That’s the 2007 study. My link described a later study, from 2012, which used simulators/video games.
http://faculty.chicagobooth.edu/bernd.wittenbrink/research/pdf/cpjwsk07.pdf
They were totally different. This study flashed a picture and the participants were to determine if the person did or did not have a gun. It took the cops 560 ms to determine a white suspect had a gun while it took them 552 ms for black suspects. A whopping difference of 1.5%. Hardly evidence of a significant bias.
The whole concept of policing is that we as a society, have determined that the government has a monopoly on the legitimate use of force. The police officer on patrol is the tip of the sword of the state, and yes, he has the legal authority to take you into custody and take away your freedom. We have constitutional/legal protections in place to try and mitigate the state’s ability to use this power without just cause and/or abusively–few will argue we get that perfect, but few aside from extremists would argue we’re a totalitarian fascist police state.
That does in fact mean that he’s in the right and you are in the wrong if you respond to being taken into custody with resistance. I don’t really understand what people are advocating here–a “right to resist” police? I’m not sure how that squares way with the societal concept of government having a monopoly on the legitimate use of force.
Now, “good policing” generally does stress deescalation, and avoid things being violent if they don’t have to be violent. There’s a huge number of arrests (probably the vast majority) in which the suspect is taken into custody with no violence on either side. But when a suspect refuses to be taken into custody willingly, it is the police who are correct to use escalating force to achieve the arrest, and the suspect who is wrong to use escalating force to resist arrest.
An old saying that I don’t know if cops still use in training was “ask, tell, make” or some variation. Basically it’s an escalation of force guideline. “Sir, please exit the car.” “Sir, exit the car now.” After that, you make the person exit the car. It’s usually not taken to mean literally that you ask once, tell once, then use force. It’s usually more practiced as you ask them several times, when they don’t respond to that you tell them in an aggressive manner–many people will be intimidated (which is good) and comply at that point. Only after that’s not working do you then use force.
It isn’t necessarily relevant to a situation with a gun, where things may need to be escalated to lethal force very, very rapidly. But I’ll be honest, I’ve seen hundreds of videos of police interactions with civilians and it’s very, very rare that a cop won’t first ask you to do what he says, then tell, usually many times, and only then will he use force. Until we know what happened in between the cops arriving at the table CD stand and the wrestling match will we know if the police started off overly aggressive (and like I also mentioned, that would be a “good policing” issue, it still wouldn’t really impact whether the shooting is legal, which is solely based on whether or not a reasonable officer would fear life or limb in the moment of the shooting.)
Weird double post. In case you missed my first response, that’s the 2007 study. My link described a later study, from 2012, which used simulators/video games.
Maybe this one:
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1540-4560.2012.01749.x/full
Seems like the same design.
That looks like it – thanks. They use a video game simulator and report that the highest average bias was against blacks, then Latinos, then whites, then Asians. The regular students studied only had a significant bias against blacks, and not Latinos, but the police officers studied had bias against both blacks and Latinos.
The US police should have more body cameras on them, so that they can catch evidence of when police carry out unlawful actions too, such as this!
Then the evidence would be used against the officers and it’d be a clear cut case.
Good - there is some justice out there!
This case also sounds like manslaughter. Lock 'em up and throw away the key!
or in the case of this thug of a police officer, death row and death by firing squad will do it! 
There’s no significant difference. The biggest gap between races is 21 ms or 4% of the reaction time. That’s hardly significant and 21 ms is meaningless in the real world.
Even if 21 ms were a meaningful amount of time there’s the huge question of how flashing a picture and measuring button response time translates to the real world. So even if this found a meaningful time difference, it holds much less weight than a study done on a police training simulator.
Beyond that, their numbers make no sense. The participants said “gun” fastest for Latinos, but they also said “no gun” fastest. If this were any indication of bias Latinos shoud also be the slowest for “no gun”.
The bias doesn’t have to be huge to be significant and problematic. If officers (on average) are just a little bit more nervous around black suspects, and just a little more likely to draw their weapons, and just a little more likely to pull the trigger, then that’s a serious problem and needs to be addressed.
The point is that no good study has found what you said. The studies most applicable to the real world have found the opposite. In realistic training simulators cops are less likely to shoot black people and they take longer to do so if they do.
I disagree with that point. I think you’re making an opinion judgment on this study, and I disagree with that opinion.
No, it’s not the whole point (they’re tasked with more than just catching bad guys), especially when it collides with the civil rights I specifically qualified the statement with: “first re-frame things in a way where we reintroduce the human element”.
The entire problem we’re trying to confront, here, is prejudice and the influence it has on shaping perceptions-- how and why there is bias in the portrayal and/or treatment of a race of people as “potential threats”.
In the same situation, a cop “calming down” possibly decreases the likelihood that anyone gets killed, because de-escalation is part of the job. That’s without touching on the gulf between potentially endangering yourself and lethal situation, all rounded out by the fact that the cop agreed to run that risk as part of the job, so they own a portion of the responsibility.
Which brings me back to my response to your question-- if you’re going to accept that it’s merely logical for a trained officer in a position of authority to kill civilians, in an act of fear/impulse, why is it any more difficult to empathize/acknowledge that some everyday, untrained person may struggle when placed in the same stressful situation (whether or not you or I think it’s right, wrong, or dumb)?
(The answer to this question shouldn’t be taken as a path to why it’s justified to shoot and kill a person, it should be used to understand what takes place in these situations and how/why they escalate. By that I mean, instead of looking at the other person as a bad guy who had it coming, look at him as an individual and walk through the historical or community-level experiences which lead to these types of encounters, as opposed to convenient technicalities after the fact that a man is dead.)
That IS the system we currently have. The problem is that too many police harm or kill civilians, which erodes trust in that authority. So no, I don’t buy that they can’t perform their job unless they’re allowed to impulsively kill people when scared of that job. That’s a slippery slope which leads to…
…and very often they get away with it…hence the perception issue and problem.
This has been a devastating week for our law enforcement. Two brutal shootings in a row. Thats on top of the cases widely reported in the past three years.
We have to find a solution. Some way to set very clear National use of force guidelines and hold officers accountable to them.
I’ve always supported law enforcement. I understand they are out there making split second decisions. They want to safely make it home to their families at the end of their shift. They deserve some leeway and the public’s support. Much more so than the average citizen that uses lethal force.
But pumping 5 shots (point blank range) into a guy laying pinned to the ground? Or the man in Minnesota that was following instructions. Told the officer he was carrying and needed to get his wallet. He still got killed.
This has to end. People have to be held accountable. We’re rapidly losing public confidence. Our Judicial system can’t function without the public’s support.
Here’s a meta-study that found the same sort of bias for shootings against black people. And here’s another paper from Correll’s team with similar conclusions to the 2012 one.
I certainly agree with you. In my opinion, whoever did the bolded bits above needs to be tried for murder (it’s not manslughter, it was deliberate). And if it was guilty, which ofc it would be, then it’s straight to “death row” for you. Nowhere else for you to run and hide.
You take someone’s life like that, you have to give up your own.
I don’t know if this is the right case to discuss police tactics or not since the beginning of the confrontation is missing. But getting tased is usually a sign of failure to comply with an officer’s instructions. It always goes downhill from there. Always. ALWAYS.
That aside, the officer’s body cams should have recorded what led up to the physical confrontation prior to them falling off. This is crucial information that should be released to the public right now. The audio should be useful regardless of the video.
If they said “hands where we can see them” and he didn’t comply then that’s where it started to fail. If they were responding to a gun complaint then any actions other than complying is going to raise the threat level exponentially.
Coincidentally, this thread and news coverage provides a perfect example of what I am talking about.
Dylan Noble:
The video in the above link was shot after Dylan had already been shot twice. He didn’t have any weapon on him.
If you do google news for these two cases you get:
Dylan Noble - 52
Alton Sterling - 2,685
It’s not that cops don’t unjustly shoot white people. It’s just that no one really cares, or at least they care a lot less than when they unjustly shoot black people.
Why do you think Americans might be more focused on the police killing of black people?
Possibly for the best of reasons.
But one important bottom line is that this disparate focus distorts the perception of the public.