Overt bias against race or gender has no place in a police department, where officers must make life-and-death decisions in split seconds. But bias can exist in such subtle ways, it’s difficult to spot in the day-to-day of officers’ lives.
Faced with that reality, and with recent racial scandals at the Denver Police Department, officials have embarked on a new study meant to reduce prejudicial behavior.
If conducted in good faith, and utilized by police in a corresponding manner, such a review seems worthwhile and welcome.
As The Post reported last week, the department has engaged in a study with Phillip Goff, a social psychologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, whose focus goes far beyond seeking out the bad apples with biased inclinations.
A prior University of Colorado study failed to find bias within the training process for use of deadly force, says Tracie Keesee, chief of the Research, Training and Technology division. So the department is continuing its efforts to understand how it can prevent bias elsewhere.
Keesee and her colleagues want to instead guard against and/or correct the much more serious problem of institutional bias.
In the run-up to the presidential election, polls suggested Barack Obama would have received about 6 percent more support if he were white. The explanation was that, beyond the slim percentage of Americans who readily identify themselves as racist, many who do not still harbor unconscious biases.
UCLA’s Goff tells us that those kinds of latent biases tend to crop up in high-intensity situations, such as those faced by police officers.
Beyond studying such things as the percentage of arrests of minorities, Goff and his fellow researchers are conducting psychological and physiological tests of officers to gauge “situational biases” inside the force.
Denver taxpayers aren’t funding the study. Goff is relying on grants, and the arrangement is meant to ensure police don’t interfere with his research. The tests are for voluntary subjects who are compensated through those grants for their off-duty participation.
The tests collect aggregate information, do not reveal the identities of individual officers and aren’t meant to screen for employment or discipline. Rather, by using subliminal images, researchers try to determine to what degree unconscious associations suggest officers would react in biased ways in on-the-job situations.
If the findings suggest a problem, the department can then look for ways to better educate or prepare officers to deflate the threat.
Goff’s ideas and approaches make sense to us. We would not agree with any type of required screen meant to try to probe for bias in the hearts and minds of individual officers. Such a screen would be unfair and unconstitutional, as even a person with an admitted bias should be expected to act professionally.
But a department-wide sensitivity to preventing bias from poisoning patrols should be applauded and taken seriously.
