beyond that and so nothing beyond that was based on evidence. The fMRI data don't lie.

[uponit7771]

10. I can believe it I know black people who don't like Black culture or other groups of black people

... because they know no difference

[StarfishSaver]

7. The problem is simply how individual racist cops treat individual black people

The problem is how a systemically racist institution dehumanizes and brutalizes black people.

[PTWB]

9. And how "good cops" turn a blind eye to bad cops.

That makes all the good cops into bad cops.