photo credit: my student, Kate Dawson, York College, City University of New York
According to ProPublica, who analyzed federal data on fatal police shootings between 2010 and 2012, young Black males were 21 times more likely to be killed by police than young White males (Gabrielson, Jones, and Sagara, 2014). So how can this be happening? Do we have a problem with only the police or does this reflect a problem in our culture and society as a whole?
Race is as powerful as it is polarizing in the American social experience. Consequently, and while this might be difficult to look at, we all are to some extent a little bit racist….and probably sexist, ableist, and classist. Sadly, many of us are socialized that way. To understand how this works, we can turn to an entire sub-literature in sociology and psychology that addresses what are termed “in-group” and “out-group” social relations.
Research has demonstrated that we all tend to gravitate toward, socialize, and judge others based on our primary in-group relations (friends & family) – the people we define as “us.” Racial identities are a big part of this process. This kins od social group identification occurs at the same time as we are prone to infer negative judgments about people who are not “us” – people who are “them.” The first step in changing this is recognizing that we all might have a bit of a problem. Only then can we begin to make progress.
What Is Implicit Bias?
“Implicit bias” occurs when someone ( a discriminator) is not consciously aware of his/her own bias. It’s different from “explicit” bias, which is when a discriminator is able to consciously own up to/recognize their own bias (Greenwald & Banaji, 1995). The term implicit bias has even become fashionable beyond academic circles with members of the law enforcement community. This is most likely the result of how our nation’s attention has been captivated by the numerous high-profile police killings of unarmed African American men. As numerous research studies have found, there are likely numerous social and psychological reasons that underlie how and why this occurs. But even still, implicit bias can be difficult to detect. For it is the implicit nature of cultural and racial stereotypes that impedes our ability to recognize how prevalent they are – not just among police but all Americans.
Are the Police Racist?
According to a ProPublica study, which looked at fatal police shootings, young black men were 21 times more likely to be killed by police than their white male counterparts (Gabrieldson, Jones, & Sagara, 2014). Given these racial imbalances, it’s only natural that many people, including researchers, are asking: Are the Police Racist? The research on implicit bias, while not conclusive, says – maybe.
Can A Black Cop Be Biased Against Their Own Racial Group?
Neill Franklin is a black man. But he’ll admit that after decades of working at the Baltimore Police Department and Maryland State Police, he harbored a strong bias against young black men. Franklin, now executive director of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, which opposes the war on drugs, explained, “When I’d see a young black male in a particular neighborhood, or his pants were sagging a little bit, or he walked a certain way … my first thoughts were, ‘Oh, I wonder if he’s selling drugs'” (Lopez).
As the media has increased its scrutiny of police killings of black men, some of the cases have involved black police officers. In the case of Freddie Gray, in Baltimore, for example, three of the six police officers charged for Gray’s death are black. This has led to some questions about whether racial bias is really at play — can a black cop be racist against his own racial group? (Lopez)
But social psychologists and criminal justice experts say this question fundamentally misunderstands how institutional racism affects everyone, regardless of race. Racial bias isn’t necessarily about how a person views himself in terms of race, but how he views others in terms of race, particularly in different roles throughout his everyday life. And systemic racism, which has been part of the US since its founding, can corrupt anyone’s view of minorities in America (Lopez).
In the case of police, all cops are dealing with enormous cultural and systemic forces that build racial bias against minority groups. Even if a black cop doesn’t view himself as racist, the way policing is done in the US is racially skewed — by, for example, targeting high-crime neighborhoods that are predominantly black. And these policing tactics can actually create and accentuate personal, subconscious bias by increasing the likelihood that officers will relate blackness with criminality or danger — leading to what psychologists call “implicit bias” against black Americans. Combined, this means the system as a whole as well as individual officers, even black ones, by and large act in ways that are deeply racially skewed (Lopez).
“The culture of policing is one that’s so strong that it can overwhelm individual racial differences,” L. Song Richardson, a law professor at the University of California, Irvine, School of Law, said. “People are cops first, and they’re their race second” (Lopez).
Racially Biased Law Enforcement
A lot of US police work is inherently racially biased. Cops are told to patrol predominantly poor, crime-ridden neighborhoods that are so segregated that most of the residents are black. And since police are mostly present in these neighborhoods, most of the arrests and actions they take end up impacting a disproportionate numbers of black people.
“When departments concentrate enforcement efforts, for example, in high-crime areas, those areas are likely to be areas with disproportionate numbers of minority residents,” David Sklansky, a law professor at Stanford Law School, said. “That means minority residents of the community are getting policed more intensely than people that live in other neighborhoods that have smaller proportion of minority residents and lower crime rates.”
The problem is police aren’t just deployed in predominantly black neighborhoods; they’re also encouraged to arrest and ticket as many people as possible while on the job. Until 2014, a federal grant program financially incentivized local police departments to make as many arrests as possible for drug crimes. Many police departments also use numbers of arrests as a measure for evaluating individual police officers for raises and promotions. Coupled with deployment in certain areas, these incentives effectively encourage cops to arrest minority residents in large numbers.
“Our criminal justice system and different aspects of our criminal justice system are racist in application,” Franklin, the retired police major, said. “Even if there was no intent in the design for racism, we’ve gotten to a place where it’s the result of our policies.”
Take, for instance, policing in Chicago. This map from Project Know, a drug addiction resource center, shows drug arrests were concentrated in the Windy City’s low-income neighborhoods, which are mostly black, between January and October 2014:
The disproportionate enforcement in black neighborhoods helps explain broader disparities across the US justice system. For example, black Americans are much more likely to be arrested for drug crimes, even though they’re not significantly more likely to use or sell drugs. By many estimates, white and African Americans use marijuana at roughly the same rate, yet African Americans are 4X more likely to be arrested for its use and possession.
Franklin, echoing findings from a Sentencing Project report from earlier this year, said the reason for higher drug arrests among black people is linked to how people in poorer, urban areas use and sell drugs, which makes it easier for police officers to catch them in the act. “Drug selling and use among whites tends to be more indoors, among friends, word of mouth, and there’s generally no violence associated,” Franklin said. “But overall, the drug selling and dealing in black communities tends to be in outdoor areas, because of the urban design and the [economic] competition that’s involved in a community with blight, poverty, and a lack of jobs.”
Dennis Parker, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Racial Justice Program, said this type of racially disparate enforcement is what caused so many problems in Ferguson, Missouri, where a scathing Justice Department investigation uncovered a pattern of racial bias in the local police force following the police shooting of Michael Brown.
By instructing local police (and now more recently federal prosecutors) to crack down on marijuana-related crimes, governing authorities are putting their full weight behind a key aspect of what, in terms of practice, is a racist drug policy.
In Ferguson, cops were pressured by their city government to raise as much revenue as possible by ticketing residents. Since police were most active in neighborhoods that are predominantly black, these residents were targeted at hugely disproportionate rates: Ferguson is about 67 percent African-American, but from 2012 to 2014, 85 percent of people stopped, 90 percent of people who received a citation, and 93 percent of people arrested were black. “It’s not necessarily what’s happening with one police officer,” Parker said. “There are structural reasons for this happening.”
What’s worse, Sklansky said this type of disproportionate enforcement can create “a vicious cycle” in which black residents are fearful of police, making them more likely to display discomfort around cops, which in turn makes officers more likely to perceive black residents as suspicious. “Part of the way police patrol is to look for people who look like they’re acting suspicious,” Sklansky said. “So even a police officer who tries not to be racist can wind up giving more of his attention and having more of his suspicion directed to members of minority groups than to white citizens.”
Cops (and many of us too) are Conditioned to Discriminate – Implicit Bias
Of course, racism can and often does show up at the individual level. Some of this may be explicit — like in North Miami Beach, Florida, where police officers used mug shots of black people as target practice. But as researchers have shown, very often racism culminates at the implicit level, where people’s subconscious biases guide their choices even when they’re not fully aware of it. In this case, people’s thought and actions may be conditioned by “implicit bias.” The term refers to what happens when, despite our best intentions and without awareness, racial stereotypes and assumptions creep into our minds and affect our actions. Jenée Desmond-Harris explained. “Thirty years of neurology and cognitive psychology studies show that it (implicit bias) influences the way we see and treat others, even when we’re absolutely determined to be, and believe we are being, fair and objective.”
Research on Implicit Bias
A review of the research on implicit bias, conducted by researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder and California State University Northridge, found police officers possess this type of subconscious bias, although it’s less pronounced than the general public’s bias in use-of-force simulations.
Josh Correll, a psychology professor at the University of Colorado Boulder, tested these biases through a video game simulation in which people were tasked with quickly identifying whether virtual suspects possessed a weapon and should, as a result, be shot. The results: subjects of all races were quicker to shoot black suspects compared with white ones.
Correll explained to Vox’s Jenée Desmond-Harris, “We think this represents an awareness of a cultural stereotype — not that our participants believe necessarily that black men are more dangerous than white men, but by virtue of movies they watch, music they listen to, etc., they’re getting the idea that black male goes with violent. The group and the idea are linked together in their minds whether they agree with that stereotype or not.”
It is also possible that being a police officer and integrating into the culture of the job could make a cop, even a black one, racist. Adam Waytz, who is a social psychologist at Northwestern University’s Kellogg of School of Management, calls attention to the concept of “de-individuation,” which says that people lose their sense of self-awareness while in groups. This changes the self-identity of all police officers, regardless of race. So black cops may think of themselves as members of the police department rather than members of a certain race while on duty, making it easier for them to act in ways that discriminate against members of their own race.
“When you’re talking about police interactions, in many ways the color blue becomes more important than black and white,” Parker of the ACLU said. “People identify more with their role as a police officer and all of the cultural things that entails more than their race.”
But the very idea of this, no matter how well-established by empirical research, is still controversial. People don’t like to think they could be racist; they prefer to divide the world into a binary of “racist” or “not racist,” with themselves in the latter category. But that makes it a lot harder to address the effects of implicit bias, which impact everything from hiring to police conduct.
In the case of police officers, they are perhaps more likely, due to the nature of their job, to be over the course of time conditioned toward implicit bias. So for example, when cops are thrown into situations every day in which black people are viewed as criminal suspects, they begin to see race as an indicator of crime and danger.
“Just by virtue of watching the news every night you learn the unconscious bias, because you will always see young black men being connected to criminality,” Richardson of the UC Irvine School of Law said. “Police officers are engaging in proactive policing in urban neighborhoods that may be majority nonwhite. And as a result, they’re constantly practicing the association of nonwhite with crime.”
But it can get even more complicated, Richardson said, because stops of innocent people can still reinforce implicit bias. “If [a cop] were to frisk someone and find no evidence of criminal activity, what he’s likely to say to himself is, ‘Oh, well, this guy’s guilty, he just got away with it this time,’ thereby strengthening the association and affecting his memory of the event later,” she said. “In that messed-up way, he actually strengthens his unconscious bias.”
San Bernardino Police Department Officer Darren Sims drives his patrol car at sunrise on the graveyard shift.
No Perfect Solutions
The bottom line is when we tell people about implicit bias, what they hear very often is an accusation of racism that they feel the need to deflect. Acknowledging on some level that we all potentially operate according to these frames that condition our behavior would go a long way in helping to address the issue and solve problems. Given how deeply ingrained racism has been in America throughout history, none of these problems will likely go away in the foreseeable future. But there are things police departments can do to diminish the effects of racial biases.
Awareness can go a long way by forcing police officers to consider and try to control their own biases. Waytz pointed to research that found National Basketball Association referees became less racially biased once their propensity to call more fouls on black players were exposed by previous studies and widespread media coverage. This indicates, Waytz said, that racial bias can be diminished through awareness.
But awareness can also backfire. Richardson of the UC Irvine School of Law pointed to what’s called “stereotype threat,” which can lead people to act out in dangerous ways if they’re nervous about reinforcing stereotypes attributed to a group they belong to. Preliminary results from unpublished studies, she said, have found that if a cop is aware of the stereotype that cops are racist, he may get nervous about reinforcing that stereotype during encounters with black suspects — and that increased anxiety may make him more likely to use force.
As another step, Richardson suggested that police officers may be able to diminish their own implicit biases by taking greater steps to engage and interact with the community in ways that aren’t inherently confrontational. If police are exposed to the daily lives of black residents in a very personal way, they may come to realize — particularly at a subconscious level — that they shouldn’t associate blackness with crime or danger.
Training could also help diminish some racial biases. But Richardson emphasizes that this training shouldn’t just focus on split-second decisions about whether to use force, but rather more slow-taking decisions about whether a police officer should make a stop that could lead to a use-of-force scenario. For example, in the case of Michael Brown in Ferguson, better training may have pushed former police officer Darren Wilson to not stop Brown for a petty crime like jaywalking — and, as a result, avoid the escalating circumstances that led Wilson to shoot Brown to death.
“The time frame that I want to look at is how that interaction began in the first place,” Richardson explained. “So if they’re about to stop and frisk someone, maybe they should slow down first and ask themselves, ‘Would I find this behavior suspicious if the person were a young white man instead of a young black man?'”
Creating more diverse police forces can also help police departments build trust, according to Sklansky of Stanford University. “There’s less likely to be an us-and-them attitude between police and the community,” he said. “A diverse department can still have problems keeping the trust or even gaining in the first place the trust of minority communities, but it’s likely to have fewer problems than a department that’s monolithically white or doesn’t reflect the demographics of the community.”
More broadly, new policies and reforms could help address the problems that lead to systemically skewed enforcement. Policies could be reformed to put less emphasis on arrests for petty crimes, which could help diminish some of the day-to-day harassment black communities experience at the hands of police. And businesses and lawmakers could do more to invest in impoverished neighborhoods to address the socioeconomic issues that make certain places more prone to crime.
But while all of these ideas could all lead to improvements, they most likely won’t eliminate all racial biases in police departments.
“Nothing solves racism completely,” Sklansky said. “Racism, in general, is a deeply entrenched problem in all societies, including America’s. We’ve made enormous strides in the United States in confronting that problem in some ways but not in others.”
Jennifer Eberhardt
Jennifer L. Eberhardt is a social psychologist and associate professor at Stanford University and a 2014 MacArthur fellow. She studies the mechanisms, effects of racial biases in criminal justice. Eberhardt’s research investigates the subtle, complex, largely unconscious yet deeply ingrained ways that individuals racially code and categorize people and the far-reaching consequences of stereotypic associations between race and crime. She is particularly interested in how race influences visual processing – our perception of objects and physical spaces, how objects and physical spaces influence how we think about race, and how race changes how we see people – and how such perception may influence institutions such as the criminal justice system. While her work was originally focused to the laboratory, where she worked with brain-scanning machines, it has evolved to encompass police precincts, where she now advises police officers about the different ways their mental processing and thinking conditions their policing practice, which can put them (and fellow citizens) in dangerous territory.
According to Eberhardt, “most people know that African Americans are associated with crime and that they’re stereotyped as criminal — in fact, it’s one of the strongest stereotypes of blacks in American society.” “My work focuses on how that association might matter at different points in the criminal justice system and how this association can then affect us in surprising ways.” These perceptions matter, because people can transfer those associations from people to objects and places.
Eberhardt’s research demonstrated that when white people were shown flashing images of black faces, they were able to visually recognize the fuzzy outline of a gun more quickly than peers who were exposed to white faces. Later, when she reversed the experiment, she discovered that the association between blacks and crime moved the other way. In this instance, she exposed subjects to crime-related objects, which were quickly followed by a longer-lasting screen showing a black face and a white face. At this point, subjects were asked to identify where a dot flashed on a blank screen. Their reactions were documented to be quicker when the dot appeared on the side of the screen where the black face was shown. The same findings were documented when police officers were given the test and shown crime-related words such as “capture” or “pursue” instead of images of weapons.
Her documentation of these visual perceptions suggests that they may infect the judicial system with bias. As her studies have statistically demonstrated, having stereotypically black facial features correlates with tougher jury verdicts, longer prison terms, more death sentences and erroneous identifications by police.
There are a number of different Implicit Association Tests (IATs) available online, which test for implicit bias. You might try this one from Harvard.
Sources:
Parts of this article are excerpted from a 2015 Vox article, “How Systemic Racism Entangles All Police Officers — Even Black Cops,” by German Lopez. Last accessed Feb 2016.
“A Black Police Officer’s Fight Against the NYPD,” by Saki Kinafo. Last accessed Jan 2018.
Discussion Questions:
Do you find you sometimes harbor bias towards different racial and ethnic groups due to cultural stereotypes, where you understand some people to be more dangerous than others?
If you can go so far as to “own” your own bias, what do you attribute to be the source of the bias? Is it the result of your own direct experience or cultural representations?
What do you think about policing patterns in general, either from the perspective of what you see represented in the media or from your own experiences on the street?
What do you think about the idea of people being biased toward members of their own racial group?
Do you find you sometimes harbor bias towards different racial and ethnic groups due to cultural stereotypes, where you understand some people to be more dangerous than others?
When it comes to cultural stereotypes, I do not find myself harboring bias towards different racial and ethnic groups when it comes to danger. I believe that there are many ways that can trigger people to often find themselves seeing bias towards different racial and ethnic groups. Certain ways can develop these biases and influence perceptions of dangerous groups. One major thing that can have an impact on someone’s bias on a racial or ethnic group is the media. There are certain types of disproportionate media that generally focuses on certain races and ethnic groups. By doing so, this can create huge scandals and make people believe things that are not true. When doing this, this can cause people to have bias towards certain people/groups. Another reason why someone would harbor bias towards a certain racial or ethnic group is through negative experiences. If someone has a negative experience with an individual from a particular group, they may generalize that experience to others from the same group.
Police officers being biased against their own race is not very shocking to me. Reading about Neill Franklin, who was a black police officer, saying when he was in a bad neighborhood and saw a young black male with his pants sagging, thought he was selling drugs. I believe this is large in part due to systematic racism. Our minds were trained to link people who have a certain look and act a certain way, to bad things like selling drugs, stealing, shootings etc. This is a very important topic to discuss and try to fix. Police forces around the country have been trying to get more minority officers into the police force for years now, almost as to go out of their way to say they aren’t racist or don’t have racial bias against minorities. However, if those minority officers are still racially biased against their own kind, how does that solve the problem? If anything, it only makes it worse by dividing each other, and making minorities continue to be distasteful towards law enforcement. Policing patterns in general need a hard look at. From what Parker said of the ACLU, police officers tend to look out more for the color blue instead of black and white. This to me sounds like they are more worried about themselves than the people they are trying to protect and serve. Watching the film “The seven five” in class also added to this point, where the main goal was to protect themselves and always have a fellow officers back, no matter if it put someone else’s fortune on the line or in danger. Awareness and more community policing could help racial bias in some regard, but it probably never goes away entirely.
After reading this website post I think it is safe to say that policing patterns come straight from implicit bias. If police are more biased towards the idea, for example of black Americans being more dangerous, but they do not realize they are portraying this bias, then their bias will become violent. This website states, “According to a ProPublica study, which looked at fatal police shootings, young black men were 21 times more likely to be killed by police than their white male counterparts”, which would show this bias being portrayed. It is also very known that police will patrol low income neighborhoods the most and this can be because of the stereotype that this is where majority of crime happens, but this idea happened because it’s no surprise that the highest crime rates will be in areas where police are the most trying to catch people. This is another way that bias creates these patterns.
Do you find you sometimes harbor bias towards different racial and ethnic groups due to cultural stereotypes, where you understand some people to be more dangerous than others?
If you can go so far as to “own” your own bias, what do you attribute to be the source of the bias? Is it the result of your own direct experience or cultural representations?
What do you think about policing patterns in general, either from the perspective of what you see represented in the media or from your own experiences on the street?
What do you think about the idea of people being biased toward members of their own racial group?
Bias toward different racial and ethnic groups happens often without us even realizing it. It’s shaped by what we see in the media, cultural stereotypes, and sometimes personal experiences. Many of us might subconsciously think certain groups are more dangerous, even though that’s not true. This is called implicit bias—bias that we’re not always aware of.
Owning your bias means recognizing that you might have these automatic thoughts. Most of the time, it’s because of things we’ve seen in the media or learned from society, not necessarily from personal experience.
When it comes to policing, racial bias is a big issue. Police often patrol poor, mostly Black neighborhoods more than others, which leads to more arrests and confrontations with people in those areas. This over-policing creates a cycle where minorities get more attention from police, reinforcing the stereotype that they’re more likely to commit crimes.
Even people of the same racial group can be biased against their own group. For example, some Black police officers develop biases against Black people because of the environments they work in and the stereotypes they see. This shows how deep-rooted racism is in society and why it affects everyone, regardless of race.
I can’t believe that there are actually people who will support a type of bias towards their own racial group. I understand that officers will try to establish a circle or group within the department and they just want to fit in. However, police officers should want to go into the profession to protect the people they care about as well as strangers who may represent their own values and culture. The sad part about this is that the interactions between cops and citizens are where there is a white cop violating a black citizen’s rights or they are using excessive force is normally the scenario that is filmed. I have never seen a video of a black cop harming a black or white citizen based off of racism or bias. This means that the public will associate white officers with abusing their power towards black citizens. The general public may look up to black cops more because of this even though those police officers may be just as or more bias than the white officers. The media plays a big role in how the citizens in our country look at police officers, but if they would secretly follow both black and white officers, they will see that a good amount of them will be bias towards different ethnic groups.
No matter what anyone says. It is undoubtedly true that everyone who ever lives in this world, always have had biases, and always will have biases. And anyone who denies that have biases is straight up lying. Everyone looks at different races a certain way and everyone looks at how people dress, and they have a bias about that. For example, many people have bias on races and how some races can be more dangerous than others. And honestly, I think people as far as policing goes to need accept that bias. They need to accept it and learn how to deal with it without affected their job and how they deal with people. Of course, a bias will always be there when dealing with people, but the officer who is dealing with that situation needs to put that bias in the back of their head and deal with the situation in a professional appropriate way. I think it’s interesting for people of the same race to be bias towards their own culture and race. But like I said, everyone has them and everyone creates them in different ways. You can create them from how you grow up your experiences, many ways you can create biases. But people need to embrace it, put it behind them and deal with people in a professional manner.
I think that policing patterns in general are at the point where they can not escape the deep roots of racism that they were first created upon. As the article stated, “Our criminal justice system and different aspects of our criminal justice system are racist in application.Even if there was no intent in the design for racism, we’ve gotten to a place where it’s the result of our policies”. I feel as if this is really spot on with targeting the issue we have at hand with the overall policing problem in America. You simply cannot outsmart or make enough rules to cover up the fact that the entire basis of policing is rooted in oppressing and locking up men and women of color. I do think that the idea of people being biased towards members of their own racial group is completely possible and relevant in today’s society. I think ultimately these biases that we as individuals have are based off of our social group and who we are surrounded by and where. These social aspects can play a large factor in how one’s bias’ towards specific racial groups, even their own, can form.
This part of the reading really made me feel some type of way. Just the statistics alone were very eye opening. I mean, Blacks are 21 more times likely than a white man to be killed by the police. That is absolutely ridiculous, and I can’t stand it when people try to make up excuses for why these numbers are so disproportioned. People associate Black people, Black men especially, with danger, aggression, and crime. They say “we don’t over-police Blacks, all of the crime just happens to be in Black communities”, when in reality it’s all a set up. In the reading it says, cops are told to patrol predominately poor neighborhoods that are segregated and mostly Black.
I really like the idea of implicit bias because it explains how people can be racist or bias and not even realize it. People see the stereotypes of Black people on TV and in music and think that’s us, but it’s not. Just like it said in the reading, people are going to have to get out of their comfort zone and actually meet and hang out with some Black people. I think that is the only way to change some people’s minds. With that being said, I understand that some Black people don’t really help their case any. We happily portray the thug or drug dealer in movies, we talk about gangs, sex, drugs, and murder in our songs, and then we can’t stop killing our own people in the streets. So, in a way, I guess that I believe it’s going to take effort from everyone.
What do you think about the idea of people being biased toward members of their own racial group?
I see this idea as entirely possible, especially with the conditioning and education of the police system itself. Support for this answer can be taken from the regular patrolling of predominantly black neighborhoods, to the Neil Franklin quote, “ “When I’d see a young black male in a particular neighborhood, or his pants were sagging a little bit, or he walked a certain way … my first thoughts were, ‘Oh, I wonder if he’s selling drugs” (para.6). It seems as if within the realm of policing, officers are exposed to the conditioning of their own beliefs and opinions. For example, if an officer’s patrol route every shift was through a certain area, they would find no positivity within that area. Especially the way poorer areas are policed, where the constant police presence seems to be looking for something to throw their lights on about. In addition to the possibility of bias towards one’s own racial group, it also screams that there is some sort of issue in policing. Whether it is through training, dated racist thinking throughout PDs, or older leadership within PDs, there is absolutely an issue. A career such as policing should not be able to formulate biases, especially at such an extreme level. In terms of resolving this issue, maybe hotspot policing or leadership roles throughout PDs need to be reformulated (or at least improved in a way that would aid in the elimination of biases themselves).
I would like to start off my comment by saying that this article, like the others, is extremely important and I am very glad that it is something this course (policing) is telling us to look at.
This article reflects the teachings of Critical Race Theory in that we are all bias, and not at our own faults, but because of society. We as a society created the social construct of race in the first place, too. We are our own worst enemies. Not only do we all have bias, but we all want to be part of groups (i.e., the in-group), and feel a sense of belonging. While in this group, we look outward at those who are outsiders, where we may judge them because they are not like us. There is a term called “anti-racism” that I believe was coined by author Ibram X. Kendi. This term plays into the fact that, in order to make social progress, we must fight against racism compared to being silent.
Because we know all of this, police are a group that have these qualities, too. We see these qualities in media (i.e., shows, movies, etc.), but also on social media of footage recording of police work. We may see police engaging with drug dealers for their own gain or using excessive force on a person of color. Because the police are a group in themselves, they are bound to have their own in-group perspective. We see it in this article where Ofc. Franklin describes his stereotyping of young, Black men in certain neighborhoods. The goal is that everyone needs to recognize this implicit bias in order to self-analyze and make a change.
I do believe police officers have implicit bias with their policing patterns in general. When a police officer is not consciously aware of their own bias, it is called implicit bias. This may be a result of systematic racism and the biased racial nature of American policing. Police officers patrol racially divided, impoverished, and crime-ridden neighborhoods, where Black individuals make up the majority of the residents. Many law enforcement agencies and officers have incentives to make as many arrests as they can, resulting in the mass incarceration of Black and Latino men. Our beliefs and behaviors are influenced by racial stereotypes and assumptions. African Americans are associated with crime and stereotyped as criminals. In my personal opinion, this kind of implicit bias is evident in the media. There is a racial disparity in the number of people killed by police. According to federal data on fatal police shootings, young Black men were twenty one times more likely than young White men to be killed by police between 2010 and 2012. The criminal justice system in general and law enforcement officers specifically have been proved by the media to be racially prejudiced. There is a thin line of trust between the African American community and police officers. The fear that Black people have of the police causes them to act uncomfortably, which makes the officers think they are suspicious. Racial bias can be reduced so that there is no longer any media coverage of any form of racial injustice through the implementation of new laws and reforms, training, engagement with the Black community, increasing the diversity of the police force, as well as awareness and acknowledgement.
This article starts some very valid and accurate points about implicit biases and policing. It’s interesting to see how many people don’t know what implicit biases are and how it can effect every day life, jobs, interactions between one another, perspectives, and the list goes on. Knowing that implicit biases play a part, and aware that it’s an issue, it’s interesting that it has not been addressed or have found a solution to go about this. Implicit biases is a huge problem in policing, yet this is something that it’s hard to break. Could it be due to the systematic racism is so large that it’s hard to counteract it’s damage? Could it be some individuals are simply not aware they’re doing it or have these biases (or not want to admit it)? The list is endless and that’s where we are running into problems of how to correct this. I feel PD or people in general need to hear stories or experiences from those who have been on the other side of someone having a implicit bias and been wrong, or hearing from those who have realized their own flaws with implicit bias to show how to recognize it and change their thinking. Policing strategies need to be changed and reevaluated. As it said in part of the article, officers are told to go to lower class, poor areas and have higher patrol there. What about the higher end neighborhoods where just as much crime (or different crime) is occurring? Being involved in more trainings of ethnicities and diversity, recognizing racism and the tendencies that follow behind it. Holding people accountable and acknowledging these problems within the system. Education is key to understand what implicit bias is and the effects it can have. If people become aware of their own biases, that’s when a conversation can start of how to address this.
Breaking from stereotypes is a difficult task but I think that I have learned to judge other based on how they treat me and others. I can be your friend or I can leave you the hell alone.
The sources of my bias are solely on my own personal experiences. Learning more about myself and these biases allow me to break from them.
I see more of a reactionary force rather than a proactive one. Police who sit and wait for things to happen rather than being there to prevent it.
I think that hating someone based off of their skin color is racist at its core, and there is no other way to put it.
1.I do not have bias racial or ethnic groups I have bias towards certain characters. it does not matter you skin color or what you believe in its about your character and how you present yourself.
2.typically when someone has a bias nowadays it is because it was passed down through experiences
What do you think about policing patterns in general, either from the perspective of what you see represented in the media or from your own experiences on the street?
3.policing patterns are tricky because typically the police come after the crime is committed and the damage is done so to speak. the cops are not patrolling they will drive around look for a space to sit and try and catch people speeding and sit there till their shift is over. I went to my girlfriends house one time at 12 o’clock in the middle of the day, saw a cop on the side of the road, and left at like 8 o’clock PM and the cop was still sitting there.
4.typically those people are not he brightest or do not have all their screws tightened. they dont have the full picture to judge what they are judging.
Implicit bias is exist and very common in the society, sometimes it’s just automatically happened. It’s a product of the society, the information you have been accept through the media since you were little, the influences by others around, etc. Honestly, I personally experienced. It was like the first thought, you can’t control it to appear, but you control the thing after appear. So as for me, I once had some bias to one person, then one second later, I would like “why did I think that” and just let that thought go away. But this phenomena would be particularly dangerous in police department. I believe everywhere has bias, and in police department, those a little action due to bias could maybe huge results. I think this probably one reason why our trust in the police has declined. I could understand why people sometimes biased toward member of their own racial group. But I do not understand why people being biased toward member of their own racial group because of the racial of the other. For example, I am a Chinese, I would never have bias toward other Chinese just because of they are Chinese, on the contrary, I think we should help each other.
I have never really thought of myself as a racist person. I would never blatantly be rude or belittle anyone just because of their race. However, I might treat them different in other ways. If i’m walking home on a dark night and I see a group of rowdy young black males who are sagging their pants and using vulgar language, I might cross the street to avoid walking past them but I’d do the exact same thing if they were white or any other race. I’ts just that “gangsta” or “street” culture that I tend to associate with violence. So if some one talks with a lot of slang and they look like trouble, I try my best to avoid them.
I have a hard time understanding how the police are structurally racist. I think the system sounds pretty logical but I do see how black people end up getting stereotyped because of it and I just don’t see a way to fix it. The police want to stop as much crime as possible so they go to the places with the most crime and they arrest people in these areas. The places with the most crime are usually poor areas and African Americans are statistically the lowest earning race so I think it makes sense that the majority of people being arrested are African Americans. I think this explains why black people are stereotyped as “what a criminal looks like” because it’s all the police ever get to see.
I believe that this concept is a very much alive in our modern world and promotes a necessary conversation about issues in policing in particular. It always rubs me the wrong way when I encounter people that support the police 100% of the time. A child gets shot; they will say “well, that would not have happened if the kid did not run”. Every scenario warrants and excuse as to why the police are not to be met with any skepticism. That being said, those are the type of people to deny the concept of implicit bias. It is insane to think that people can look at the demographic empirical evidence towards biased police methods and still refuse to accept it, or even consider it for that matter. Kind of an odd thing that the people defending the police are often white middle class citizens. I am not saying that all lower class people should distrust police, we just have statistics that need to be dealt with and responded to with logic.
” “Implicit bias” is what academics refer to as the subconscious beliefs, feelings, and understandings that influence our perceptions when we encounter people of different races, economic status, gender and so on. It’s a term that has even become fashionable beyond academic circles with members of the law enforcement community, as national attention has been captivated by images of police encounters with black men in particular, given the tidal wave of high-profile killings of unarmed African American men.” Dr. Trappen Implicit bias is a part of society whether anyone wants to admit it or not. We all participate in it even if we do not have a racist or sexist bone in our bodies. It’s a tough subject because we can never truly eliminate it, but we need to do a better job of understanding it, controlling it, and teaching the next generation to minimize its affects. The two most common manifestations of implicit bias in our society is bias towards African Americans, and bias towards women. The bias towards both of these groups is very obvious in our culture and needs little explanation. You can take countless examples including the most recent case involving Justice Kavanaugh. Also the pointless killings of black folk by law enforcement. Racism, sexism, and class-ism exists every single day. This not only effects these groups in terms of injustices, but also how they view themsleves. Blacks, women, gays, trans etc.. are told that they are second class citizens by our society. I truly believe social media is one of the worst things to ever happen to our society. It is full of bias and negativity and promotes division on a daily basis.
This is definitely a section where i disagree, and so i will make my thoughts clear below.
It is remarkable to me that the debate surrounding unconscious bias, or implicit bias, has gotten this far considering the extreme lack of information on the topic. There is no connection established thus far between unconscious or implicit bias, and biased behavior. I can admit that everyone has some kind of bias in many areas, but i am unconcerned about the thoughts that people have and much more concerned about the actions that people take. People have thoughts every day that do not result in action, most of them, i would say. I grew up in a suburban middle class neighborhood with almost no violent crime. I was taught to treat people with dignity and respect, and to be kind to others. This article claims that everyone is racist, but yet i have never been overtly racist to anyone, ever. However, I’ve seen racist behavior many times. People who think its funny to say terrible things about other people in order to try and be “edgy”, or people who believe that they are superior to others simply because of the pigmentation of their skin. Simply put, it is clear to all when truly racist behavior has occurred, and we can all stand up and call it out when it happens. But, to claim without evidence that everyone harbors serious racism or other prejudices simply because it ‘seems likely’ is i think a mistake. It is mentioned in this section that: “Richardson suggested that police officers may be able to diminish their own implicit biases by taking greater steps to engage and interact with the community in ways that aren’t inherently confrontational.” But if solving implicit bias was this simple, it wouldn’t be nearly the problem that these experts think it is. The other problem that i have is with the IAT’s. There is no connection between the results of the IAT tests and behavior, or even any actual level (for lack of a better word) of racism among a group. For instance, each time someone takes an IAT they will get a different score. Is this because they became more/less racist? I think not. If the test is used to measure racism, and the scores decrease as the number of tests increase, it would seem then that the tests were never a good measurement in the first place.
Anyway, an interesting read nonetheless, but i think there needs to be much more research done on this topic.
There is a particularly large volume of research on implicit bias. Your reading here, which leads you to conclude “there is no connection established thus far” does not point to a specific study, a specific panel of IAT questions, a specific research method, etc. What you offer here instead are sweeping generalizations about an entire body of research. Note there is always a way to critique research, IATs in particular, but you have to start with the research itself, then look at specific research questions, the research methods, findings, etc. Your critique, as stated here, is essentially a broad-brush rhetorical move to dismiss. And you can’t do this when you haven’t done any of the heavy-lifting first. A proper critique (one that would begin to support the kind of statement that you make here) would require a full literature review with a critique of the research methods and findings. If you were to acquaint yourself with the full breadth of the professional/expert criticism, I can guarantee you will find all the research experts do not all agree. This module is designed to introduce provocative ideas and to offer an opportunity to engage with an area of research that is well-established in the realm of social psychology studies – it’s a point of entry; not an endpoint. You have chosen non-engagement. And that’s fine. On the other hand, if you really want to make this critique, then I would suggest you take serious steps to become read into this literature. Talk and engage with people who do this work. Stanford University has lots of these folks, so that’s a good place to start. Because to do anything less suggests that advancing rational critical thought on the subject is not really the goal. My advice, if you really want to do this, is to go for it. Journals will be climbing all over themselves to publish your article. Imagine taking out an entire research sub-discipline, whose scholars have been awarded the most prestigious academic prizes in the social sciences? You will be famous. And I would be happy to review your article.
Implicit bias is a real thing and it is especially dangerous in police departments. If a police officer has a bias it can determine how he treats an individual and in many cases an officers bias cost people their lives. Bias can be subconscious in my opinion and an officer may not even know that he has a bias towards a person for whatever reason. As shown in the Hill readings, racism can be deeply rooted in a community. As shown in the hill readings, many states tried to keep the races separated after Jim Crow ended. This keeps the “super predator” perception alive and absolutely affects the people, even if they don’t realize. That is why many officers approach minority groups with certain assumptions. They think the individual is going top behave a certain way just because of how their skin looks or where their home is located. One way to combat this would be to study police departments and give bias test. Now, this would be difficult because the questions would have to be tested and proven to work to find bias and the departments would have to figure out how to train the bias officers to no longer be bias. This is difficult to approach because how you remove bias form a person, especially an officer, is hard and I am not sure that there is any proven way to do that. Many people have deep rooted biases and that is very hard to erraticate because it is so deeply rooted. This was an interesting read and I feel we can help solve the bias problem but there needs to be a lot more research before anything should be implemented.
Like the beginning of this article states. We all fall victim to being biased at one point or another. Individuals have these thoughts whether they knowingly doing it or not. We see this a happen a lot with police. Police in will often see a black kid with a hoodie on walking down the street and think automatically that they are doing something illegal. Not every cop may think this way but it has been and still been an occurring problem with police departments throughout the states
Implicit bias is something that we all can’t escape from regardless of our backgrounds. Policies such as “the war on drugs” has been a policy where they focused primarily on drugs and crime in predominately black neighborhoods. Although drugs are used in the suburbs, urban neighborhoods, and country sides, laws are made with a focus point to focus on low socioeconomic with a microscope. I’m not surprised that African Americans have a racial bias towards themselves especially those who are in the police force. Their job trains them specifically to imply that certain characteristics of an individual or environment may result in criminal behavior. Stereotypes such as “sagging pants” can be correlated to crime. Based off of the data of between black and white arrest with drugs, there’s
An obvious bias being applied with 332 whites being arrest for drug crimes than blacks with 879. The data is skewed with only 9.5% of whites doing drugs and 10.5% of blacks doing drugs. I believe that Implicit bias has helped shape “mass incarceration” as the police authorities already knew who to focus on. I am an African American male who faces implicit bias on the regular. Regardless if it’s a micro or macro aggression. Often times it my own race using and implying that I am “not black” because of the way I carry myself. I’ve also encounters several police officers who may have applied a racial bias. Growing up a group of friends of mine would play a game of “Release” at night. While playing a police officers turned on the sirens and jumped out the truck with a loaded 9mm pointed at us as if we committed a crime. So yes it’s real, is there anything we can do about? Not necessarily simply because you can’t change someone’s view’s when they are comfortable and not susceptible to change. Doing so will be like beating a dead horse repeatedly until it moves.
Implicit bias is something that we all can’t escape from regardless of our backgrounds. Policies such as “the war on drugs” has been a policy where they focused primarily on drugs and crime in predominately black neighborhoods. Although drugs are used in the suburbs, urban neighborhoods, and country sides, laws are made with a focus point to focus on low socioeconomic with a microscope. I’m not surprised that African Americans have a racial bias towards themselves especially those who are in the police force. Their job trains them specifically to imply that certain characteristics of an individual or environment may result in criminal behavior. Stereotypes such as “sagging pants” can be correlated to crime. Based off of the data of between black and white arrest with drugs, there’s
An obvious bias being applied with 332 whites being arrest for drug crimes than blacks with 879. The data is skewed with only 9.5% of whites doing drugs and 10.5% of blacks doing drugs. I believe that Implicit bias has helped shape “mass incarceration” as the police authorities already knew who to focus on. I am an African American male who faces implicit bias on the regular. Regardless if it’s a micro or macro aggression. Often times it my own race using and implying that I am “not black” because of the way I carry myself. I’ve also encounters several police officers who may have applied a racial bias. Growing up a group of friends of mine would play a game of “Release” at night. While playing a police officers turned on the sirens and jumped out the truck with a loaded 9mm pointed at us as if we committed a crime. So yes it’s real, is there anything we can do about? Not necessarily simply because you can’t change someone’s view’s when they are comfortable and not susceptible to change. Doing so will be like beating a dead horse repeatedly until it moves.
Being racially bias can quickly be placed in your mind and anyone can fall into this category. Since birth we all went through some sort of racial bias experience. Whether it was with seeing your family talk about it or actually in school learning about it. Often times I would catch myself. When I meet someone new I automatically start thinking if they are bias or bias towards their on race or not. Theirs been many times when I walk pass a black man with his pants sagging blasting rap music hands in pocket and the first thought that came to my mind is “he is a drug dealer “. Of course I can be a hundred percent wrong however how that black man dressed and how he decided to look at first glance. Fits a typical type description on what a “drug dealer or “thug” look like. As years pass. Not just the government but we the community conceived this image in our mind on how the black man acts and that drug activities some how always relate back to the black men.
In my own personal thoughts i have seen very strong implicit bias in my family. Particularly my grandmother. We all see it very obviously and it almost as if she has no idea she is being racist. On vacation this year when we checked in and we got in the room she looked at my dad and said, “hey bill, theres a black down the hall.” She said it so easily and as if what she was saying was normal. When we compare this to America today we see the exact same thing. People are so ignorant and mostly unaware of how ignoranrly racist they can be. I believe that most of these instances start in early development in childhood. It can come from how parents are raising their kids or how they talk around their kids. The area the kid is raised can heavily impact their views on people such as African Americans and how they are judged. I truly believe that most cops can be racist based on how they were raised and how they interacted with others and it just became “normal” to degrade blacks and treat them as lesser than whites. I do not tolerate any of that and i feel that the way people are talking around their kids. I understand how hard it is to control what people hear because you can’t control how other people live. I just feel that police target all these poverty level neighborhoods because it helps boost their “statistics” because its easy and they are just so racist they feel that what they are doing is right. They make reasons up in their head and they actually believe that it makes sense and they sometimes have no idea they are racist. Its just really sad.
I personally almost never harbor biased thoughts towards different racial and ethnic groups due to cultural stereotypes, where I understand some people to be more dangerous than others. I was raised to treat other the same way I want to be treated, regardless of their age, race, size, or religious background. I believe my own biased opinion are from my own direct experience. It may be different as well for my personally opinion do to my mixed-race genetics. I grew up in a middle class suburban area, where you were not judge on what you drive or what race you are. Racism and biased opinions was never thought of when I was growing up. I know that this problem is big in today’s world, but I think you need to look at certain areas that are racist and biased. From my own experience, I believe policing patterns are to an extent, effective. Law enforcement are not always going to be there to help you when you need them. Many events happen where police eventually are involved are when the crime has already happened. I believe there are always going to be problems with law enforcement, but in order for things to get better different polices need to be put into place to improve policing patterns. With the idea about people being biased towards members of their own racial group is something as have never thought about before. I do not believe they are being judge on their race compared to actions that indicate did or there potential thoughts.
My father is Croatian. He fought amidst the horrors of the Bosnia War in the 90s. He witnessed the worst outcome of discrimination, genocide and ethnic cleansing. He fought Muslims and he fought Serbs and he had family and friends that lost their lives in unspeakable ways. When he came to the US, he left the war behind. Here in the US he has friends that are Croats, Bosnian Muslim, and Serbs. All those who immigrated to the US after the Bosnian war in the 90s, from my experience and for the most part, get along well. From my experience running in “former Yugoslavia county” circles I am familiar with third, fourth . . . generation decedents of Serbs and Croats. The are very biased. There biases are deep seated and are passed down from generation to generation and go back 100 years. I’ve heard comments like, “Oh those Bosnians,” or “I would never let my child participate in a Croatian event . . . my grandfather will roll in his grave if he knew.” I was really surprised when I heard this and experienced the ethnic discrimination. All my father’s family is here in the US, they all came after the war and they witnessed ethnic cleansing, if they are biased they never expressed it. I never knew this bias existed until I met American Serbs and Croats, and to be honest, it made me biased (but only toward the “barely have Yugo left in your bloodline” wanna be Serbs and Croats). The war is over and for them, it’s been over for a long time! I was in Croatia, there are distinct lines and real tension among the ethnicities. Our tour guide was a Croatian woman and she made derogatory comments, horrible comments, about Bosnians during the entire trip. I find it interesting how the Croats, Bosnian Muslims, and Serbs who moved to the US after the war in the 90s became so tolerant and accepting of each other. May be being displaced is so disorientating that it blurs the lines of bias and you cling to and cherish whatever is familiar.
Thank you for sharing this….very interesting!!!!!
Implicit Bias is a product of human nature, it is sometimes not even apparent to an individual until someone informs them of it. I think the most important aspect of certain implicit biases start during childhood and is heavily controlled by family beliefs. It also depends on income level because I truly believe that someone that has lived a life of luxury in upper class neighborhoods have different views of minorities in the inner city than someone who has been born and raised in lower/middle class areas. Therefore, assumptions and biases are formed that only worsen the reality. As someone who grew up in the lower/middle class and have family members that are African American that live in Baltimore and Pittsburgh, I have personally seen these biases and like I said before, sometimes people don’t even realize they are doing it. I think this bias exists everywhere because people come from different backgrounds and cultures that differ from everyone else and naturally they are going to favor their own roots and background.
Implicit bias is very true and I say this because I have unfortunately seen it many times. People who grow up in certain households, whether they be top class, middle class, or lower class have a different outlook on life and certain subjects. For example, I believe that people who grow up in a racist household have more of chance of being racist. Implicit bias happens in our police forces almost everyday. Police are told to go to these lower class, poverty stricken areas because they want to focus on black people. Black police can also be bias towards black people. What I mean by this is that Black Police may know more about the area and know the in’s and out’s because they’ve seen it. This also leads to a lot of tension between both the black cop and black people because black people tend to look down on black cops. For example, I watched a video online of a black Baltimore cop, just talking to a group of black men and the black men started calling him a “white boy” and a “trader.” Within 5 seconds, the black cop just started beating one of the black men up. To me, that is implicit bias because the black cop knew what he was getting into, and the black man pushed him into fighting him. The tweet by Samuel Sinyaway was very amazing to me. It says black people in St. Louis have a 9 out of 100,000 chance of being shot and killed by police while the US murder rate is every 5 out of 100,000 people. So black people in St. Louis are twice as likely to be killed by the police than the average American being killed by anyone. That is very shocking to me, and these are one of the reasons people have these bad encounters with police. The statistics really prove it.
Where I work and what type of work I want to get involved with deals with bias every shift. I work as a public safety officer and work very close with many law enforcement officers all the time. I can honestly say that I do in fact harbor bias towards others. I am wrong sometimes about the way I feel though. But, other times I can guess what they are going to do next. I mainly focus on their body movements, i.e. their eye contact and the way they walk / run. Criminals almost always set themselves up for an arrest by body language or their attitudes and being bias before coming in contact helps because you almost expect to know what you are walking into. For those who do not work in law enforcement, I feel everyone is a bit bias. We are quick to judge people based on race and gender and where they are and where they come from. Police are at a cross road in todays society. They are being watched constantly by news, their own body cameras, and society. One wrong thing from a witness and the officers career could be over. Police have to be bias in order to do their jobs. Profiling is a term used as well, but if you do not profile and aren’t bias, how can one even be on duty in the streets. Now, when it comes to those being biased of their own race, it is kind of confusing for me. How can one be racist over their on race? I see this happen many times with police officers and it has even happened to me at work. I, unfortunately, laughed in the ladies face because I thought she was joking until she grabbed a supervisor. I didn’t get in trouble, but it was till a crazy incident. Police do their jobs no matter what race. They will back their brothers in arms up through every situation and will act in certain tones of voice to make every situation safe as possible.
I think there are some policing patterns in several police. i have been in a situation with a friend from Puerto Rico and we got pulled over and the cop asked us for our I.D. and so we gave it to him and the cop was being extremely rude. My friend has two last names because that’s what his culture is and the police was being rude for no reason. My friend was speeding and the cop was saying “you think you can come up here and just drive on the streets like this?” I have another friend who was stopped by police and he was with about four other people. My friends said they cooperated with police and there was one African American and also a white police. they said the white police was being the nice one but the African American police was being rude. At that time there was a girl from Greece and she spoke English but there are times that if you say something, she may not understand right away. The police were giving her a hard time because she was not understanding exactly what they were saying so she was confused. I feel there are different patterns in policing because of the experiences I have witnessed.
This post actually goes along with the book I am reading, racism without racists. Everyone has underlining beliefs, feelings and understandings that are subconsciously hidden. People don’t realize that even tho they feel like they never “automatically judge” everyone always does. I think it is so interesting that someone finally looked into this topic because it can be so confusing. If you ask anyone “are you racist” of course they will say no. People never realize what they really think until they are in certain situations or they are asked certain things. I don’t believe “police” as a group are racist, but I do believe they can be manipulated into targeting certain types of people. This doesn’t make the police racist it makes them have unfair quotas that they have to meet. I’m sure their are some officers that may be prejudice towards black men specifically but I don’t believe as a whole that they are. As far as black cops being racist against black people, it could happen to anyone. Yes it is possible anyone can be racist against their own race. We saw it in that video of the cop tasing the little 11 year old girl. He said to her “this is why we can have nice things in black neighborhoods.” He is blaming that girl and all black people for in-equal treatment when it’s not them it’s racist people like himself. It’s just such a weird concept to think that people don’t realize that they really are racist and they don’t believe they are.
One can be biased towards their own race, and I think being biased towards your own racial group is a very difficult concept to understand in my opinion. People often believe that being biased towards your own racial group corresponds to being racist to your own racial group and it does not. I personally have had my share of biases towards people in my race and outside of my race; just people in general. To be biased towards another person no matter what race they are is completely normal, because the fact that people have unconscious feelings and thoughts towards certain people that tends to determine how they feel about them. Today’s society made it so effortless to form an opinion about another person, because of the societal stereotypes around certain racial groups. For example, “All African Americans are on welfare” — stereotype!
I believe everyone has some kind of bias toward people. I don’t think race has anything to do with it I think the actions of people is what brings up my opinion on them… Everyone that commits crime gets in trouble and I believe the same consequences and I do not think race has anything to do with it at all !
I agree with the the section. While there may be a correlation with minority population and low income neighborhoods, that doesn’t mean that they are more likely to commit crimes. This disprortionate rate at which the police are spread out isn’t fair.
With implicit bias, especially in the police force, I believe will be impossible to reach true equality.
Implicit bias is anyone of any race and or culture that is the subconscious beliefs, feelings, and understanding that influence our perceptions when we encounter people of different races, economic status and gender().This article talks about implicit bias being within the police department. Anyone of any color can have a implicit bias, belief or feeling, towards anyone. When you talk about this sort of thing especially in the workforce first thing that comes to mind is a caucasian officer wrongly fully apprehending a African American person just off of the belief they are breaking the law. This can be the assumption of selling drugs, being in a gang, loitering, and more all because of that individuals skin color. After reading the article it was surprising that an African American police officer, Neil Franklin, admitted after working there for so long he as well gained a bias attitude towards African American people. That just proves that you can be bias over your own races and working in a environment such as that one for so long it’s human nature to adapt to your surroundings. Also in the article In North Beach Miami Florida police officers use African American’s mugshot as target practice. I don’t think that in my opinion would be implicit bias because using another person’s picture as a target is usually a sign of hatred for that person, and for police officers to use such a thing as a target is extremely unprofessional. There isn’t a good solution to try and change this bias of a person but there can be ways to somehow try and decrease on it. For example using mug shots as target practice can be stopped.
I believe society is biased towards all types of people, including those of their own race. Much like the article, we read, “Trash Talking the Working Class”, many caucasian people of a higher social class described their feelings towards other members of the same racial classification as the lower of the group being not “proper” enough. I think people try to separate themselves within their own racial groups so they are never classified as being “white-trash”, etc. Being biased towards people of the same racial class as yourselves is a very common thing simply because social status is the foundation on which many live their lives.
Due to my past experiences I would say I harbor some bias like most people. For example a stereotype most people believe is that if you come from the West Indies than you automatically smell like spices. We also live in a society where we are conditioned to assume that because this person may look hispanic than you can come up to them and speak Spanish. Another example of harbor bias for some would be assuming because a black person is not using slang “they are trying to act white”. Another example regarding this is if a black and white person were to walk into a store they automatically start profile them. People automatically start clenching their belongings while the white person is free to roam around. Interestingly enough the white person could of been the one stealing items.
People being racist towards their own race is a very real thing. I have noticed it many time growing up. I have heard white people call others “white trash”. Racism happens every day, between members of the same race and different races. If we cannot stop racism within the same race then stopping racism all together is impossible. One should not judge others based on their financial or any other state without knowing the full story. They may have hidden motives or reasons for them being in the place they are that you may never understand or experience. As far as patterns go, for Black people making up a significantly smaller population size but having a higher arrest rate is a problem. There is no hiding from facts and evidence.
Jeiron Lewis
I think that the idea of being bias toward members of their own racial group is horrible. I think it is horrible because I think the people of your own race should have a better understand of what type of neighborhood people could of grew up in or what problems people could be facing. For an example black cops being bias towards black people. I would think that black cops would understand how it is living in a low-income area that’s poor, around drug activity, and violence going on all around you it’s like how people cannot get easily influenced by what’s going on. I’m not saying that just because someone is the same color as you that commits a crime you should let them go, but the cops should approach the situation differently like that person is a person and not an alien that the cops fear and must kill them. Crimes are committed everyday I think if the cops of the same race used what they know about there race in the situation and try to help that person or group of people I think they will open up and that could prevent that person or group of people from committing more crimes and less people would be dead.
Living in such a diverse place, I believe that everybody harbors bias against one another. I would say that I have harbored bias towards different racial and ethnic groups as well. People are filled with information, whether it be true or false, through many different sources such as social media, the news channels, and even people that they talk to in their every day lives. I believe that one is able to harbor bias towards another and not be racist. In the website post it says, “White and African Americans use marijuana at roughly the same rate, yet African Americans are 4X more likely to be arrested for its use and possession”. For people who do not think that there is an issue with cops being bias against certain racial or ethnic groups, there has been evidence to prove that they are. I also believe that people are capable of being bias toward members of their own racial group. Even though I believe this is possible and does happen, I also believe that people should stop being looked at differently because of their race and/or ethnic group. I do not think that one race or ethnic group is more important than the other and this problem will never be fixed until everybody else realizes this as well.
Yes, I have found myself harboring bias towards different racial and ethnic groups, but I don’t mean to. I grew up in a primarily white community, shielded from different cultural and ethnic views. As we all know, anyone who was not white in historic times was subject to prejudice and that has been deeply ingrained into our society. Since I have not grown up around those ethnic groups, I have not learned how to react when around them (I have now, but there is always that feeling). It’s a feeling I hate and resent because I’m not culturally diversified and everyone is equal. As I stated, the cause of my bias is the primarily white community I have grown up in. I was never introduced to anyone different than a white person.
Now, with the issue of people being biased towards members of their own racial group is the same as a two different racial groups being racist towards one another. Just because you are the same race doesn’t mean being racist is okay. I have seen many accounts of this in policing. There will be a black cop that is racist towards other blacks. They would treat them like dirt, like they were less than the cop was.
Equality is something we will never achieve in society. Everyone is always going to think one is better than the other.
What do i think about people being bias towards memebers of their own? I think that it happens all the time, i find myself being bias towards both of my races. It’s normal, everyone forms an initial opinion of someone no matter what they look like but as they start seeing the same issue with certain groups they create stereotypes. For an example, when i drive through a neighborhood and i see a bunch of young African American men standing on the corner, i think to myself wow these guys could be doing something way more productive with their time. When i see white folks on drugs i think to myself wow you guys had an advantage in this world and you wasted it to be on drugs or to be lazy. So yes being bias towards your own race is normal.
I do find myself harboring bias towards different racial or ethnic groups sometimes. When i see a story on the news of people protesting over the shooting of someone, I find myself thinking “was it another African American who was shot?” I have family members that either were police officers, or they still are. I understand the dangers of them being on the job, and them not wanting to take any risks that could end up costing them their lives. However, I also see it from the victims perspective. There have been many cases where police have used excessive force and ended a civilian’s life when it was not necessary. These shootings cause the protests that we see on the news more and more. Many of these protests are after a young African American is shot and killed by a white police officer. People are crying racism and until recently i always sided with the police officers due to my family ties. However, after doing my own research I have discovered that there is a lot of racism in the police departments and many innocent lives have been taken because of it. The problem roots back to where we grew up and the views we were taught from our parents.
Due to the cultural stereotypes in the media about different races and cultures I myself do sometimes harbor bias towards different racial and ethnic groups, but i have never been racist to anyone due to their race or culture. My best friend growing up was black and we are still great friends to this day. I would say the bias comes from what the media tells me 24/7, and me just not knowing someone not necessarily from a past experience but just not knowing them. I can definitely see that black people are watched and under suspicion way more than white people, and this is from trust and implicit bias which has to stop if any resolve between the two sides is going to happen. I think being racist towards people in your own racial group is another trust issue. If you don’t know a certain person you might have a certain bias about them before you even know their name. I think it all goes back to trust and wont stop unless people learn to trust each other and get to know them before your implicit bias gets in the way.
I have found myself in the past being biased towards people of different racial or ethnic groups than those which I am a part of personally. I have never been consciously racist towards anybody. I’ve never been afraid of someone because they aren’t white, or have avoided people just because they’re black. Personally, I grew up in a poor neighborhood with a variety of people from different racial and ethnic backgrounds. As kids, no one cared what color anybody was, everyone just did the same thing as everyone else, regardless of race. Even as the kids in the neighborhood got older and started, as I like to put it, “doin’ bad shit,” race wasn’t a huge barrier, as long as you didn’t make it one. That is to say, if you didn’t care that someone was different than you, they probably didn’t either. To me it was sort of a “we’re all in this together” type of situation since everyone grew up in the same neighborhood and knew all the same people and did the same stuff as everyone else. I personally think that this upbringing has helped me as a person to be less implicitly biased towards people who look physically different than me compared to someone who might have grown up in an upper class all white neighborhood their whole life. Though, that isn’t to say that I don’t have any implicit bias toward anyone, we all do no matter who you are. I personally have gotten away from being a part of my neighborhood’s typical activities, as many of them involve, or are at least usually done in conjunction with, illegal activities and I personally don’t see any gain to be had by going to jail over something stupid while hanging out with friends.
The way I was raised I never really thought that I was racist or had certain bias against people. Now I hold a certain bias against everyone, I don’t really trust people outside of the area I live in.
Id say the reason i’m biased would have to do with the school i went to the friends I had and the way I’ve seen the world through the news that I’ve heard from people around me.
From what I’ve seen the police just pull as many people over as they can, just recently the last few days in the month of march I saw about 20 people pulled over by cops.
It’s completely reasonable at this point in my life i’m more likely to think some random white kid Is smoking weed, or doing other drugs more often than a black kid, simply because of the situations I’ve seen or heard of from my friends.
I definitely think people are biased towed their own racial/ethnical group as far as policing and anything in law enforcement goes. I also think some of the reason why people are biased toward their own is because of patterns in policing. It’s a big circle, it goes the same way every time. The way people react toward police reactions make them react the same way again and completes the policing patterns. You see many times that black cops are racist toward other black people. What’s sad about that is we only focus in the black cop being racist toward another black person, we don’t focus on white cops being racists toward another white person. Even a Hispanic cop toward another Hispanic. As a society we have decided to let the stereo-types define white cops black cops and Hispanics. Just because one cop is racists now they’re all racist just because one cop likes donuts now they all do. Were living in a dog eat dog world.
and this too. check your syllabus and reading list.
When looking into policing patterns from the medias perspective, there’s no doubt in my mind the black males are being targeted the most. Racial profiling without a doubt is used by some police officers. If you even look at the amount of murders by police per million, black people are double, if not triple that what other races are. Stereotyping is one of the biggest issue inside our police system. All though that is a problem, it doesn’t help that black’s have a high crime rate.
I believe that everyone is biased in their own way whether they realize it or not. I even consider myself to be biased about areas I am driving through that I do not know. Often times we make assumption about a specific area or race due to an experience we’ve had or a story told to us by some close to us. The first time I ever drove through any part of Philly, my aunt told me not to look at anyone and keep looking forward after seeing a man yelling into his phone outside of a bar. After this, if I find myself driving in what looks like to be a town in poverty, I make sure my windows are rolled up, my doors locked, and i focus straight ahead. I normally do not catch myself doing this until after I leave an area due to the fact that I am subconsciously doing these things because of one experience.
Every person on the planet has unconscious thoughts, feelings and attitudes toward people, places and things that affects our judgments and decisions. To truly understand implicit bias is to know it does not equate solely to racism or prejudice, but rather is a fundamental way human beings function. Bottom line, we are built this way and for good cause. The big issue with implicit bias isn’t its basis in humanity, but rather that police officers may subconsciously use force based on it. So in reality, we are depending on the police officers good graces in order to make a “right” choice, and we are putting our lives on the line in order to do so. That is probably the scariest thing about bias. In the context of criminal justice and community safety, implicit bias has been shown to have significant influence in the outcomes of interactions between police and citizens, especially when it has to do with race and poverty. Discussions of implicit bias in policing tend to focus on implicit racial biases; however, implicit bias can be expressed in relation to non-racial factors, including gender, age, religion, or sexual orientation. In policing, this has resulted in widespread practices that focus undeserved suspicion on some groups and presume other groups innocent. Reducing the influence of implicit bias is vitally important to strengthening relationships between police and minority communities. Yes we are all bias, but police officers have a duty to serve and protect our society. Not destroy it.
I feel like every person has some kind of bias. It all really depends how you were raised like for me I was raised to treat everyone with respect no matter the race. Also, another thing that makes a great impact on the bias is social media because it portrays so much it could either make one group look good or bad. I do understand what good or bad like states one state that they say is bad is Baltimore and with that i wouldn’t like to live there because of how bad that it is there. One way to know if Baltimore is bad is by looking at the crime rates. The Policing patterns need to change because they target the poor areas and that’s where more arrests happen and the crime rate is at an all-time high. It’s not the officer’s fault they target it there is the person in charge of them because they tell them what they expect from them and what they should do. The patterns should focus in other areas not highly on the poor ones because they never know whats fully going on in other areas if they aren’t high patrolled as the poor areas.
I think that everyone holds some kind of bias towards other people. Whether they personally experienced something from a different group or if a family member had told them about a story that happened to them. Even I have some bias when I go into unfamiliar places. An example is when I drive into Wilmington i always make sure my doors are locked and that I’m aware of my surrounding. Ive heard stories that wilmington has a lot of crime and I don’t want something to happen to me or to someone that I am with. I think that it works the same way with police officers. They are told stories about the district or area that they work and have then created a bias towards the people that they are sworn to protect. And it is a very vicious cycle.
I think that policing patterns need to change especially for police departments that force officers to extremely patrol areas that are poor or have high crime rates. In some ways it is not the officer’s fault. Supervisors and training are the ones creating issues. I believe that once an officer has been forced to stop and frisk people because they looked suspicious, that it would be hard to move away from that. I think that almost everyone creates some sort of bias toward members of their own racial group. I do not think everyone purposely creates a bias of people of the same race. Overtime you just see/learn about everything in the world as you are growing up and certain views are put in your mind. An example would be a white friend judges someone that has to take the bus. You do not how they were put in that position. Maybe they like taking the bus. I hate when I hear someone judge another person when they have no clue who that person is.
That’s a really good example – taking the bus – because it illustrates perfectly how people learn to attach meaning to the smallest things (they confirm their bias), where they judge another person as poor, dangerous, not fit, etc.
The idea of people being biased toward members of their own racial group has some truth. The readings detail how black police officers could be racist towards black men and believe into the stereotypes. Personally, I hang out with a lot of cops that come from different races and back grounds. Currently, at my internship I speak with a former Reading cop who is Puerto Rican. When speaking to him, he talked about how it did get to a point where he saw Spanish people walking through Reading he felt suspicious by the way they dress and so on. Because Reading has a high Hispanic population, he spoke how he arrested a lot more Hispanics than any other race. Essentially, I can envision him at some point in his career as a police officer having a bias towards his race. A lot of people want Police Departments to be more diverse, but as the readings suggest, I think eventually their bias will show. Overall, the issue of implicit bias has to be address for arrests of minorities to decline.
That’s what makes the research so important – because most people think that the bias problem can be fixed by diversifying the police force. Clearly, it is not that simple.
I am sure that I do sometimes have biases toward certain racial and ethnic groups. To have some biases is natural, and we aren’t always aware of them. I don’t really blame myself for these biases, but rather, my environment. I personally have never really had any complaints about the policing patterns within my community. However, I’m sure there are other neighborhoods where the police do not have as good of a relationship with the public as I am used to in my neighborhood. Lately, it seems like the media’s representations of the police have been very bad, sometimes rightly so. Ultimately, I don’t believe everything that the media says. Almost all of the networks are painting a picture that supports their own opinion. The idea that people are biased toward members of their own racial group does not seem that far fetched to me. I know many people who are bias toward members of their own racial group. Interestingly, most of those people are minorities. Its almost as if they have bought in to some of the stereotypes said about minorities in this country.
I do often find that I hold racial and ethnic biases because of the cultural stereotypes around me. As much as I try to fight them because I know they are not right to hold, I am well aware that they are still there. I do not always listen to the biases but there will be times when my conditioned thoughts influence my observations of a person and whether or not they may not be dangerous. I believe a part of these biases i hold is my upbringing, while I lived in diverse communities and had friends of different races and ethnicity I was overall very sheltered as a child. I would not be aloud to go to others houses, I could not go out with my friends if it was not in a group and while they may not seem like they are major proponents of racial bias, I feel like they prevented me from truly seeing how others lived and that it was not the same as my own. My mother is not racist but she also subscribes to her racial bias and voices her thoughts when she thinks “all these people are like that” so as I grew up the stereotypes were all I knew. When it comes to policing patterns I do not have any experience dealing with them myself but in the media we see issues every day of officers being aggressive and unfair to those of color but not as much to those of color. POC’s get stopped and arrested and jailed for small crimes like weed as opposed to white’s who sometimes can’t even get arrested for major crimes like rape. It suggests a serious need to change our policing patterns when it comes to how we reward and punish officers based on how many tickets they write or arrests they make and instead for actually getting serious criminals off streets as opposed to meeting a goal. I think people being biased against their own racial groups is very common, we tend to point out the flaws in the people around us and apply it to our race. In the past even I have done this saying “Indians are cheap”because I feel as if I know my own race. I am cheap sometimes, members of my family are cheap so I tend to apply that stereotype to my entire race even if it is not true. While that is not as serious as seeing your own race as criminals it is an example of how it becomes perpetuated. If you see it all around you from those of your race, you will assume it of the race. That is one issue I feel will never be fully solved because stereotypes exists in the 1st place, as long as the concept exists we will keep applying them to even ourselves/ our races.
I’m sure there was a time where I would of been bias towards a group of people. For example, cultural stereotypes play a huge role in today’s society. So when I was growing up I only knew the culture around me. So when it came to other cultures I had nothing to base my opinions of views off of except for the stereotype. If I still held stereotypes at such a high standard to base my views upon now, I do think I would think some people would be considered dangerous than other. So, I understand that those who haven’t been exposed of it only see the worst in a group based off of either what they hear or see within the media. Sometimes what is portrayed in the media is all we get to see. For example, areas like St. Louis, Detroit, Memphis, and Baltimore. I always hear the worst. This makes me not want to live there or even visit. The city can’t be bad, but the people in that city can. This assures me that I wouldn’t want to be around people like that. I’ve had very limited contact with the police. In fact I can not ever recall a time where I had a interaction with a police on my term. I’ve seen then and talked to them at places like school and national night out community gathers. I’ve also learned that some things portrayed in the media can be bias. There are news outlets that tend to view a certain way. That being said I don’t like to build opinions based on that. Especially if it’s coming from a place that doesn’t reflect my community. If I could live in the ideal world, bias wouldn’t be a thing. However, I cannot judge someone for being bias toward a group. I don’t know them. I don’t know what type of interaction they’ve had with someone of a certain group. Ideally I wouldn’t want anyone in my circle to be biased towards another racial group. Those are not my morals or values so I don’t see myself surrounding myself with people like that.
According to all my prior readings, I find that the policing patterns in general tend to target crime ridden neighborhoods where predominately black people live. In hot spot areas, people may even notice that the police are typically white males. I think that by having more diversity in a police department, it can help with the tension. Hispanics are probably more comfortable being pulled over by somebody who actually speaks their language. “A diverse department can still have problems keeping the trust or even gaining in the first place the trust of minority communities, but it’s likely to have fewer problems than a department that’s mainly white or doesn’t reflect the demographics of the community.” Overall, racism has been an issue for many years and it can be overwhelming for community members to experience it while being apprehended by police officers.
In this post it talks about Implicit Bias , but the definition given I ” subconscious beliefs, feelings, and understandings that influence our perceptions when we encounter people of different races, economic status, gender and so on.” Basically from my understanding is that if an officer has a influence or perception of a certain race he/ she would have a bias towards that race and use to justify why he/she stopped or arrested that person and so on.Also the media and your up bringing may cause you to have bias towards a certain race. However ,I do believe that Black people are targeted more than any other race because just look back at our history with slavery it all derives from that.
Personally, I have never had any bias towards any race or ethnic group. Being hispanic/asian, I have yet to find someone who fits these “stereotypes.” I understand stereotypes are made for a reason, but at this point there’s a stereotype for literally everything. I never had a problem with anyone because of their race/ethnicity and I race is the last thing to pop into my head if there is a problem with someone. What it all boils down to is the kind of person they are. There is a different spectrum of people anywhere you go. There can be someone who is rich and awful, but there is always someone who is poor and just as awful. The idea of stereotypes coming from race should be forgotten at this point, I hear more stereotypes coming from hobbies and groups of people rather than race. For example, if you were to think of a gamer what image pops into your head? Or a nerd? Or a prep? For all of those examples I’m sure race wasn’t being added into the picture when you thought of the stereotype for each group. So to answer the question, no, I do not harbor any bias towards anyone coming from any race/ ethnicity, with the way the world is changing race shouldn’t even be a problem anymore.
I’ve found that I do harbor a bias against different racial and ethnic groups. My particular bias is against people of Reading and West Reading. If I can tell someone is from Reading, then my first impressions are that they are probably not the best person. I attribute this to the fact that I am from Wyomissing where most students from the school and town were incredibly well behaved. The exception was that kids from West Reading who also may have been from Reading caused significantly more problems than white kids. For awhile I thought that I was racist, but I eventually realized that it was all because of what has happened with Reading that has resulted in my bias. I think policing patterns are effective at catching crime but very poor at doing their job of protecting the people and keeping the peace.
Yes, I do find myself harboring bias towards different racial and ethnic groups due to cultural stereotypes because as much as we what to believe stereotypes are mean and untrue, 9/10 they are true. Stereotypes do kind of make it easier to understand who is more dangerous than others just because of trends that we see. I think policing patterns are unfair, but needed in the sense they need to stop targeting those who cant afford to get arrested and target more of those who can. What I see as a median on the streets is color and money, if you don’t have money you are targeted if you do not as much, if you are colored tend to be targeted, white same difference. I think the idea of bias against own members of their own racial group is good because it means that they see something that others in their group don’t and from what I seen through historical research when the few notice something is wrong it usually is.
At times I have notice that I am bias towards certain groups other than races. I grew up in the city and was always surrounded by other cultures. I never felt as though one race of people posed any threat. To this day I don’t succumb to racial prejudice or stereotypes that are promoted on television or in the media.
Although, I do not feed in to racial bias I do not feel comfortable outside of the city than I do inside of the city due to racial profiling. There are times when I was at the park with my children and noticed my children and I were treated differently. At that time, I felt that I wasn’t welcomed to that neighborhood. I didn’t feel unsafe, just upset that people are still stuck in their racial mindset.
In my opinion, policing patterns are meant to target the lower-class neighborhood. Police make me uncomfortable because of their abuse of power. I can admit that I would be nervous if I were to be pulled over by a police officer knowing that I might be treated differently because of the color of my skin. You can go on social media and find hundreds of videos of cops killing civilians. It’s hard to cope with the thought of being killed at a routine traffic stop because the office was scared of you because you “fit the profile”.
I definitely harbor some sort of bias when it comes to profiling different racial groups as dangerous. It has a lot to do with how people dress, how they carry themselves when walking past them, and how they interact with me. For me to perceive someone as dangerous, it’ll take two or more of these characteristics to set off alarms in my head, but if I see any one of these, then my mind locks in. A well-dressed white man who has very angry interactions with me later might not set off my awareness of my bias, but if the same man were terribly dressed with ragged clothes and unclean hands might provoke me earlier. The source of my bias comes from cultural representations seen through television and the media. As a young kid, I was always on the television watching commercials which no doubt held underlying messages about different racial and ethnic bias for their time, passed down to me just by watching cartoons. While I was not a huge consumer on the news, news stations generally made me biased towards cities, and ultimately the people living in them, as dangerous when compared to rural life.
My view on policing patterns is torn between my own personal experiences and what I see on social media and the news on a regular basis. One tells a story of how the police are a predatory system not in place to serve the people, but to serve higher up’s, legislators, or themselves. Social media tends to paint policing as dangerous and predatory, but my own personal experience proves policing as non-predatory. I will admit my own experience is limited to what I see on the road as I drive to work and school. I mostly see police officers helping individuals with car problems, and in fact, had experienced that myself a year ago when my car got a flat on the highway. As I was pulled over on the left-hand side of the road, a police officer pulled up behind me to find out what was the matter. After discovering the flat tire, he assisted me in changing the tire out for the spare since I did not know how to change a tire. He was very kind, gave me tips for the next time, got my information, and went on his way.
It’s impossible to ignore the fact that we are all biased to a degree, whether we like it or not. Even those within their own social groups. As for myself, I am no different than anyone else. I admit that sometimes I can be biased towards certain groups without ever meaning to. As if automatic, my mind categorizes and judges people on cue before I even think about it. It isn’t intentional but it’s simply something our mind do by nature. However, it is our choice whether or not we act and encourage said accusations or fight against them with neutral logic. These biased thoughts are triggered by what society often implements into our minds at a young age without anyone ever realizing it. Something as simple as a poor casting choice in a film can weigh someone’s opinions on certain ethnic groups.
Such negative and simple choices such as that can be the difference between a respectful and disrespectful cop. Especially nowadays with social media, it’s easier for these issues to be blown up within our faces and exploited. While there are plenty of accounts where biased Police officers have been unjust to people of certain ethnic groups, it would also be hypocritical to state that Officers, in general, are the problem when there are plenty of Officers who do not let their judgments get the better of them.
I believe that I always try to treat a person fairly, no matter what they’re racial or ethnic background. I judge someone off of their personality and character and not their appearance. I think that everyone makes assumptions about certain groups that are unfair to believe. I believe that my own personal bias towards certain groups is because of what I see in the news. I think that the news causes fear and hatred towards certain groups and manipulates the way I think. Though I know these biases are wrong, it is constantly repeated in current events.
I think the idea of policing patterns is wrong. It should purely be based on the crime rate of an area alone. If a neighborhood is predominately a certain race, does not mean that it should receive extra policing. If a neighborhood has a high crime rate though, then it should get all of the necessary policing.
I don’t think anyone should be biased towards their own social group because I don’t think that one group has all of the same people in it. I also don’t believe that a social group should always stick up for one another when you know that they are wrong. People should make opinions based on each individual and not stereotype into a large group.
Growing up in a majority white suburban area while being of the minority, I still find myself having some harbor bias towards different ethnic groups due to cultural stereotypes.This is simply because I have seen both sides of different ethnic groups and I understand why people make stereotypes. I would say the reason of this bias is due to cultural representation and what I have personally experienced. A lot of people are also influenced by what the media shows. Even though the media doesn’t always portray what is happening accurately, they still give us an insight of what is happening in this world and allow people to make certain stereotypes. People shouldn’t be biased towards their own racial group because they should know how most of the people in their group are and how they act. Even though I can understand why some people are biased towards their own racial group. This is mainly due to the media and how they portray the certain race.
I have to say, it’s really, /really/ hard to be able to not have even the smallest form of implicit bias. I mean, it certainly is something that’s looked down upon in our society, having any form of prejudice and bias, but I don’t think it’s anything that can be avoided. Not only are we taught from our parents about what their beliefs are, and that in and of itself is an extremely strong influential force, but with the way our brains themselves function can also influence this. Considering that we’re mentally programmed to make an assumption of strangers we come across within the first few moments of meeting them ties into this whole thing. We can’t stop ourselves from making assumptions. After all, when was the last time you looked at someone and had literally no opinions about them entirely?
So yes, I have bias too, considering that through what I mentioned above, it’s hard to ignore everything and say that I don’t. Because if you deny having even the tiniest bit of bias, then even that statement alone will cause others to get bias of /you/ instead.
Of course, I would say another large part to this issue alone is from how media changes and forms it. Giving those who once didn’t have a voice, a voice. The fact that all of these racial issues isn’t something new, it always existed, but now with ever-increasing technology, all of it can be spread to every corner of the globe. Trying to get rid of implicit bias is something that’s impossible to accomplish. To try and change cultural and personal views is something that may take decades, perhaps even centuries. Something like this simply can’t be ‘fixed’ by reading and sharing posts, looking at facts and statistics, or befriending others and learning about them.
At times I do find myself being biased and stereotyping ethnic groups, however I do respect them. Although, everyone at some point in their life also is biased or stereotypes people. The main source of the stereotyping derives from things such as: newspapers, news channels and social media. You can see numerous cases of people of all races committing crimes daily. However, as bad as it is, when viewing the news or reading the paper you will probably see it being a black person committing the crime. This is most likely due to them living in a poor neighborhood and the only way they think they can get something is by theft. White people on the other are also just as bad because they too commit crimes and just as often. But due to media you mostly see the more controversial side of things.
I don’t think I am bias towards racial or ethnic group. Ever since I was young i was raised by my parents to look at everyone as equals and to show no discrepancy between anyone. Obviously there are some people that have bias towards others, but I try not to listen to those people and keep reminding myself of how I was raised. I went to high school in Providence, RI and we had all different races and ethnic groups in my school and I was friends with everyone because skin color or religion did not make me think that they were different. Coming to college is the same way, because I want to be friends with everyone and nothing is going to make me stereotype anybody. Everyone is equal to me and that will never change. Everyone has the same goals in college, to earn a degree, and everyone should get the same and equal opportunity to do that. We are all here for the same reasons. I have not personally experienced any discrimination in policing, but I have seen it in the media. Some people stereotype others and police officers could stereotype the people they arrest too. They arrest people because their job is to make places safer. I believe police officers are just doing their job, but there is also stereotyping everywhere because not everyone was raised to not stereotype other people. This issue could go either way it just depends on your judgment and opinion.
Personally, at times I do show bias emotions towards racial and ethnic groups. However, I do not believe the color of your skin or the religion you choose, depicts the type of person you are. In today’s society, all most every United States citizen, one way or another, has shown bias emotions towards different racial ethnicities (especially being shown to the public through communication). With that being said, having easy direct access to the internet and news channels tend to grow tensions on the topic of “racism”. These ways of communication (the internet and the news) fixates on the negative aspects, resulting on the growing tensions of racism in society today. Unfortunately, I do believe these negative aspects that are being portrayed to the public, do in fact, effect every individual police officer. This has both effected police officers way of life on the job, their policing patterns and the public’s view on them as a whole. In my opinion, police practices are very good and most of the time officers stick to protocol and do the right thing. However, this is not always the case. Some people, such as Kalief Browder and Eric Garner were treated unfairly and both men were stripped of their 5th amendment. Having said that, I believe police officers are always here to protect us from any intimate danger and in today’s world they are seen as the threat rather than the solution.
I do not believe that I harbor bias towards any racial or ethnic groups. I have been raised to view everyone as equals, and I try my best to do just that. I understand that there are stereotypes about all races, but I believe that those are all generalizations. People can be dangerous no matter what the color of their skin is, or what their religion is.
As a college student I have been exposed to various nationalities. I do not feel any different having a conversation with an African American, Asian, or white person. To me, they are my peers and we are all here to gain an education to have the greatest opportunity for success in our futures.
When I was younger I had some biased thoughts towards different ethnicities. This stems mostly from how my grandparents have acted towards certain groups. Hearing them say certain things when I was a child led to me unfairly categorizing certain people. Now that I am older I do not believe these things at all. I can’t even think of a time where I have unfairly judged someone because of their race. This being said I understand why so many people are biased towards certain races. The areas where people live play such a big role in how some people see others, this can be seen primarily with police. I do not like or approve of how police officers are so biased against certain groups. However, I understand that they are put in areas where most of the crime is done by specific groups. Because of where they are placed they are much more likely to discriminate because of their own experiences in those areas.
As bad is it sounds, I do harbor bias towards some racial and ethnic groups through both stereotyping and through personal experiences, although when I get to know anyone in any race, I see those individuals differently and I respect them. Growing up, I had family members that were racially biased towards anyone that wasn’t white, even though my family has a mix of American and Asian blood (which isn’t much of an excuse). I’ve heard about every racial slur and joke ever made for most races and I use them jokingly once in a while when I know I can get away with it. I respect people in public, but I might throw bias out with friends privately if I randomly get upset and know their race. Ultimately, I wish the best for everyone, but it seems I’m probably part of the problem when I think about it and my friends do this as well.
In terms of danger, specifically with black people, I see the pure Africans as much nicer group of people than the supposed “black people” who are really mixes of other races and are brown. Africans just seem very nice towards me while the mix is a bit less nice and more daring. My sample size (aka what I’ve seen) isn’t very large, so I don’t take these judgments as a predetermined truth, but I keep them in mind. Other races don’t intimidate me at all.
Personally, I find myself thinking about different stereotypes and having certain biases towards people depending on the place I am. For instance, my opinion on African Americans can change if I am in a city at night compared to if we are in my dorm for instance. When I first started attending berks, I met someone in my dorm from inner city Philly. I never worried about him being violent, stealing items, or being your stereotypical inner-city citizen. Instead I saw him as an equal, and never even thought about how I viewed him until I was asked to write about my biases.
I think many issues in policy stem from this same idea. When these officers are usually found at fault in a shooting issue, some may have been in situations where all they can think about is the fact that it is dark, they are in the bad part of town, and many people here carry guns. Maybe the cop is racist, and just automatically assumed that the guy was up to no good because of their skin color, but some may have had the issue of the situation. They could have felt uncomfortable, and wrongly shot their weapon.
I do not find myself being bias towards different racial and ethnic groups due to cultural stereotypes, where I think some people are more dangerous than others. With being mixed myself, Puerto Rican and African American, I would say I have had people from different races be bias towards myself and my family. I have experienced and have been in situations where people of different races have been bias towards others of my race or even my family itself.
For example, being African American people expect “us” to be the stereotypical “black people” all the time. People in this society look at black people to be dangerous, violent, or drug dealers. From my experience, sometimes in some stores black people get watched while in the store because they look at us as threats or think we are going to steal from the store. Also, from an experience I encountered, I was at a dinner with people, all different races, and a few tables away there was a black family also having dinner, and one of the girls I was having dinner with, who was Caucasian, made a comment saying “They would be black people being loud”. In that situation, it made me realize how people really only look at peoples skin color and automatically think they fit all the stereotypes of certain races.
I think that there are a lot of harbor bias towards different races and ethnic groups now a day. I especially see a lot of it where I am from. I’m from Denver Pa where there aren’t very much ethnicity around there. I would say that over 90% of the population that lives around me would be white. I think this is why there is a lot of racial people where I am from. One place I witness a lot of racial conflicts was in my high school. You could easily tell which groups were racists and which were not. I did however notice that the majority of the people that were getting in trouble at my high school were African American students. This I believe caused bias between races at my high school. Another issue I would like to talk about is the policing patterns. I live right near a pretty busy road that cops tend to patrol and sit on often. It is very uncommon to be able to drive down this road without seeing at least one cop sitting along the road. The weird thing is I have never seen anyone pulled over on this road before. This makes me wonder why they spend so much time on this road while they could be focusing on other spots.
I agree with the ‘academic’ definition of what implicit bias means. Implicit bias is basically what people think about other people based on their race. The idea of people being biased towards members of different racial groups could be a bad thing in the realm of policing because if officers having bad biased opinions regarding other another race, they will guard and police that certain race more than any other race, which would be unfair. This is true because if for example, a white police officer were biased and thought that white people are innocent no matter what they do, they would not arrest as many white people for doing illegal things, because of their opinions regarding races. The tweet by Samuel Sinyangwe describes how implicit bias can change people’s lives because of how other people act. Unfortunately implicit bias can affect a police officers job performance, and how they view different people as criminals. Fortunately I haven’t had any experience with police being biased towards anyone specific in my neighborhood in the last 19 years, but that could also be because of the rather low crime rate in my area. Originally, bias stems from the way that certain people see other people, and this could be caused from how someone was raised, such as someones parent’s telling their kids that a certain race is bad because the way that they act, even though it may not be entirely true. Along with this, being bias could be because of the person that is being bias is uneducated or not well informed about a certain race.
Coming from inner-city Philadelphia as well as being a minority I know that there are a lot of prejudice people in the world. I go to a clothing store, there’s you can see people watching you, spying you making sure you don’t steal anything. I could be going home at night and I can tell people don’t want to walk near me or try to get far away from me as possible.I do the same thing even to my own race. If I am by myself at night and I see a crowd of minorities I would avoid them as well. I don’t really know why I do it either. So I’m not sure why people are biased towards their own race. I thinks that the reason people treated minorities they way they do is because of stereotypes. Even though there are a lot of people out there that don’t think that way. I think the police do patrol the right areas at certain times. Police patrol the places where more likely a crime will occur. Its not there fault that these ares are usually have poverty and are usually predominantly minorities. Its sad but thats just how it is.
My personal experiences with a bias towards a group or race come from a mission trip I went on with my church for the past six years. The trip is a week in Tennessee participating in an outreach program called Mountain T.O.P. in which participants are put into teams of about 8 with a driver and either do repair work to homes and properties or run a day camp for local children. The area, Tracy City and surrounding communities in Grundy County, have a very low employment rate and a very high poverty rate. It is a place where the term “white trash” can easily be applied. Every year I experience the same cycle of bias and then shame for my original bias. Every time my team pulls up to another trailer that is falling apart, trash piled up outside in an overgrown yard, I instantly think ‘wow, these people must never get off their couch, they are probably unemployed drug users,’ and I am always wrong. After getting to know the residents and hearing their stories, I come to find out that they can’t work because they are too sick or injured to do so, despite how badly they want to, and many of them have their children and grandchildren living with them. I have never had an experience with a mean person in Tennessee. What really gets to me in an emotional way is when they buy or make us lunch. The camp provides us with a lunch, so there is no need for them to do this, but they are just so grateful that they insist on it. When I think about where this bias comes from, the only answer is the stereotype of “white trash” and people making fun of it, like the page “People of Walmart”.
I have had experiences with a bias against minorities on one of my trips, though, and it was interesting. One of the homes I went to, I met a black man who had a very powerful story. He was from Pittsburgh, had become homeless at 15, and survived by dealing drugs. He had been arrested and spent time in prison. He was very drunk as he told us this story and began crying and saying how badly he wished he had made better choices because he felt he wasn’t providing for his family. He had a job, as a music producer, working out of his basement. He fit the stereotype that fuels implicit bias within police forces. He was a young black male selling drugs. The police had a reason to arrest him, as he was breaking the law. But, he was homeless at 15, and it was the only way he knew to make money. And, like he said, he didn’t choose that life.
Coming from majority white suburban town, I have no first hand opinion on the racism of cops. My town is filled with racism and stereotypes that all point to this idea that people of color are the ones who produce the most crime. In the article it talks about African American cops being racist to their own racial groups. My first thought about this is that people of different races have come from so many different struggles or places. They may be this outlier we talk so much in class that they come from nothing and expect everyone to be able to do the same. Or the complete opposite, they come from something and don’t quite grasp the idea that others have had to struggle to get to where they are even if it is not a good place. I will say that from what I hear on the news and the way social networking exploits all these headlines, it seems like a very real possibility that different groups of people are being targeted for certain things. Certain crimes are put with certain groups of people. So maybe that is how we are all racist. We think of someone addicted to meth to be living in a trailer park, so wouldn’t that make us just as racist as the next person? The idea that bias police officers exist is no doubt but true. If a family member gets a ticket or close friend gets pulled over then strings will be pulled. Growing up in a family of multiple cops and law enforcement workers, bias and favoritism happens.
Racism is a trending topic in the United States, especially with our current president, Donald Trump. Racism in the justice system has only been fueling the fire. With the amount of crimes being committed by white police officers on black Americans, there has been extensive controversy. Some think it is all done on purpose, while very few find it to be a coincidence. It is sad to say but when I see news reports of gun violence on the streets of Philadelphia (where I am from), I normally assume it is a black male that committed the act. It is rare that this is not the case, but it is still unfair to assume. With the way the media portrays violence, it is difficult to not make assumptions and hold firm opinions on certain matters and people. With that being said, some people take it too far by holding their media based opinions towards every member of a specific race/religion/group. It raises the question of how intense would racism be if it was dialed down in the media or if EVERY crime was reported? By this I mean the stories that make it big in the news are crimes that can be categorized as racist or hate crimes. Most violent crimes committed go without being mentioned in the media. Is this the media stirring the pot or is this how we have learned to determine what matters? It is hard to say with any certainty that people will change their views or opinions or that the media will filter through what they cover or shine light on. There needs to be a change, but that is hard to accomplish or even begin without help. When a black on black crime is committed, people do not put as much feeling into it. When a black on white crime is committed, people go crazy. The point is, either way someone was injured or lost their life. One life is not worth more than another based on the color of their skin.
Personally, I find that I have a bias point of view towards minorities when I am frightened or in a sketchy area. I believe my prejudice comes from the news and how I was raised. The media practically always presents the “bad guy” as someone who is of hispanic or African descent. Therefore, when I am walking alone at night or when I am walking within the city, I become paranoid and tend to get extremely nervous when a minority comes close to me. I believe if the media showed more American caucasian “bad guys” then I would feel nervous around them also late at night. In the daytime, I could care less who walks by me or stops to talk with me because there are typically more people around and I feel that people are less likely to commit a crime in broad daylight.
Another thing that has influenced my bias is my family. They tell me to stay away from certain types of people and skin colors just because they have their own personal prejudice of that certain type of people. Though it influenced me when I was young, now I think my family is ridiculous for being racist against a certain people.
On 1/31/18, a classmate went on about how there are enough police enforcement but they are spread poorly, and I agree with the statement 100%. While my classmate went on about the countryside, I want to go on about Reading and West Reading. As a citizen of West Reading, I could complain about the police for hours of the day. I feel that West Reading is a beautiful part of Reading that is kept under control. I also feel that Reading was once beautiful, and would be more beautiful if their officers were as anal about everything as West Reading officers. I feel that West Reading officers spend every moment being way too picky about everything, down to making people park their car within lines. I think all the extra patrol we have in West Reading should be sent to parts of the city that need to be straightened out. They could also be sent to the countryside, as my classmate desires, because I think the police should be used to help keep order in society in better ways rather than making sure someone isn’t half an inch parked too close to the other car.
I don’t believe people are biased towards their own members of a racial group, purposely. Personally, I believe stereotypes take a huge play with someone being bias with their own group. An African police officer is more likely to target African people because he is surrounded by other police officers that target these minority groups. As a police officer their job is to serve justice and most of the time they do so in crowded cities where majority of the people are minorities. As day by day goes on of them arresting minorities including of their own race, they are going to develop subconscious bias towards their racial group because they literally arrest minorities every single day.
So many interesting points that you raise here…we will discuss tomorrow and contrast with Ricky’s observations.
!!!! A bit of language !!!!
I would be lying if I said that the cultural outlook on racial biases especially involved with minorities who resided in low-income housing in the city or more towards the country in the trailer parks didn’t have an effect on my first hand judgement basis. However, I don’t base my judgement off of what everyone else is saying IE: the media, or the police. Over the past 15 years I’ve either worked with or was associated in some way with an individual or groups of people who resided from low-income inner city areas. The fact of the matter is, is that nine time out of ten those “biases” are right. If you hang out with a certain crowd, act or dress a certain way, you’re going to be labeled as a part of that group. However everyone is afraid to have their own goddamn opinion that most people read a headline and believe everything they read and develop a racial bias or feeling towards a group of people.
People being racially bias towards their own racial group happens more often than you think. If an animal meows enough, you’re probably going to call it a cat. Being around law enforcement and the military my whole life, it’s not hard to pick out “shady” people. Spending years and years of observing people you learn a lot. I don’t give a damn what color your skin is, if you’re breaking the law, you’re breaking the law. Don’t give me this “oh, just another white man going after a black man” bullshit. In my opinion the color of your skin doesn’t matter, Jim Carey in Liar Liar states it the best, “ Quit breaking the law asshole!!”
Yes, minorities are being arrested at a higher rate but look at the area all of this is taking place. Low income housing which is predominately African-American and Hispanic. This goes back to people getting comfortable and staying in an area that isn’t safe or suitable for you and your families future.
Black people may be arrested at a higher rate than white, but like this article says, we need to take into consideration where the majority of these arrests take place. Like the article says, heavy policing is centered on areas where the crime rate is high and there is a danger to it’s residents. These areas tend to be predominately black and poor neighborhoods. I live in a predominately white area, and the people who are not white don’t tend to get arrested at a higher rate. It is the people who do illegal things and get caught doing so. If I see any suspicious person walking toward me on the street, I avoid eye contact and walk away from them. No matter their color. I understand there are corrupt officers out there, but the majority are just doing their job to keep everyone else safe.
I believe policing patterns change relative from place to place. Police tactics are going to change from area to area as well, what tactics are used in the city are not going to be relative in a empty deserted town. I live in two places during the semester. I reside with my grandfather in the city of Reading, as well as Wyomissing with my intermediate family. There are vast changes between these two areas. Experiences differ from the city of Reading with my grandfather, weapons in the main rooms for protection, to an area where crime prevention groups are around. As I was born and raised in the city, things are normal to me and not the regular citizen. The sound of either a gun shot or fire works surround the sky, and no one flinches or asks a question. The way of life around the area is completely different, people know everyone on the street and look after each other, others look and don’t say a word. Sometimes you may see a person that is living in a home and not ever see them again after a few days. Police are always on route around the area of Reading, in Wyomissing police are not always on a route, but rather called from the district to action. Reading police have to deal with poverty issues and other issues surrounding city people and low income family’s. Most police in the city deal with harassment charges, or assault and battery. Murder is a common thing in the city, a terrible trait but one that can not seem to be forgotten. In Wyomissing, police deal with rich crime, white color crime, possibly other high notch crime. Car accidents, robbery’s in the local stores possibly and traffic stops.
Everyone has some sort of bias and it obviously comes from an individual’s personal experiences, upbringing, and education, which vary for every body. But the problem with saying this or claiming racism based on implicit/unconscious bias is that it’s extremely hard to change, unless you have some way to go back in time and put people of all races around each person so every family has one of each skin color. Since that doesn’t seem likely to happen, it makes sense that people have biases, even from just “judging a book by its cover.” I couldn’t care less about people’s unconscious biases or thoughts about racism especially because I’m not a mind reader and I can’t change someone’s personal thoughts. What matters is when those thoughts manifest into racist behavior that it becomes an actual problem.
With regard to the “No Perfect Solutions” section in this post, I see some problems. In terms of the awareness solution (the NBA analogy), what happens if black players actually did commit more fouls which the post fails to discuss and in the real crime world, what if black people have a higher tendency to commit violent/gun crimes. The best way I can get this point across is New York’s stop and frisk law. Critics of this say it’s racist because cops are going after minorities at a higher rate based on population, but these critics fail to mention the that the same minorities commit crimes at a much higher rate. So the percent of stop and frisk situations being against minorities actually correlates, and maybe is too few, compared to the percent of violent/gun crimes committed. Also when stop and frisk was deemed unconstitutional, violent crime did rise. The next solution of police officers getting engaged in the community, I agree with and I don’t see anything wrong with having more cops in places of high violent crime rate. In terms of making police forces more diverse, Baltimore police departments are mostly minorities and the city still had major riots, so I really don’t see that as a necessary solution.
My solutions would be first, greatly aid inner city schools so there are after school programs and sports teams, have more policing in high violent crime areas, have police be a part of the community better, and instill values that cops aren’t evil and need to be feared and fought but that they are here to protect/serve.
Coming from Philadelphia, I have seen first-hand the implicit biases of police officers. In my town, we would often have half days of school and if I were walking to lunch with my friends of color, the patrolling officers would stop us and ask if we were skipping school while I wouldn’t be stopped if I were alone or with my white friends. I think that it is entirely possible for a police officer of color to develop racist tendencies. We all learn by example and, if an officer of color watches other officers act on biases, they can develop implicit biases that perpetuate the violence. I think that the main thing police officers need is information. They need to be educated and educated on these topics as well as the dangers of implicit biases. The more informed people are, the more they can change, and we need change more than anything right now.
Signing that dotted line and taking the oath to become a member of a force that you may potentially give your life for is one hell of a thing. The people around you cease to be coworkers and strangers and become your brothers and sisters, whom you would die to protect. Whether it be the military or law enforcement, you stop seeing race and you start seeing family. You don’t just tip toe into a culture like this, you dive in head first. And when you do, you don’t stop to question any of the norms. You just follow suit. This article does a very good job of highlighting how members of a police force are able to look past even their own skin color and form biases against citizens of their own race. As long as the officer can maintain this thought that he is blue first and everyone else is just the ‘other’, there is no moral dilemma for the officer, despite the fact that this often causes may racial bias to be formed.
I think everyone has some sort of implicit bias in them, whether it be a product of their upbringing or experiences. Some might have a greater presence of this bias in them, but I definitely believe there is some in everyone. What interested me particularly about this article was where it says “Racial bias isn’t necessarily about how a person views himself in terms of race, but how he views others in terms of race, particularly in different roles throughout his everyday life.” This quote shows that people are still capable of holding bias towards members of their own racial group. This makes sense as earlier in the article, Franklin, the director of Law Enforcement Against prohibition, as a black man, said ““When I’d see a young black male in a particular neighborhood, or his pants were sagging a little bit, or he walked a certain way … my first thoughts were, ‘Oh, I wonder if he’s selling drugs.’” This shows that many times officers are trained to perceive these kids as threats, solely because of the way the look/dress. This is not to say that some of this bias is justified, as in the article it shows that many low-income neighborhoods that Franklin was talking about were riddled with drug-selling kids like the one described.
Almost in the very beginning of this reading block I found it interesting how a black police officer admitted to being bias toward young black men. I think that this just goes to show that, over time just being an authority figure in this society you develop a certain bias toward black people and other minorities. This makes me think about “stop and frisk” because this law was set in stone so that police officers could stop someone they found to be a suspect of criminal activity and pat them down. Of course this mainly effected black and latino men who most of the time we not doing anything wrong at the time. In the reading block it was also interesting to learn that almost about the same percentage of white and black people use drugs but that there are over double the amount of arrest of black people that is drug related. This is all due to bias and stereotyping. I believe that the media definitely plays a big part in this bias. For example the way black and latino men are portrayed in movies, particularly in inner cities, is the same way they tend to be treated in our society.
I think this article does a great job of highlighting how easy it is for our brains to be manipulated into believing something, just because we see it constantly happening in video games or the media and it is seen as “normal”. There is no question that there is a bias between different racial and ethnic groups due to stereotyping. These stereotypes we see playing out in video games, T.V shows, or movies all manipulate our brains into thinking these things are social norms. I think since recent events involving police brutality these notions we have are being brought to light and questioned, which of course is a good thing, but it also means there is now a spotlight on our police forces. This is a good thing because unnecessary police brutality is obviously a major problem in our country, but this constant surveillance may hinder some officers from acting out on real, dangerous criminals.
I think it is unsurprising that even black officers have shown a racial influence in their policing. After all, police racism is, as noted in the article, a problem with culture as opposed to overt, individual bigotry. In light of this, I have to wonder, as the article does, exactly what could be done to overcome this problem. Protesting and raising awareness does work to a certain extent, as officers become more consciously aware of their actions. But at the same time, trying to eliminate racism from the police corps entirely is a frankly unrealistic goal; in all walks of society, people, including those in power, are going to have their unconscious biases at the very least, and eliminating these is simply not practical. Instead, efforts should be focused towards holding police accountable for their actions in the courts. Body cameras are a popular way of encouraging cops to be more careful in how they go about their duties. Another, perhaps more “complete” method, would be to reevaluate how we look at police brutality cases in the legal system, which are often unjustly decided by grand juries that have working relationships with the officers they are being asked to indict.
I think this article does a great job on highlighting the power of authority and how easily the brain can be manipulated. I thought it was interesting in the article when it stated that Black cops, see them selves as cops first and then they factor in their race. But for me I find that hard to believe because when I address myself, my mind self-consciously always allows me to realize that I may be the only person of color in the room or I am the only women in the room. Therefore, I find it heard to believe that when black cops are immersed in a room of people that don’t look similar to them, they don’t innately separate themselves are compare how you are different. I think that the theory of de-individualization, aids more to why black cops are implicit bias to poor black people. Due to great systemic racism that is stemmed in the police force, the black cops have to lose a sense of themselves in order to fit into that environment, whether it be involuntary or not.
I think due to the brain having the ability to be manipulated and heavily influenced is why implicit bias exist. Human are designed to follow authority, but our values and experience, I think, shape how we will react to harash and uncomfortable conditions.
One of the most unsettling things about this article was the part that mentioned that through video game simulation it was proven that people of all races were quicker to shoot black suspects when compared with white ones. This proves that there is a deeply rooted image of violence and crime tied to black people. This image is so common that people who are apart of the black community begin to believe it themselves. I was not surprised to learn that this portrayal and stereotyping of blacks steams directly from the media. I myself remember growing up and seeing a majority of black actors play the part of a criminal. Along with this there were often depictions of black neighborhoods being extremely unsafe. The media constantly uses a false image to ingrain a sense of fear into individuals. Assumptions based of what is seen in the media causes people in policing positions to act unjustly when dealing with people in the black community. It scares me to think that the color of your skin really impacts the way you are viewed to law enforcement and society as a whole.
I grew up in a high school and town with many white neighborhoods and barely any African Americans or Asians. Although, I truthfully never had any comment to hold biases towards ethnicity and cultural stereotypes, however I do understand how some individuals hide their beliefs from unspoken biases. Though, I do believe that not having a diverse town or high school might be a factor to lead unspoken racism. Fortuitously, applying to colleges and getting accepted into Loyola has allowed me to broaden my social environment. This type of “bias” comes from the absence of diversity that my town and even others surrounded by me are affected by this experience.
I do believe that these statistics has definitely made an impact on media. Although, I have never experienced harassment through the police department, it has become too clear that the police system stereotypes have been taken to another behavioral level. Between the police and citizens, over the past media postings the police have definitely abused their powers. From hearing all the abuse that the police had expressed, these developments from statistics are very alarming. That is why biases have been more noticeable. It is possible that one racial group can be racists towards an individual based on their same race.
I feel that in society today our bias towards different racial and ethnic groups are so twisted because of everything in the media and how we see it being portrayed in different areas and cultures. Most things we see on the news or in movies is showing the poor black people or associating them with doing bad things and never really showing the successful or the black people doing good. I feel that some people are bias to people of their own race or culture just because they may have a preconceived notion of how some of their other people may act/be like. A lot of colored people especially black people are scared of cops just because of everything they have seen in the media about how they are treated, and I feel like cops are their to protect us yet cops scare people more than they comfort them. I do feel that sometimes I am bias towards different racial and ethnic groups just strictly because of my cultural stereotypes in the world and especially the way some people are portrayed in movies and in the news you can’t help but wonder and have that bias towards them sometimes.
I seriously despised the fact that the people who are supposed to be protecting us from danger are the ones who are causing it. In the article, it states that “Cops are told to patrol predominantly poor, crime ridden neighborhoods that are so segregated that most of the residents are black, since police are mostly present in these neighborhoods, most of the arrests and actions they take end up impacting a disproportionate number of black people”. When cops are lurking around any neighborhood, everyone is going to look somewhat suspicious, but they are not going to look more suspicious just because of the color of their skin color, or what their socio economic class is like. The police needs to realize that crime is practiced throughout different ethnicities and different social classes. In the article it states that, “Black residents are fearful of police making them more likely to display discomfort around cops, which in turn makes officers more likely to perceive black residents as suspicious”. Instead of the police force helping us keep our communities safe, they are degrading humans, and are making them feel unsafe. I feel like several people are biased towards people in their own racial group just because they think know what their capabilities are. A person cannot assume a person of a particular race participated in a specific crime, it just not ethical. Each individual is different and has their own mind set, and that does not correlate with race.
I found it very interesting that in Miami that the cops use images of black people as target practice. If you are conditioned to shoot at people of color then in the field you are inclined to target those over whites. Even in social media such as movies and TV shows, minorities are always portrayed poorly and in gangs and any group that involves violence, drugs, and illegal things. Socially these groups of people of color are not being portrayed correctly and therefore people have this predisposed judgement about them. I also found the how people, especially those of color, are scared of the cops, and because of this fear they are seen as more suspicious to the cops. I’ve never been very comfortable around cops or any of those who have authority in society. It would be from how society portrays them as well, negatively and violence towards those of color. The police system is suppose to be maintain the peace in society and not be the cause of them.
Due to the impact of the news and other media/social media outlets, the coverage of Freddie Gray’s death in Baltimore was one that could not be ignored. Attending Loyola and living in Baltimore at the time this occurred, there was even more scrutiny, outrage, and scandal that surrounded this event. “How could this happen again?” I tried to follow this case, but one thing that is news to me after reading this article is the fact that three out of the six police officers that arrested, handled, and in turn killed Freddie Gray were black. This was so surprising to me, due to the emphasis on racism and injustice that was put on the police system after this occurrence. It was interesting to read and learn about implicit bias, and that black police officers identify first as police officers, rather than black. There is so much that can be said and done to improve where our society currently stands involving racism, bias, and injustice in the police system. Bringing awareness to these issues and educating people is where we can start the improvements.
Despite our ethnicity, we always want to be on top of everyone. We want everyone to see us as an example of what a successful person looks like. Therefore, racism within a social group can often occur because we are always in competition with the people surrounded by us even if they’re the same race. We discriminate against each other because we think we’re better than them but the reality is that we are all equal. We shouldn’t treat our own people like crap and expect to receive good things in return. This happens a lot with people who hold positions of power like police officers, bankers, supervisors, etc…They think they’re better than their own racial group just for the amount of power they got. At the end of the day, if you were born Latino, African American, Asian, YOU WILL die the same way you were born as.
This article clearly indicates that racial biases that are evident in our society and how it contributes to the way people live their lives and carry out their duties. The one point that stood out was the idea of de-individualization meaning people lose their sense of self-awareness when they are in groups. People have been conditioned to think a particular way about people and certain situations based the on the environment they live in and the people they surround themselves with. Despite the fact that some people have different views than the majority, their sense of fear that others will come down on them for not sharing the same ideas has forced them to become conditioned to this implicit bias. These stigmas that have been created not only go along with racial discrimination, but other prominent social issues. For example, there has been studies done stating that most people who are mentally ill are violent, and as a result, people may be afraid to help them. By not engaging in their treatment process, these people are showing mentally ill people that they are worthless and scary, and should not bother seeking help. Similarly, most people also believe that a black individual walking down the street with his or her hood up is a criminal. Thus, they feel self-conscious and begin to frantically look around them as they walk, making others believe that they are doing something suspicious. While I do not believe that these stigmas will totally vanish, I feel that it is important that all people gain a sense of awareness about the ongoing issues in society and learn how to cut the social ties by engaging in the community. It is necessary that we beat the frustration and questioning as to why others live as they do an begin to get more personal with them to ultimately realize the reasons for why life is the way it is.
I am actually very interested in this idea of people being biased within their own racial group. This isn’t something that only occurs within ones racial group. It also occurs between women, within the LGBT community, and with most oppressed groups. I think this is due to the fact that the systems in which we live are so ingrained into our society. In a society with inherently biased systems, its impossible not to be implicitly biased. This in turn causes a lot of internalized oppression. I would even go onto say that this bias within ones own group is a defense mechanism for assuaging cognitive dissonance due to internalized biases. This idea of internalized bias happens on the implicit level. Perhaps a way of fixing this problem is to make people aware of their internalized biases. By making them explicitly aware, it might make people think twice about why they are being discriminatory. “Do I actually think this way, or am I just a victim of my oppression?” This idea could help answer further questions like why a woman would want to vote for Donald Trump despite the demoralizing claims he’s made about women.
“Do I actually think this way, or am I just a victim of my oppression?” This idea could help answer further questions like why a woman would want to vote for Donald Trump despite the demoralizing claims he’s made about women.
Such a good question and you read my mind – YES! Internalized misogyny (the power of patriarchy) is sadly deeply ingrained in our society as well as within many women. Women deny their own agency and empowerment as well as solidarity with other women in what appears to be a strategy to acquire male approval (and protection). We see this in women who refuse to declare themselves “feminists,” having somehow learned (incorrectly) that to be a feminist is to be against/hate men.
But of course, Simone de Beauvoir wrote about all this in “The Second Sex.” Women could not be oppressed nearly as much as they are if they did not participate in the terms of their own oppression.
When I first read the question at the beginning of this article, I assumed that yes, a black police officer would be less likely to arrest a black man. I assumed that the police officer would be more sympathetic and perhaps let the person he was questioning off the hook. I was guess that the police officer is aware of the unfairness that black people face regarding the police force and he would be understanding of this and perhaps not question black people as often. After reading this article I was very wrong. I found it very interesting that it is almost impossible for a police officer to not be racist when they are policing. If they are ever only in poor, minority neighborhoods, then most of the people they see doing bad things will be minorities and they will just assume from then on that black men always are doing bad things. It was so alarming that the police departments have used mugshots of black men as target practice and that police departments have incentivized more arrests.
This article was interesting to me because it focuses on biases regardless of race or status, which I think the world needs to hear a little more of. Attending a predominantly white school with people from mostly the middle and upper class has shown me that although one’s exposure and upbringing plays a huge role in how their attitudes are formed, it is not entirely determinant of how they will always be. One has to be culturally aware and empathetic to the realities of the unjust system in order to truly get a glimpse of what happens in the real world. In addition, one must also have a desire to look outside their own personal lens and experiences and realize that just because they don’t witness injustices occurring doesn’t mean they don’t exist. This idea resonated in my head after hearing some of my friends say they have a Black professor that doesn’t believe in systemic racism because he personally has never been victimized or felt prejudice for being Black. Mind you, this professor is also highly educated, grew up in a fairly wealthy area, and is making a good living. I was shocked to hear that he not only invalidated the feelings of others of his race, but also failed to put into perspective how his own personal status could have affected his perception. I instantly thought of this while the reading posed the question of whether or not Black police could be biased against people of their own race. For this reason, I firmly believe that intersecting identities such as education level and class can play a huge role in one’s biases. People fear what they don’t know, but the first step is for people to become willing to educate themselves on those who have different experiences than they do.
Too often, when there is an incidence of police brutality that makes headlines across the country, and sparks outrage and discourse, I think the general population tends to try to use it as an opportunity to convey their personal, polarized opinions. Even as someone who does believe that new legislation can be an effective step in the right direction in addressing many social issues, including police brutality, I would agree that, especially on social media platforms, some people often exploit the victims or the situation in order to promote their own (political) agenda.
While I’ve personally reached a point in this election cycle where I am jaded and withdrawn, I did briefly tune in to the recent Vice Presidential debate, in which, police brutality became a topic of discussion between vice presidential candidates Mike Pence and Tim Kaine. Both candidates seemed to me, to just be spewing the current dialogue/opinion of their respective parties. I think the more this repetitive, polarized banter becomes the only way we discuss the issue of police brutality, the further our society gets from actually proposing solutions to the problem. If we cannot even agree that there is a problem, we are very far from negotiating what to do about it.
For me, there is no question. Anyone can look at the data and see that, generally speaking, implicit bias against black people and other racial minorities exists among police officers in America. As soon as someone takes the defensive to argue “not all cops [are racist; violent]” they have missed the point, which is that, we have observed that too many police officers are racist, and so is the system in which they operate. Because the data is already available to us, and to deny it, you would simply be wrong, I do not see the point of making police brutality a partisan issue.
Instead, I think we should look to the training and education people go through before entering into the police force. I do not know much about the Police Academy, though I’m sure it differs regionally, but I did research a few details about it after hearing about some of the tragedies involving police brutality this past summer. What I was most surprised about was the duration of time it takes to complete training and education in the police academy. I expected, or at least hoped, that it would take much longer to complete the program. Then, I remember thinking, “what kind sociological and ethical education do police officers go through?” At Loyola, every student, regardless of major, is required to take two philosophy and one ethics course to graduate. I have a philosophy minor, so I have taken 4 philosophy courses that are considered courses in ethics. One of these courses was Bioethics, which, for the most part covered ethical concerns for students headed toward health/medical professions. My professor for this class informed us that we would likely have to take at least one more course in Bioethics in our graduate programs. This made me think — the reason healthcare/medical professionals are required to take painstaking courses in ethical concerns pertaining to their field is because they are trusted with peoples’ lives. In giving deadly weapons to police officers, we also trust them with our lives. Is the training and ethical education police officers receive enough to ensure that we can trust them with peoples’ lives, or do we need to reform the Police Academy?
As I read the beginning of this blog, it made sense to me that there were more police in poor and black neighborhoods because there was a higher crime rate. However, as I continued to read, I discovered that neighborhoods consisting of white people and people of higher social classes used just as many drugs. I think that police should be present in more of these white areas to check for drugs. Drugs are no more dangerous to black people than they are to white people so white people should not be excused from this act.
The “vicious cycle” mentioned is an unfortunate truth. I am a white, middle-class person, and I have never feared the police when I had an encounter with one. If my demographics were different, I believe that my emotions around police would also change. I recently saw a Facebook post from a white police officer that had pulled over a young black male for texting and driving. The cop explained that when he was speaking to this boy, he was extremely scared to speak back to the cop. The boy put his hands up with his voice shaking and asked the cop if he needed to step out of the vehicle. This police officer made this post to show the reality of this “vicious cycle” and to explain why it needs to be fixed. Even the police officers within this systematically racist culture acknowledge the unfair treatment that black individuals face. As the blog says, awareness can be part of the solution. As more police officers come to this awareness, hopefully this systematic racism can begin to diminish.
Police officers should also get to know the black individuals that they patrol. For example, this past weekend I was in downtown Baltimore. There was a black man on a corner asking people for money. There was also a white police officer patrolling the area. The police officer looked at the individual and jokingly asked, “Hey, do you have a dollar?” The black man laughed and they had a conversation for about 10 minutes. They both looked so happy to be talking to each other. After this conversation, the black man looked at me, and other people who were on the street, and told us to have a great day and he happily continued to walk away. I think this conversation helped this white police officer to have less implicit bias and this black man with fear that he potentially had towards the police.
As many sources of evidence have pointed out, implicit bias occurs nearly everywhere and in unavoidable in many situations. We are surrounded by the news, media, and events occurring right outside our doors that introduce these biases and make it hard to ignore them when making decisions. Although we may be unaware at times, implicit bias dictates our society, and actions need to be taken to reduce these biases on the future. Before reading this, I was unaware that three of the six officers charged for Freddie Gray’s death were black. This really stands out to me because I had always just assumed that these officers were all white, especially because of the underlying racial issues that were involved in this crime. I also never really thought about black police officers being racist against blacks and other minority groups because of their own racial identities. I had never really thought about a black cop’s identity as a police officer as being more salient than his racial identity in certain situations. When looked at from this point of view, it is easier to understand how black cops can, in fact, be racist. The situation regarding Freddie Gray’s death really stood out to me because it was something Loyola students experienced first hand. It was amazing to see so many members of the Loyola community join together and stand up for the hate crime that took place. While riots and protests were going on just a few miles away from campus, members of the Loyola community were speaking out against hate crimes and racial violence and informing students and faculty about what it feels like to be a minority. I believe that with more acts of solidarity in communities, awareness can be raised about implicit bias, which can ultimately be the first step in diminishing this particular societal and institutional problem.
Growing up in Baltimore City, I was surrounding by people of color. In my community the police were never seen as advocates of the law. Most of the people around me said, “F**k the police”. Due to this mentality there has always been a growing tension between my community and our local police officers. The connotation that police were bad was never associated with race but with the group itself. More than half of the Baltimore City police officers are African-American, Hispanic, Asian or Native American. Officers who they themselves are minorities are targeting their own kind. Adam Waytz concept of “de-individuation” can be seen in the Baltimore City police. Police officers who identify as minorities, have lost their self-awareness through the position they hold. Once they are put in a group setting it is easy to mistake feelings portrayed by others as your own. A perfect example of situation in which a cops demonstrate implicit bias would be the the Freddy Gray case. In the Freddy Gray case 3 of the 6 police officers involved are African American. Implicit bias can be conditioned by the group a person is in and the ideals they are surrounded by. Due to the environment in which policy officers are in, implicit bias is easily developed, while not correct, this often poses minorities as criminals and inferiors.
People view policing patterns differently based on their experiences with the police. I live in a particularly white suburban neighborhood and have not had a negative experience with a cop, my Uncle is a retired NYPD Sergeant as well so I generally have a positive outlook on the police. However, I went to an ethnically diverse high school in Queens where some classmates did not have the same experiences with cops. Some of my Hispanic and Black classmates have been stopped and searched by police members and for little or no reasoning, as Stop and Frisk policies had not been deemed unconstitutional yet. Even hearing that your classmates have been stopped and frisked leads one to believe that there was a reason for it. Professor Richardson of the UC Irvine School of Law says it here “Just by virtue of watching the news every night you learn the unconscious bias, because you will always see young black men being connected to criminality”. The media constantly portrays black men as aggressors continuing to perpetuate the stereotype that black men are dangerous. The outcome of the media demonstrating this stereotype, is that is remains in society. Students that are similar to you, other than how they look are then deemed suspicious by the media and the police.
I think it is an interesting notion that people are biased towards their own racial group and I think this idea stretches beyond race. Socioeconomic factors can be apparent by how people present themselves. Education can also be apparent when holding a conversation with someone. These factors may help to diminish bias between other racial groups, but it is also possible that a well established, educated black man may harbor bias toward a poor, uneducated black man. Additionally, group think and the idea of a uniform as more relevant before race is interesting. I think that notion extends beyond cops and uniforms to people in other services such as the military who are also required a uniform.
I grew up in an overwhelmingly White neighborhood where five or so African Americans went to my high school. Although I personally do not hold biases toward ethnicity through cultural stereotypes, I definitely understand how and why individuals may subconsciously practice implicit bias. Social isolation, in my opinion, is what leads to this implicit racism, dwelling in environments/neighborhoods that lack diversity. Fortunately, through different job experiences and my time at Loyola, I have fought off prejudicial tendencies that some of my former high school classmates probably still suffer from. The source of this type of “bias” originates from a lack of diversity that my town and even the towns around me experience.
Statistics and even the media have all contributed to the fact (one that is not surprising) that police harass minorities in inner-city neighborhoods all over the country. Although I have never personally witnessed such harassment, it has become too clear that a quota-based system predetermines police to abuse their powers. Therefore, police patterns must take a systematic, institutional, and even generational shift away from outdated policies that clearly presuppose abusive behavior.
Overall I totally believe that individuals can be racist to their own racial group. For instance, Black police officers may become increasingly cynical due to their occupation toward the Black community. Biases can form over experience, so in the instance of racist Black police officer toward Black citizen makes sense.
Sometimes it is hard for me to understand the hatred between police and citizens. Like we have talked about in class, I grew up in a community that police were always friendly and never against certain people. However, I do see the problem because of the media and the information people are trying to get out. For example, all the stories that were displayed on the quad. It really is a shame. However, I do not think that we need to think all the police are bad because of some bad apples. But it goes the same way too, just because my community is good does not mean police do no wrong. I would love to say that I have the answers to make the problem disappear but I do not see that happening. I think the hiring of police could be different or the way they handle if the police do something wrong. They sometimes give them too much time to think of a story or come up with a “reasonable” excuse. These are just maybe a few thoughts of mine that could have an impact of some sort today.
I never thought that a race could be bias against their own. After reading this article, it opened up my eyes. When a police officer has certain orders, they have to decide to stay with their job or go against. Sometimes they just stick with their job and what they have learned from upper power. They need to do this to survive themselves or support their families. I think we can fix the bias if we stop thinking crime only happens in poorer places with certain people. If people would realize that for the most part poor and rich people are the same and the rates of crimes or drugs are the same, but only some get caught, maybe changes can be made. I am just not sure if people are that educated on this topic besides what the mass media says like Twitter or the news. They only see the two extreme sides and never know all the information in between. Articles like these need to be seen by more people.
When I was a young child I would spend my entire day counting down the hours until my dad came home from work. The second he arrived I would run to him as fast as I possibly could so he could lift me up above his head, swing me around, and give me a big hug and kiss on the cheek before putting me back onto the ground. I would proceed to follow him around the house all night until it was time for me to go to bed. Once he got home I would go with him upstairs to my parent’s bedroom and wait for him to change out of his work clothes in the master bathroom. When I was very young, practically a toddler, I would play with the landline telephone next to my parents bed while my dad changed behind the closed bathroom door. I enjoyed the different sounds each button made and typically I would click a random series of digits producing no actual phone number. But apparently one night, while playing with the phone I accidentally called 911.
Producing an actual phone call was never the goal of this hobby, I simply liked clicking the buttons. Because of this, the 911 operator was able to hear my incoherent toddler babble but could not get me to answer any of her questions such as “who is this?”, “what is happening?”, “Is everything alright?”. Within a few minutes there was a police officer knocking on our front door. The officer informed my mother that the dispatcher had received a call from the home. My mother informed the officer that no such call was made and hollered for my dad to come downstairs to help sort out the confusion. He came downstairs with my sitting on his shoulders, still playing with the phone. The officer laughed and said something to the affect of: “Aha! I think I know who the culprit is!” and jokingly pointed to me. My parents and the officer shared a pleasant chuckle before the officer wished us a good evening and left. He didn’t ask any other questions, take a look around the house, etc.
My parents tell that story from time to time when reflecting on some of the silly things my brother and did as children. But I can’t help but wonder that if my family wasn’t white and we hadn’t lived in a nice, modest house in a New England farm town, would that scenario have gone over differently- drastically differently? What if we were African American or Lantino and lived in the inner city? What if the police were trolling our neighborhood every day, dealing with violence, gangs, and drugs instead of the deer-related car accidents our small town’s police were accustomed to handling. What if our house was a mess, dirty because both my parents worked several jobs and didn’t have time to clean? What if our next door neighbor was a suspected drug trafficker, or our street was littered with corner boys, stray cats, and junkies? Would the officer have asked more questions? Insisted to search the house? Look at my brother and I as neglected instead of loved and cared for? Would the officer be more suspecting of foul play based off our environment and/or race? Would the officer realize that domestic abuse doesn’t LOOK like poverty, the ghetto, or a particular race? Would the officer realize that my dad doesn’t need to be wearing a wife-beater and do-rag to beat up my mom? Something still could have been very wrong in our house, but because my mom was cooking a casserole and my dad still had on his Brooks Brothers loafers — we must be fine. Lucky for us, we were.
Everyone has an opinion on the racial views of society and the policing going on that is considered biased or racist. To me, the media has the biggest impact on society today. Media is the one thing that can express an idea to the world through videos, photos, or text.However, the media can be manipulated in many ways for society to get a skewed view of what actually happens. There are always two sides of the stories when dealing with racism and policing. Videos on Facebook reveal police officers going out of line and killing black people for an irrational reason, as well as the next video showing a police officer helping the black community or making peace with them in some sort of way. Nobody is born racist. Society influences people to develop biased thoughts mostly through media. However, one person can be more biased or racist through their own experiences. For example, a person can see a black community that is run down or slummy and correlate it with the stereotypical black communities society expresses, which later leads to racist thoughts. From my own experience, I have heard people talk down on some minorities and have a certain bias towards them because of one thing they saw them do or one experience they have had with them. Cultural stereotypes and how the media controls them in my opinion is the source of bias thoughts and racism. Regarding the policing patterns seen going on throughout the US is sort of a civil war between them and the black community. I think that these cops are doing their jobs and they are put in crime filled cities because that is where most of the action happens. Most of these cities are full of minorities but that does not mean these cops are only arresting these people because of their race. They are doing their jobs, however there are many cases in which the police officers take matters into their own hands and make wrong decisions which resembles this bias. I think police officers still need to raise awareness about this implicit bias while minority communities need to realize that these police officers are just doing their job and protecting the community.
The idea of absorbing a group identity when surrounded by others is something that makes a lot of sense to me when considering police officers who discriminate against their own race. I feel like people think police deviance is only a white police officer, black victim issue, but in reality that is not correct. I can only imagine how difficult it is to stand up against an entire police force or department as a black officer, when all those around you are telling you to act a certain way in spite of your race. I believe that this is also something that people are unaware of when considering the idea of deviant policing. For the people who make the argument of there only being “a few bad apples” within police forces, they are not considering how the group dynamic affects ones actions. These same people would probably make the argument that black police officers do not discriminate against their own race just based on race alone. I also think the concept of implicit bias is an important one, and also something that many people would deny that they have. Unless you are doing something like playing a video game simulating being a police officer, I think that having implicit bias is a hard thing to identify for a person. However, I believe that everyone has implicit bias, whether you would like to admit it or not.
The sentence that I think best explains the predicament here in this article is:
“Part of the way police patrol is to look for people who look like they’re acting suspicious,” Sklansky said. “So even a police officer who tries not to be racist can wind up giving more of his attention and having more of his suspicion directed to members of minority groups than to white citizens.”
There are so many cops who are not racist but their job forces them to act in racist ways. Whether the cop is white or black, depending on where you are trained, where you are stationed, and what you experience on the job will change the way you view people and the actions that you take. For Neil Franklin, working in a place such as Baltimore where so much crime is taking place in a predominantly black neighborhood, you are forced into an unconscious bias. Neil himself is black and therefore couldn’t be racist towards black, yet his job is making him lookout for where he thinks the crime is taking place. And unfortunately for him, it happens to appear most often with black people in Baltimore. Needless to say, one cannot assume in these situations, but people are often put in a hard position where they look racist when indeed they are not. So Neil as a black cop may not have any predisposition of hate towards black people but is forced into habits of suspicious, just like a white cop is. Which is where the “Black Lives Matter” issue comes into play. Like the article said, with the Freddie Gray case, and how much a racial bias can come into play when there were also black cops present.
On the other hand, there is plenty more the police system can do to reduce this skewed system and do a better job at leaving out racism, even if unconsciously acting this way. This is a difficult situation to deal with because of the many individual people and cities that can be involved in our nation and the way each individual case is interpreted by our society. So it is definitely something we still need to work through to understand better.
I have witnessed bias both systemic and implicit which was projected by officers from the 28th precinct in Harlem, New York on a daily basis as I grew up in what Harlem was commonly referred to as “The Black Ghetto”. I witnessed black officers inherently enforcing the law far more readily than their white counterparts. I always felt those black officers were traitors to their race, and at that time I didn’t know how to put into words exactly what I was feeling then, but I realize now that those black officers were conforming to what was expected of them by their peers (who were white) and their superiors. I watched those officers actually treat their race far worse than the white officers would. It was as if they simply did not WANT to be black and the people they were policing should be treated as cruelly as possible because they were embarrassed by the fact they shared the same skin color. Police officers in Harlem were absolutely brainwashed into being biased toward their race, and back then, where better to incite individuation and separatism than Harlem? as far as the powers that were was concerned they had a mission to accomplish, and accomplish it they did. Just look at the reasons for #BLACKLIVESMATTER.
Racism is a topic many people are uncomfortable with. It’s something we’ve all observed in our lifetime at some point. Many people have the privilege to ignore racism while the other half has to deal with it on a daily basis. A lot of people fail to understand that race is something that society uses to classify different types of people. Race is not a biological classification; there is no scientific variable that goes into deciding your race. People fail to believe that race was created socially as a way to identify faces that we don’t normally see and are used to. To define race it would all depend on the timing and context of when the word is being used.
Minority groups are constantly looked at as “ethnic” or “unique” to a person who has only been around other white people for most of their life. Anybody who is not white is treated like a museum exhibit in the lives of white people. It’s the mentality that white is the normal race, that everyone should strive for and every other race is just different. Society has created the idea that the white race is the standard.
The news categorizes and judges minorities differently than whites. If a white person messes up, there’s always some sort of redeeming quality that gets brought up in the news as well. But if a minority does something wrong, his mistake is all he/she is seen for. In a sense, extra effort is taken to humanize whites that just committed an atrocity. The belief that whites are the superior race is why the media constantly has to make excuses for the white criminals. Often times, news headlines seem to suggest that black victims are the reason for their own deaths and are to blame. News reports are often unsympathetic or dismissive when it comes to black victims.
The contrast is evident when the media portrayal of white suspects is drastically different. The headlines are often presented in a way that expresses disbelief that a white killer allegedly performed such actions. White people cannot be shown in a bad light because they are the superior race, the ideal race that does no wrong, so the media will characterize the suspects in a positive light in an attempt to cancel out the crime that was committed.
White trash differentiates poor white people from other white people, the “real” white people, and the ones who are not poor. The term white trash presumes that they are a different race or ”breed” of people. The whites that don’t fit our stereotype of whiteness, being financially wealthy, have to be separated out and named differently. As with most such stereotypes, this one is meant to be a shorthand description of how certain groups of people behave: White trash people live in certain places and behave in particular ways. This is another way for people to feel better about their economic standing and their social status by punching down the class ladder. The similarities between characteristics ascribed to white trash and those ascribed to minorities are evident. It is just another way for the whites to exclude themselves from any negativity towards their own race. Even though “white trash” are still white, they cant be used against the “real white” people because that’s not who they want to be represented by so they labeled them “white trash” so society knows they are different.
I do not agree with being biased toward any racial group. The truth is there are people who are biased toward their own race. Why are people biased against their own racial group? It could be how one was raised, the interactions they have in their communities, or social group. Some people could have been fortunate enough to have good opportunities afforded to them, while others may have not. The person who has a better advantage may look down at their own group and look down upon them thinking they are uneducated and lazy. People do want a sense of belonging, but at the same time those people of a particular social status exclude people who they think do not fit their social mold. Some cultures are racist against their own race simply because of their skin color. The lighter your skin tone, the more coveted you are in your race, the darker you are it implies you a poor “day laborer”.
When it comes to black cops being biased toward their own racial group there is a seed planted there while they are training to be police officers. I found this passage in the article particularly astonishing, “In the case of police, all cops are dealing with enormous cultural and systemic forces that build racial bias against minority groups. Even if a black cop doesn’t view himself as racist, the way policing is done in the US is racially skewed — by, for example, targeting high-crime neighborhoods that are predominantly black. And these policing tactics can actually create and accentuate personal, subconscious bias by increasing the likelihood that officers will relate blackness with criminality or danger — leading to what psychologists call “implicit bias” against black Americans.” This is an ongoing issue that needs to be addressed quickly and efficiently.
I think many of us are implicitly biased in one way or another. We have to look at ourselves how we convey our thoughts and how we talk about other people. As soon as we start to realize that we are biased and address the reasons why we behave the way we do towards one another the better we can treat one another.
It might sound mean if I agree with the fact that people are biased toward members of their own racial group but that is the sad truth. I am aware that Hispanics and Black cops target their own race (poor people) because that is the way they are been taught at the academy. But also they have the free will to target whoever they want. Especially because they think they are inferior than others who don’t have the power, money, education, etc. It is crazy to know that they won’t stop someone who looks ”decent” despite their color. Cops only go after the ones who live in poor neighborhoods where it is more likely to find people committing crimes or deviants in exchange of money.
Sharmila Taveras
2/10/2016
What do you think about the idea of people being biased towards members of their own racial groups?
In the Bible it says spare the rod spoil the child.
Have you heard the expression: This is gonna hurt me more than you!
I am sorry to say this but it is not Us versus Them. We want to help them and reach out to them and show them other ways to go. You don not identify with the criminal because you know better! But how many cops are turning into what they wanted others to avoid? We have former cops sitting in jail. Do you know how bad these cops get treated? Why? Because you now represent what they were fighting against. Even you could not stay clean. Some people become cops because it was their calling, others because they needed a job. If your child acts up do you not reprimand them and teach them how to become better citizens or do you sit there and let them do as they please?
What do you think about the idea of people being biased toward members of their own racial group?
When i hear or read that people are biased toward their own racial groups, I think this is very sad and disappointing. Even though society has changed physically, there are still multiple problems with the people that are apart of it. Many will not agree that all people should be treated the same so this makes it very easy for them to be bias especially toward people that aren’t like them. This is an on going problem within the police department especially when officers have a quota to feel, a black American officer may have grew up in the the projects, rode the same pissy elevators as their peers, and had friends that used drugs. Since they are a police officer all of those similarities go out the window because of the uniform that change their minds and vision. I once saw in a movie where an a black officer locked up a black man for saying “hey my brother” the man meant no disrespect or mock. This was just an expression of acceptance and respect for another “Black man,” I could not understand why the officer or the producer made this officer so upset.
People are biased everyday you mostly hear about this from people with different racial backgrounds, when people are biased against their own people it weakens the community and allows the people that are negative to gain power because creates more people that are bias if this doesn’t stop the worlds will continue to grow into one hatefully tumor waiting to combust.
A black cop can be racist against their own racial group, especially since policing is done in way that target crime areas that are predominately African Americans, by doing that, black cops eventually hold a strong bias against young black men and not aware of it because they have the idea that blacks are an indicator for crime and they must be conscious around such particular group of people, solely makes it difficult for them to stand apart from other cops that have the same type of mindset. Overall, it’s completely ridiculous to be racist towards your own race, that basically being racist against yourself regardless, if a police officer arrests or stop-and-frisks more blacks, it is done irrationally.
What do you think about policing patterns in general, either from the perspective of what you see represented in the media or from your own experiences on the street?
I, myself have been fortunate enough to have had (needed) very limited contact with the police. This is not to imply I have never done anything wrong but be it by good luck/privilege I have never been harassed in a significant way by a police officer or found myself in a position where I was desperately in need of a police officer for assistance. The reason I am prefacing my statement with this is that I think it’s important to be aware how our own experiences (however limited) can implicitly affect our perspective. Just because my experiences have been either positive or non-existent cannot serve as an invalidation of the experiences that so many other have on a daily basis.
We live in a world where police officers are needed. The current system seems to set up a situation where it is “us vs them”. This while perhaps understandable to a degree within a context of occupations that involve a large amount of risk is not conducive to community policing. It actually works against those policing by fostering an atmosphere of fear, distrust, and alienation among those they are supposed to be protecting and serving. The pattern of arresting those in a low social-economic brackets for low level offensives or ticketing them and then levying ever mounting fines when they can’t afford to pay the initial fee is not just biased but should be illegal. It creates a vicious cycle and undermines the credibility of the police. Are they there to prevent crimes and provide a sense of security and wellbeing or collect money so the town can pay its bills?
I don’t think that most police officers sign up with a desire to do the wrong thing. I believe that most people who become cops want to help others but the decades of institutionalized prejudice and biases we all carry regardless of our upbringing have a nasty way of becoming dangerous when given a gun and a badge. To counteract this I would think more education, critical thinking skills and projects that provide outreach within the community a cop is patrolling would behoove everyone involved.
Do you find you sometimes harbor bias towards different racial and ethnic groups due to cultural stereotypes, where you understand some people to be more dangerous than others?
Yes, I have and I think we all have. We can’t blame or stereotype a whole racial group because there are blacks who live with white neighbors and whites who live with black neighbors who act and think differently. For me rather than stereotyping a certain race of people, I look at an individual or at least I try. But i think that’s whats important because you should not vent your anger on a group of people because there black, white, red, brown or yellow. Thinking and believing those stereotypes are just ridiculous. I have been asked countless times in math class for help because a certain classmate thought i was Chinese or maybe all of them did . But I was happy that I could break that stereotype because I was also struggling in math class too. I feel insulted when someone think I am another ethnicity and this happens a lot. I feel judged right away and if that’s how i feel then I guess that’s how people from all over the world are being felt and being treated according to how they look and present themselves. Growing up as an Asian American is difficult too, even though I was born in America, I have some people talk to me like I came from some part of Asia, (most of the time China). I know were talking about policing and blacks who are being targeted I just thought i could share what i can relate to and my experiences with the outside world. But going back, yes i find some people to be a potential danger but its not because of just racial back ground it has factors involved in it like for example if their bigger than me, wielding a weapon, threatens me or just acts violently and looks like they are planning an attack. I just try to avoid all of that.
Now a days we run into all types of police , but I have a question….. when we see police don’t we all have the same if not majority view point of them?
In my opinion just because a cop is black and he runs into a black suspect does not mean he can relate to his mindset or view point rather. I believe that when stuff like that does occur, me personally speaking for blacks : were not asking a black cop to give us a golden ticket to pass but were more so looking for a bit of sympathy being that everyone know what its like to be black especially living in a lower class urban area. Yes there has been multiple times where blacks or Hispanics seen their own kind and reacted as if they weren’t from the same background and in ways it shows bias or even hearing certain things they say with bias intensions
The world is full of destruction. There are concerns that people have with racism and other issues that are going on and it’s making the society more dangerous to live in than ever. If these issues doesn’t stop, then I feel like an apocalypse will occur. There’s going to be that one day where everybody is going to shoot down everything and everyone because there is so much hate that people just want it to be over. I say this because nobody respects one another neither do the law enforcement respect their fellow partners, so how will they respect their people that they’re are serving? Or should I say “trying” to serve? The policing patterns is an institution that is well-needed for nation and have everyone under control but at the same time, it is so corrupted. Police officers are not doing a great job serving and protecting us. Of course they have the mentally as a militarist because they are taught to shoot and kill but it is not right when they do it all the time. Especially to those who didn’t deserve to get killed which are the African-American. As I’ve learned, black men are targeted, shot, and killed the most than white men. Furthermore, when cops are off duty and are not wearing their uniforms, they even shoot their own partners that are part of the police department. I find that to be very disrespectful and it has become ridiculous because cops have shown to the world that whether or not you’re a cop, they will still shoot. In this world, racism and inequality has always played a huge role because it has impacted everybody and there are more people that are dying and lesser people living in the Earth. There is more racism going on than having more equality. Police officers feel like they have to make a certain number of arrests in order for them to get ranked up and get promoted in their job based on the rap sheets, arrests, plus more that they have done. Obviously, cops also go by the race (skin tone) of the human being because they feel like the more they arrest different people with the same race, which would make it seem like they’re doing their job. Technically, they’re getting their job done but not in an appropriate manner. Police officers are a representation of the law enforcement which makes them look and be “blue armors”. They’re just regular human beings that wear uniforms. Nothing about them makes them look different or abnormal. However, they feel like they can do whatever they want to people because they know they can get away with it since they’re a “police officer”. Most of the things that they do to people, they get away with but some of the other things they aren’t so lucky. Depending on what they did, they will get their position/job taken away and they won’t be able to work anymore or at least in the law enforcement, serve time in jail/prison, or get suspension without pay until they’re allowed to join the “blue armors” again. Many officers do not use their best discretion towards people to avoid a bad interaction or confrontation with them and others. They just egg on it more which makes the problem worse than from when it started. Human beings shouldn’t be picked on just for the way they walk, talk, look, or whatever they got going on. Cops need to come into justification of stopping a person and arresting them or pulling out a gun and point it at the wrong person. Although it does make them feel like they’re powerful and in control on what’s going on, it shouldn’t give them no right to do that. Stereotypes are created by people in the society based off of racial groups and ethnicity because someone always have something to say about another race and it becomes viral through the streets, being shown on TV and through the internet. It’s everywhere! Police officers may be our “heroes” but those are the first people to discriminate others and make unlawful actions against the communities that people are a part of. They find it normal to be very critical on those of their own race and that’s what gives them more of an ability to make arrests and kill. Especially since they already know how they are based off of their race and ethnicity. Additionally, cops focus more on the poor neighborhoods than the rich neighborhoods since the poor people in those neighborhoods don’t have enough power to defend themselves as much as the rich folks would in their community. That’s why they tend to make a lot of arrests on poor people than the rich people. What the government needs to target on is the stratification of the society that is affecting people in a negatively manner and is not making anything better. More problems are being created and more poor people getting murdered just for the heck of it. I certainly do not agree on what is going on and the way these issues are being dealt with but that’s how we are all living our lives in today’s messed up world. Police officers are breaking the law everyday and they don’t even know it. If they’re getting away with murder, they’re going to get away from anything else that they commit. In my notion, the only way the policing patterns will change is if the urbanity changes as well. It should be more diverse than usual. The policing system is bastardize yet nobody including the law enforcement are doing anything about it. It’s time for our generation to take over and change it and make it stricter.
We all harbor some type of biased. I for one harbor some biased towards the police. Its in particular the way they carry themselves talk act and carry out their responsibilities. I hold a certain biased towards anyone, cop or not who will kill any human being and not treat people with dignity and respect; those who take their power and misuse it. I don’t carry a perspective view on anyone in general. I feel that people whether African american Hispanic or white draw attention to themselves and make themselves look bad. For example the police; there are so many good cops out there and all we see in the front lines are cops brutally killing and very few making much of and impact or difference. This makes the police in general look bad and form a biased opinion concerning police in general. We are all biased and form opinions based on many things we have our own views and opinions. I feel that one person or a persons actions dose not define the lot of them. We all choose and decide what we will and will not do. We are individuals; just because a handful of Puerto Ricans, African Americans or cops are bad, kill,steal and end up in jail doesn’t mean its true for every single African american, Hispanic or cop. Those that do steal, kill, rob, rape etc do make the rest look bad. It looks bad because they form a name and a stamp for all other not just themselves. Race shouldn’t be dependent on whether you are capable or a regular at at. An individual is an individual and have individual actions.
I should say when i mean kill any human being a mean they way police have done brutally and unnecessarily.
This problems that exist today have been going on for many years even before I or any of my peers were born. The only difference is modern technology hones in on everything especially with society pouring their dislikes and discomforts with law enforcement. Can we really blame people though? So many things have happen by the hands of the fraternity groups (Law enforcement’s), that people are tired of being pushed around by the very people that are suppose to protect them. As I look at these pictures they look as if they are the military but most of them are just street patrol, they try so hard to mimic the military that they picked up their bad habits of defending there own at all cause. Even though there have been much controversy with law enforcement, they are not all to blame. I feel it also does not help that society puts a magnifying glass on every bad thing law enforcement does as well as leaves out information that may make an officer not look as bad as people perceive them as. At the end of it all we still need each other we are all human beings and if we do not come together as a collective society, we are gonna end up like the movie “The Purge.”
I believe policing patterns in general are mainly to criminalize African Americans in low income poor communities. These patterns that police practice on African American communities contain aggressive tactics that will led to a black person to get hurt to go jail or end up dead. The media portrays high crimes areas as mainly low income black neighborhoods what police departments do is they flood a lot of police officers no matter what race the officers are into these neighborhoods and they attack. They stop young black people because these are people that mainly get stopped and the officers will start picking you apart trying to find something to arrest you on. Policing in America has a culture of using tactics to targeting African Americans enforcing a status quo and police officer were mainly white. Police departments now may have diversified but the same patterns still exist that’s why you’ll see black officers targeting their own race. In order to change the policing patterns you have to change the policing culture.
In my opinion i believe that cops develop their racism against their own kind by observing the neighborhoods that they have been assigned too. They notice that the people who commit the most crimes and are arrested the most amount of times are people of their same ethnicity. I also think most cops don’t even know that they are racist to their own kind. Some cops may even find it as something any normal person would do. I think there many solutions that cops can try in order for them to change the way they think about certain minorities but it is up to them whether or not they want to change their ways not only for themselves but for the sake of others.
The work place envoirmment plays a major role in shaping one’s personality. We have the tendency to repeat our coworker’s behavior, so we can become part of that group. The formed cliques are present almost in any institution. Copying of one’s ways reduces the feeling of not belonging. The main problem is, that when police officers are at work, they are perceived equally as long as they are wearing the “blue shield”. As soon as the officer removes his blue “skin”, he or she is judged based on their actual skin color. The racism among the same racial group is pushed upon by higher organization that creates the stereotypes. Just because the urban cities are composed mostly by minority residents, and are highly patrolled by police that creates the disproportionate amounts of arrests. We have more arrests of black youth that stabilizes the stereotype. So the police officers, black or white, unfortunately accept the “numbers”, instead of understanding the real problem. The problem is the stratification and the poverty. Instead of fixing the neighborhoods, we are creating the vicious cycle by depriving the minority the chance to escape it. Arrests cause the lack of job opportunities, which leads to poverty, and later to crime.
I think the key here is that police officers are the ones creating “the numbers” as you say…the very same numbers they point to as a means to confirm their own bias as “truth.”
I believe policing patterns in general are very awful because of my own experience and also growing up in a poverty neighborhood you see a lot of things happening, which involves a lot of criminal activities going on. Policing patterns need to change because there is a lot of innocent people getting hurt or killed due to their racial or ethnic group. There are also few people who are biased towards their own racial group and I believe that should not be happening at all, it is ignorant and it is very immature of a person to act like that. I also believe people should be able to stick together and come together to stand up for each other. I am Hispanic and people who are Hispanic are one of the racial groups, who receive a lot of negitative comments and it is very uncomfortable sometimes. I do not look at a person and believe there is a chance that may be dangerous because of the stereotypes their racial group receives.I am the way I am because I myself have received ridiculous comments because I am Hispanic. As, I grew up I learned to not judge nobody because of their racial group.
What do you think about the idea of people being biased toward members of their own racial group?
People that are baised toward members of their own racial group is upsetting. I believe it is upsetting because they are mindful of their racial group but they are ignorant towards their own people. This has occurred because of social media and unnecessary comments that have been made within todays society. Young black males are considered to be drug dealers due to the sagging of the pants so they are portrayed as thugs which attracts attention to themselves.
“People are cops first, and they’re their race second.”
This is very true in the society we live in, personally I feel that no matter what ethnicity you are it shouldn’t effect your work ethic. In the passage the most interesting thing that caught my attention was the fact that police are very biased towards young African American men who dress a certain way. This is unprofessional and wrong in every aspect cops shouldn’t judge minorities lifestyle by what their appearances and looks but then again majority has brought that attention and reputation to them self’s.
I agree that police officers of the same race could be racist to their people because many individual are grown up differently. Since, black and Latinos are the highest target of arrested in the usa its easier for an officer to feel superior against them. However, new coming officer are also trained by old officer who have the mentally of discrimination and another fact is that police officers are being penalized of not meeting there quarter this also pushes officers to make wrongful arrest and unlawful actions against the community.
One way this could be fixed is by changing the way police officers are trained and are informed in the community. For example, the saying “if it a black man with a black hoody, then it’s him,” gives off the idea of every black person with a black hood is a criminal. If we could change the teacher, we will change the students.
I believe that no matter what race you are in this society the way media portrays black men and women is how you would see them. If one is lead to believe that these people are “bad”, “Drug Dealers”, “Killers”, etc. then that is what is stuck in your mind. As to black people in the police force, some might have a mentality that black people are all bad in the urban areas, and some might just want to keep their jobs having so many racist partners, and boss. They would follow the flow. So it is how you as a person view this issue no matter if your black or any other race.
To say that black police officers are racist to their own would imply that all black police officers are in which would be false. Of course you have some black police officers that are racist to their own. I believe if the law is being broken by any race, they should be penalized for it depending on the severity of the crime so if they have to arrest other blacks, so be it as long as its legit.
Also, most of us can agree that police patterns need to be fixed in order to keep up with the current trends. Unfortunately the patterns are still similar to how it was during segregation, “Watch those negros with their hands in their pockets. Oh hello Mrs. Daisy, how was your day?”.
I think that a black cop can be in fact racist against their own racial group. Im not only trying to target a black cop but I think it goes the same for white cops with white people and Hispanic cops against their own people as well. As a Hispanic female, I just have to admit, Hispanics can be pretty reckless and it makes me mad. Sometimes we get annoyed at the stupidity our own people do. However, society will just always find it racist when a white cop has a problem with a black citizen or the other way around.
The idea of people being biased towards members of their own racial group is kind of sad. It’s sad, but it happens often. Its’ like they are believing in their own racial group stereo types and they look at their race in which the stereo types describes them. I feel like even though they most likely are not racist what so ever, they have heard the same things about their racial group over and over again because of these stereo types created by society.
i fully do believe the black police officers are racist against crime and recidivism. the police officers are train with the mental to arrest anyone who is breaking the law , it doesn’t matter which race you are. police are afraid of black people due to the fact that black people have a high chance on being arrested. The problem is that black race have become the most popular race to be arrest after a crime have been committed.
Yes I do believe the black police officers are racist against crime and recidivism. I think that the policemen are reacting to the crimes that are being reported by the community members. Once there is a report of a crime the police have to act to follow up on it. Regardless of the race involved of the policeman or the alleged suspect, the police must do their job. Unfortunately, out of 40,000 cops employed by the N.Y.P.D. some do not use their best discretion in their actions and they impact peoples’ lives forever and leave scars on their families that can’t heal.
I feel like I it is actually true that blacks commit many crimes; however, every other race does the same. The problem is that blacks have become the most popular race to go and arrest after a crime have been committed, namely, when you see a black person walking towards you with a suspicious behavior what would you do? most likely cross the street or something. Anyhow, you might not even do this because you are racist, but because society have made the terrible job to make all of us feel as if every single black male/female who gets close to us might cause us any type of problem. Also i feel that in order for society to finally be equal then all races should be biased towards all races. Meaning, all races should be open with all other races. Not only to defend/support each other, but also to overcome racism and inequality.
I think the policing patterns in general is that black people are getting arrested more than white people. I seen this happen on social media and also seen it myself on the streets. This is happening because high-crime neighborhoods are predominantly black. Police go to these neighborhoods and end up making more arrest here and also the action they take impacts a number of black people. Not because the police officers are racist against the black people but because they are doing there job. For example in my neighborhood there is a group of black people always selling drugs on my block. In my neighborhood that is not the only crime that is been committed so the police tend to be patrolling around the area more often. This doesn’t mean that the police are racist against the black people but because they get caught by the police so that is why they get arrest. Some people are willing to do anything just to get there hands on money fast and easy because the money will help them in many ways. Maybe it’s because I live in a black neighborhood that I often see this but I don’t think that police are racist against one another. It is because the black people tend to commit the crimes in urban areas and eventually get caught like the other crimes committed in the neighborhood.