Are the Police Biased

No one really likes the police. If you have an encounter with the police it means you are getting a ticket, you’ve been the victim of a crime or you are going to jail for committing a crime. We would rather not have to meet a police officer in an official capacity. Most acknowledge the need for police officers even if we don’t want to see them ourselves. However, there are some who make their discontent toward the police very well known. They talk about racial disparities in arrest rates, police officers using greater levels of force on people of color and most recently, in Virginia, disagreements over assault firearms law enforcement. This last conversation drove me to look a little deeper into what the problem with policing is in the United States. My conclusion, the problem lies with implicit bias, the implicit bias of the police and the implicit bias of our society from which the people who make our laws and our law enforcement officers are all products.

So, what is bias? Simply put its a preference for one thing over another. We have explicit biases (I prefer steak over fish) which as a Country, we are finally eliminating from our criminality. Then we have implicit biases, those for which we do not have a conscious awareness we even have a preference. These implicit biases are created though our experiences our childhood, our family of origin, our faith practices, the media and daily interactions which leave small but vital imprints on how we view the world. In the book “Blind Spot” the authors examine the data from the Implicit Association Test which shows 75%, of those who have engaged in the assessment, showed preference for white people over black people, regardless of the race of the person taking the test.[1] Let’s take a look at how bias has evolved in our laws and law enforcement.

Early bias in our laws and the enforcement of our laws was explicit and racist on its face. During the mid-18oo’s police enforced the U.S. Fugitive Slave Act which permitted the capture of escaped slaves and the arrest of anyone helping them, across all states in the United States[2]. After the Civil War, every state established Jim Crow laws supporting segregation of the races[3]. These laws existed for over 100 years before finally being overruled by several U.S. Supreme Court decisions and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It would take another decade or so before all of the Jim Crow era laws were eradicated from State laws and no longer being enforced[4]. Of course, this did not end the fight against biased laws. Over the past few decades we have seen laws challenged and overturned as they were designed to target minorities due to gender, sexuality, national origin and many other factors. Slowly we are successfully challenging these laws and removing them from the criminal code books.

A bigger problem we face is the implicit bias in our laws and the enforcement of our laws. These can be more nuanced and harder to flush out through legal changes and court decisions. This is where we see a disparate arrest rate on minorities across the United States. Local, state and national legislative bodies expect and demand, their law enforcement officers arrest those who violate the laws they create. Today, this disparate arrest rate is most obvious when it comes to arrests for possession of marijuana. Despite the overall usage of marijuana being fairly equal amongst all people, black males are 4 times more likely than white males to be arrested for possession of marijuana [5]. Many people and groups are advocating for law enforcement to stop enforcing marijuana possession laws as a way to reduce this disparate impact on people of color. I want to go back to the assault rifle debate and the role implicit bias has had in this argument.

When most people think of gun control, they think of assault weapons such as the AR-15 rifle. This was the legislation that caused the outcry in Virginia. There are many passionate arguments on both sides of this legislation but I want look at this legislation through the lens of implicit bias. In 2018, there were 14,123 homicides reported in the United States 10,265 of those being committed by a firearm. Of those firearm related homicides 6,603 were committed with pistols, 297 with rifles, 235 with shotguns, 167 with other firearm and 2,903 with an unknown type firearm[6]. The majority (64%) of firearm related homicides were committed with pistols Only 3% were committed with rifles, if we grossly over estimate and include other firearms and the unknown type firearms as rifles (grossly over inflating the rifle numbers) we come up to 31% of homicides. Of those 31% many would not be included in the definition of assault weapon. So, if 2/3’s of our firearms related homicides is achieved with pistols why the focus on assault rifles which make up much less than 1/3 of the homicides? Fear and race. Assault weapon homicides make national news for killing school children, concert goers, movie watchers and chain store shoppers. More than the venues though, the majority of these victims are white while the majority of pistol homicide victims are persons of color. This is implicit bias at its core, white innocent lives get more media coverage than black innocent lives and thus we fear the assault rifle more than the pistol. Is an assault rifle ban really going to have the impact legislators and other want or will it simply be another law which will be driven by implicit biases?

Many times, we have trouble seeing the world through a different lens and this leads us to encounter cognitive dissonance such as in the case of marijuana and assault rifle enforcement. As a society we must hold our legislators to task, we must understand how laws will impact certain groups of people. Just as marijuana laws have dis-proportionally affected black males, we must realize how assault weapon bans will, most likely, dis-proportionally affect white males. As a society we have become too quick to place blame and without realizing it, let implicit bias direct our actions resulting in disparate arrest rates and lopsided laws which will not address the true nature of the problems we face. As individuals and as a society we need to examine our implicit biases and work to reduce the overall causes through equality, fair treatment and an acknowledgement of our own weaknesses and biases. As law enforcement officers, we must engage in real and honest reflection, so that we can know our implicit biases and work to reduce them from the performance of our duties. I encourage everyone reading this article to take the Implicit Association Tests[7] and read “Blind Spot” to get a better understanding of who you are and how our society has shaped your hidden biases. Only when we truly know ourselves can we begin to know others.

[1] Banji, Mahzarin R. & Greenwald, Anthony G., 2013. Blind Spot; Hidden Biases of Good People.

[2] https://www.history.com/topics/black-history/fugitive-slave-acts

[3] https://www.history.com/topics/early-20th-century-us/jim-crow-laws

[4] https://www.britannica.com/event/Jim-Crow-law

[5] https://www.aclu.org/report/report-war-marijuana-black-and-white?redirect=criminal-law-reform/war-marijuana-black-and-white

[6] https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2018/crime-in-the-u.s.-2018/tables/expanded-homicide-data-table-8.xls

[7] https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/