This is about ingroup and outgroup dynamics and favourtism. I think it’s pretty clear that there were (and still are) evolutionary advantages to favouring those in your ingroup, and with whom you are likely to share more genetic material. The benefits would be especially great when your group is small and its members are closely related to you, though the benefits are much lower today.
There is a resent study that indicates veteran white police officers use deadly force less & more correctly against blacks than against whites or Hispanics:
Cops hesitate more, err less when shooting black suspects, study finds
According to findings from a research team’s innovative experiments, officers are less likely to erroneously shoot unarmed black suspects than they were unarmed whites
Oct 13, 2014
With the turmoil in Ferguson (MO) the latest example, activists and many reporters would have us believe that police officers are prejudicially “trigger happy” when dealing with black suspects.
But a scientific study from Washington State University-Spokane suggests just the opposite. In truth, according to findings from the research team’s innovative experiments:
• Officers were less likely to erroneously shoot unarmed black suspects than they were unarmed whites — 25 times less likely, in fact
• And officers hesitated significantly longer before shooting armed suspects who were black, compared to armed subjects who were white or Hispanic
“In sum,” writes Dr. Lois James, a research assistant professor with the university’s Department of Criminal Justice and Criminology who headed the study, “this research found that participants displayed significant bias favoring Black suspects” in their shooting decisions.
Old View
In the past, based largely on incident report analyses and simplistic laboratory experiments, various researchers have concluded that in making deadly force decisions police are strongly influenced by the race or ethnicity of suspects, “independent of criminality.”
In the 1970s, this perspective was memorably captured in one researcher’s statement that “the police have one trigger finger for whites and another for blacks.” Another claimed that the “disproportionate” number of police shootings of blacks (according to DOJ figures, they are four times more likely to be shot by police than whites) “strongly suggests racial discrimination on a national basis” in law enforcement.
But James points out that it is difficult if not impossible to ferret out racial bias as a decisive factor in shootings from the incomplete and occasionally questionably accurate information included in most incident reports. And the laboratory experiments suggesting bias, she says, commonly “bear almost no resemblance” to real-life deadly force encounters.
For example, a typical research method has involved subjects sitting before a computer and viewing flash pictures of black and white “suspects” paired with weapons or “neutral objects” such as wallets or cell phones. The subjects must respond to these images by pressing “shoot” or “don’t shoot” buttons. Racial bias is then inferred by whether participants are “consistently quicker to shoot armed suspects of a particular race” and by whether decision errors tend to be greater for one race than for the other.
This process lacks what James calls “external validity” — that is, it doesn’t come close to reflecting real-world circumstances, and thus its conclusions are of limited value. “[T]he complex process involved” in deciding to shoot or not shoot and then actually firing a gun is “dramatically different” from the simple reflex of pressing a button, she writes.
Her study involved a more sophisticated, “immersive” approach.
Enhanced Testing
Along with civilians and military personnel who were tested independently, 36 patrol officers and deputies from the Spokane area, all of them white and most of them male, were selected as volunteer subjects for her research. They ranged in age from 31 to 43 and had at least five years on the job.
Armed with a Glock 21 modified to fire a laser beam, the officers one at a time were exposed to a series of at least 10 “highly realistic and arousing” scenarios in a high-definition deadly force judgment and decision-making simulator in WSU’s Simulated Hazardous Operational Tasks laboratory. The equipment permitted precise determination of shot placement and millisecond measurement of shot timing after a threat appeared.
The life-sized scenarios were randomly screened from a pool of 60 one- to two-minute episodes based on actual encounters in which officers have been killed or assaulted. They were filmed in “naturalistic” environments and included disturbance calls, arrest situations, crimes in progress, suspicious person investigations, and traffic stops — the biggest killers of cops. They ranged in “situational difficulty” from “intermediate” to “journeyman,” depending on variables such as the number of people involved, the speed at which action unfolds, and suspect demeanor, intoxication, and deceptive behavior.
Black, white, and Hispanic suspects appeared in the scenarios proportional to their involvement in actual attacks on officers, as compiled in FBI statistics. Suspects were unarmed in about a third of the scenarios.
The key responses that the researchers tested were reaction time and shooting “errors” (in this case, shooting unarmed individuals or failing to shoot armed suspects). James emphasizes that the officer participants had no reason to believe they were being tested for racial or ethnic bias. The issue of suspect race or ethnicity was not raised during the officers’ preparation, and no Ferguson-like, racially charged event was recently in the news that might have overly sensitized them to that concern.
Unexpected Results
Given the prevailing stereotype that cops are unduly harsh toward black suspects, James acknowledges that the outcome of the experiments was “unexpected.”
• Reaction time. Her findings reveal that officers took “significantly longer” before they shot black suspects than white suspects. Civilians and soldiers in the study also took longer to shoot blacks, but the hesitation by officers was roughly twice as long as that of the civilians. The delay before shooting was particularly noticeable in the most complex scenarios.
In contrast, there was “no significant difference in reaction time between shooting Hispanic suspects and White suspects,” James reports.
“Our primary finding that participants were more hesitant to shoot Black suspects than White or Hispanic suspects is in direct contrast to prior experimental findings that participants are significantly quicker to shoot Black suspects,” she writes.
• Decision errors. Where officers made errors in James’s study, they were “less likely to shoot unarmed Black suspects than unarmed White suspects,” she writes. Indeed, “we calculated that participants were 25 times less likely to shoot unarmed Black suspects than they were to shoot unarmed White suspects.” Again, this was a significantly greater multiple than was recorded for other groups in the study.
Unarmed suspects were most likely to be shot in journeyman scenarios (the most difficult), and there was “no significant difference between the likelihood of shooting unarmed Hispanic suspects and unarmed White suspects,” the researchers found.
Moreover, the officers did not fail to shoot armed white suspects any more frequently than they failed to shoot threatening suspects who were black or Hispanic.
“These findings are also in direct contrast to [earlier researchers] who found that participants were more likely to shoot unarmed Black suspects and fail to shoot armed White suspects,” James noted.
These results revealed that racial bias did exist in the officers’ reactions to the scenarios, James writes — ”but in the opposite direction that would be expected from prior experimental studies.” Her tests “showed significant evidence of bias favoring Black suspects, rather than discriminating against them.”
A “potential explanation,” she speculates, may be a “behavioral ‘counter-bias’ “ or “administrative effect”; that is, an extra caution by officers against impulsive reactions to black suspects because of “real-world concern over discipline, liability, or public disapproval.”
[Although not relevant to the researchers’ primary concerns, James’ team also recorded something that was not surprising: Compared to the civilian volunteers, “police and military participants had better shooting accuracy, fired faster follow-on shots, were far more interactive with the scenarios (for example, shouting at suspects: ‘drop your weapon or I will shoot!’), and had superior command presence…”]
Future Research
James considers her research to be a pilot study and as such she plans to expand it numerically and geographically before feeling confident that the findings can be extrapolated to sworn law enforcement generally. In work that is already underway, she hopes among other things to investigate whether this finding is replicated across larger and more diverse law enforcement samples, and if so, to “determine whether bias favoring Black suspects is a consequence of administrative measures (e.g., education, training, policies, and laws), and identify the cognitive processes that underlie this phenomenon.”
Meanwhile, the existing study, published in print last year under the title “Results from experimental trials testing participant responses to White, Hispanic and Black suspects in high-fidelity deadly force judgment and decision-making simulations,” can be accessed in full for a fee at the website of the Journal of Experimental Criminology. Click here to go there.
James can be reached at: lois_james@wsu.edu. Joining her in conducting the study were two other WSU PhDs, Dr. Bryan Vila and Dr. Kenn Daratha.
About the author
The Force Science Institute was launched in 2004 by Executive Director Bill Lewinski, PhD. - a specialist in police psychology – to conduct unique lethal-force experiments. The non-profit Force Science Institute, based at Minnesota State University-Mankato, uses sophisticated time-and-motion measurements to document-for the first time-critical hidden truths about the physical and mental dynamics of life-threatening events, particularly officer-involved shootings. Its startling findings profoundly impact on officer training and safety and on the public’s naive perceptions.
When posting something like this, it’s useful to give a link to the source. This helps other readers evaluate any bias that might be present in the citing of the research.
I found the original article so I’ll post the link for you:
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I don’t really buy the usefulness of “deadly force judgement and decision-making simulations.”
The people know they are in a simulation. They know they are not in danger. They know that people think that they are trigger happy against black men. If that can somehow be teased out or controlled for then the experiment might be useful, but as it is I think it is just showing us that cops know people think they are racist and cops don’t want to be seen as racist.
The implicit association test is easy to game too, but if you are taking it for your own information - rather than to prove a point to someone else, you won’t game it. If, however, you took a group of people and gave them scores based on how neutral they were towards skin tone, then gave them prizes based on that, the results for the test would be nonsense assuming anyone in the group could understand the test and explain it to the rest.
If it is true that police hesitate more before shooting black people, what would that mean? I mean, we have to reconcile that with the fact that police shoot a lot of unarmed black men. The only reasonable way to interpret that evidence, if true, is that there are a small number of officers who are extremely disproportionately likely to shoot black men. That would be all the more reason to go after police who do shoot unarmed black men, since it would be significantly likely that they were just dangerous people who needed to never have a gun again.
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Here’s the first news article NOT from Police One that Googling the Force Science Institute turns up:
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A little reminder on who Police One is: http://thefreethoughtproject.com/comments-cops-eric-garner-decision-turn-stomach/
Yes, actually. I haven gained incite. Learning the possible reasons behind things that seem obvious* really can be insightful. Isn’t that what a lot of science is?
Also, truthfully, I didn’t really pay much attention to the headline because I am aware that most headlines are hyperbolic (and I don’t think this is a new thing … newspapers also have always had overly dramatic headlines), and as much as I like BoingBoing, they are not immune.
*And it might be helpful to remember that not everything is as obvious as you may assume. Even comments here make that clear.
I’d think this sort of research only brings nuance and a bigger understanding of this kind of thing. With the caveat that such research can contain biases and all the cons that come with any sort of scientific research. Which is why there should obviously be a lot of it, from a variety of resources – but the problem is, the research just isn’t always there. For example, are you aware that there isn’t really any sort of record at all of police and their gun use? The police don’t really keep great records. Which is ridiculous. It’s 2014! You can’t keep of how many people the police kill each year and why? That’s interesting, don’t you think?
This research is super important, hyperbolic blog posts be damned.
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Surely this is only involved if the testee has knowledge (or can surmise it from the layout of the test) that this is being tested. If they only know that they’re being tested on reaction time or accuracy then it’s not extremely likely that not being seen as racist will be a concern.
It completely depends on the test setup and whether any information gets around beforehand, naturally. It would be really useful to actually see what controls were used.
This isn’t the only reasonable interpretation unless you’re also controlling for other situational factors as well. The original linked article on this post does mention a real-life situation where they looked at multiple factors involved in a particular kind of incident… unfortunately, they don’t go into much detail on the actual impact of the changes they made.
Regardless of my comments above, I wholeheartedly agree with you here.
I see this as two different things, if you live in an unsafe place, you need to be careful, how that place got to be unsafe and what keeps it that way, that’s another thing.
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Is it because we gave them guns? I think it’s because we gave them guns.
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I found your comment posted on a lot of boards. Thanks for the copy-pasta.
Listen. Stop.
I say ‘institutional racism’. You say, “But there’s no evidence of personal racism!!”
If I say, some other time, ‘personal racism’, you say, "there’s just a bad apple, no evidence of institutional racism!!!
You play your part well, but just… just stop. People can’t breathe.
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I think the knowledge that they are in a simulation has a lot to do with it, even if they don’t know it’s about bias.
On the other hand, I don’t think it’s easy to game the IAT. I mean, gaming it would presumably involve slowing down to make correct decisions, but response time is measured (well, I guess you could game it by taking artificially long to make responses in all contexts, not just ones involving the minorities being tested) and factored into the bias/association calculation.
On the other hand, I think this added delay typically seen with minority associations may explain why less mistakes are made with blacks in this experiment: it takes longer to come to a decision when you know you’re being judged on accuracy.
Thanks, I was more worried about making sure the researcher and author was
noted, should have also included the link.
That’s actually a good way to test the test. Did they try it?
Racist!!!1!
More insight than your commentary provided.
Article: 1. You: 0.
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It’s also not clear (to me, at least) WHEN the test was performed… if it was done after all the recent press about bias, it could be that, even subconsciously, when they see a black guy on the course they think, “wait, if I shoot, am I doing it just because he’s black? Am I being racist without even knowing it?” (see note 1) Even if they think that this is not a test of that, but just an average marksmanship test. If so, that’s a good thing (cops are actually thinking twice about their own behavior!) but it makes the results of the test somewhat questionable (as a measure of how this bias plays into things in general when this ISN’T all over the news).
But regardless, if a cigarette company comes out with a study that says, “No, actually smoking DECREASES your chances of getting lung cancer,” I’m going to need a lot of replication studies and detailed information into their protocol. Similarly, for The Force Institute and this.
I mean, if they’re saying that cops are actually 25 times LESS likely to shoot black men, and yet black men are statistically far more likely to be shot (even adjusting for relative numbers of incidents with police, IIRC)… what’s their proposed explanation? That black men are JUST that much more aggressive that even this “don’t shoot them” bias can’t even the numbers?
(1) - Edit… it occurs to me that a far less generous (to the cops) interpretation is that the extra time they allegedly take is just enough time to account for extra care if the person went into the scenario thinking, “Oh, right, I’m not in the field where I can do whatever I want, I’m actually being watched here… I’d better make sure if this guy’s ACTUALLY a threat so I don’t end up with a score of “unarmed black people encountered- 10, armed black people encountered 5, black people shot: 17”, like I’d do if I just followed my instincts”)
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That bias matters on those occasions when the cops involved are cowards. Otherwise, they should be professional, moving past their biases.
But we also know from the real world that officers wearing cameras get involved in a lot less incidents of violence. Merely knowing they are being watched is enough to trigger a “good behaviour” mode where they think about things like being perceived as racist (some surely don’t, but it’s hardly a good simulation of actual dangerous encounters).
I probably shouldn’t have used the word “only” there. I think this is the most reasonable interpretation if we just take the conclusion of the study as fact (police officers are more hesitant to shoot black people than non-black people). If that were true, and yet police officers do shoot black people more often, that would tell me that those outliers on the more-likely-to-hesitate scale must be doing a lot of shooting. I’m sure the point of linking this study is to make us conclude that in real life black people must deserve to get shot more often, but that’s pure bullshit. It would be easier for me to believe (given the real life stats) that the “hesitation” was actually just them relishing the moment.
Really, the study being deeply flawed probably trumps any explanation of the data, I just can’t resist a pile-on with “even if you were right.” It’s a character flaw.
Yes, reaction speed is exactly what you game. I don’t even know how much weight correct/incorrect answers are given. I made far more mistakes on the second half of the test than the first one, but I also didn’t read the instructions right and didn’t realize in the first half that if I made a mistake I had to press the correct key to continue, so I had a couple of long pauses in the first half. I came out of moderately biased against the group associated with good in the first half. I should take it again not screw it up this time to see what my real response is. But with a metronome-like device or app I think you could easily fake a shorter or longer “reaction time”.
No idea, but there is no possible way to make the test beyond manipulation. Like I said, if you take the test because you honestly want to learn about yourself and really try to go as fast as possible then you’ll probably learn something. But if you are trying to game it, then you will, not much to learn from that (I mean, if you are good at gaming things - which is why I said a group rather than an individual, on the theory that someone would be able to figure it out and pass the information on.)
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It’s a bit of a leap to compare acting differently in confrontations that are on-camera to racial-based reaction choice and times in a shoot-or-not test. Not that I’m not saying that there wasn’t something that triggered the test-takers to think more about race, just that it’s difficult to dismiss the test you don’t agree with with “they thought more about this just because they were being watched” while simultaneously accepting the test you agree with in the linked article where the test-takers also knew they were being watched. There’s got to be some other factor at work.
Or, that there’s additional factors involved in this complicated issue. The numerical difference on racial lines is damning, but you have to control for other factors as well in order to get a useful interpretation from the data. The linked article goes into some of that when talking about how they looked at foot chase incidents… which is why I’d be very interested in see more detail to that data rather than a vague description about overall incidents of force being lowered.
