Racial Bias In Policing: A Case Study

What is racism? Racism is defined as discrimination toward someone’s race or religion etc. As we know today, this is a big issue, especially in United State. This is important to me because it does not matter what skin color you have or what religion you believe in. All that matters are that a person follows the law. Police officers, for example, they are supposed to use the power that they have for the bad people, people that do crimes and our threat to our society. Using violence against people that haven't done any threat to our society is wrong. In Sweden there is some racism, but not to the extent that black people will get harassed because of their skin color. In Sweden, the law is for everyone and whoever breaks the law will get the punishment they deserve. We all know that it is always two side of a story for example what happened to Michael Brown on August 9, 2014. Michael Brown was robbing a grocery store. The police officer stated that “He shot Brown after the teen attacked him”, While brown’s family said, “Brown was surrendering when he was shot dead.” You are always going to hear two different sides but the justice will find out who is the guilty one and who is the victim.

Racial profiling, stereotyping, and different styles of policing has led to the disproportionate targeting of minorities by law enforcement agencies. Warren et al. (2006) notes that law enforcement often use two forms of racial profiling. One is defined by Warren et al. (2006) as out of place profiling. This particular form of racial profiling targets an individual if they do not match the general make up of a certain community. Another method of racial profiling Warren et al. (2006) explains is drug interdiction profiles, which encourage officers to target drug traffickers using their racial background to make traffic stops and search their vehicles for contraband. Furthermore, Terrill and Reisig (2003) findings

Police shootings are unfortunate events but whenever there is a shooting, the topic of race emerges. Police shootings have always been the highlights on news channels and there is always the racially biased narrative that keeps repeating itself yet no one seems to dispute this narrative. However, did you know that studies show a police officer is eighteen and a half times more likely to be killed by a African American male than an unarmed African American male is to be killed by a police officer? In fact, a recent “deadly force” study by Washington State University researcher Lois James found that police officers were actually less likely to shoot an unarmed black suspect than unarmed Caucasian or Hispanic suspect in simulated threat scenarios. Some would argue that there are still police shootings all over America and they occur when police officers

Just this April, the city’s Police Accountability Task Force found that the Chicago Police Department has “no regard for the sanctity of life when it comes to people of color.” Chicago’s population is 31.7% white, 32.9% Black, 28.9% Latino, and 5.5% Asian. However, the Task Force reported that the city’s police officers shoot Black residents at significantly disproportionate rates. Between 2008 and 2015, of all people injured or killed in police-related shootings, 74% were Black, 14% were Hispanic, 8% were white and less than 1% were Asian. The report found almost identical numbers when it came to statistics regarding the use of Tasers. The report also analyzed all people stopped by police during the summer of 2014 and found they were 72% Black,

Besides enacting racial bias screening and training requirements, police departments need to change the way they operate, by changing poor police protocol currently in place. In other words, in some cases, this issue of racial profiling can stem from police chiefs who provide their officers with patrol assignments targeting minority neighborhoods due to implicit biases which they have. In Driving While Black: Racial Profiling On Our Nation's Highways, David Harris suggests, “Because police look for drugs primarily among African Americans and Latinos, they find a disproportionate number of them with contraband” (Harris). Certain police chiefs intentionally target minority neighborhoods and put a greater effort on catching the people living there for their wrongdoings, thus making those minority groups appear as higher threats to society. The picture of crime would be reversed if the police targeted White people rather than minorities.

One of the most polarizing policy issues in the United States is the process of using race, ethnicity, and/or national origin by law enforcement as a chief predictor of criminal behavior. In the presence of social media and modern technological innovation, there has been increased documentation on the very problematic ways in which police officers use their position of authority against minorities. The countless cases of murder and police brutality have prompted national dialogue regarding to what extent race should be used in methods of policing. Against a troubled backdrop of incessant clashes with minorities and law enforcement, navigating the situation requires a degree of care that does not diminish the

The use of racially bias policing isn’t a new phenomenon, however, there is very little data on its use and practice. A lot of that accounts for the fact that determining that a law enforcement officer used racial bias as a method to stop, question and frisk a person is substantially hard. Furthermore, racially bias policing has been an issue facing police since the creation of the first police agencies in the country and since the civil rights movement; however, the public has now become more aware of the phenomenon because of various accounts portrayed in the media; such as the death of Amadou Diallo in 1999.

Weitzer and Tuch depicted that “African Americans will see police misconduct as both a general problem and one that is primarily targeted towards blacks” (Weitzer and Tuch 1011). A test was given to a sample group to decide whether minorities believe police in their city treats them worse than whites. Results show that minorities are virtually treated worse than whites. When testing the white sample group, results displayed that police in their city treated whites

Implicit biases can lead to race-based policing even without making a conscious decision to do so. Evidence proves that African Americans and Latinos are stopped for traffic offenses more frequently than Whites even though they do not commit more traffic offenses than Whites. (Richardson, 2015) One study revealed that police “officers were more likely to see weapons in the hands of unarmed Black individuals than in the hands of unarmed White individuals as a result of implicit bias” (Richardson). These discoveries mirror studies indicating that racial biases lead people to interpret the actions of Black individuals more suspiciously than they would interpret the same actions if they were performed by White individuals. (Richardson)

The research problem in Black and Hispanic Men Perceived to Be Large Are at Increased Risk for Police Frisk, Search, and Force, is one in which the bigger or larger the defendants are at risk for experiencing police force mistreatment of racial profiling, with the black and Hispanic men being more likely to experience excessive force than Caucasian men across the same dimensions (Milner, George, & Allison, 2016, p. 1). The particular design of this study was a is a quasi-experimental design, the data-gathering strategy of this study was simple and straightforward; 3 million cases from the New York Police Department (NYPD) Stop, Question, and Frisk (SQF) Database, from the following years, 2006–2013 (Milner et al., 2016, p. 1).

For the past few decades, there have been increasing speculation on the problem of excessive force and police brutality. While there are many people that claim that the presence of local police force is beneficial, the Community of Relations Service of the United States Department of Justice claims that in incidents where minority communities often do not have good relations with the police force, a small incident involving the use of force will often result in a violent disturbance (Community, 1). These tensions between the police force and minority communities are then fueled further by many different police cases across the United States in which officers allegedly use excessive force against both minority and majority communities. Many

— Some researchers say that, “Race triggers shooting by white police officers because whites feel more threatened by black faces than white faces.”

However, other studies continue to show that there are consequences for race in regards to a police officer’s response to criminal suspects. One study in particular used a computer simulation to examine police officers’ decisions to shoot Black and White criminal suspects. Responses to the simulation revealed that upon initial exposure to the program, the officers were more likely to mistakenly shoot unarmed Black compared with unarmed White suspects. However, after extensive training with the program, in which the race of the suspect was unrelated to the presence of a weapon, the officers were able to eliminate this bias. (Plant, A., & Peruche, M. n.d.) Although there is a group of people who have the counterargument that reverse racism is becoming more of an issue than racial bias against Black Americans, recent Gallup polling still reveals that nearly seventy percent of Black Americans believe that the U.S. justice system is biased against them. The poll also shows that a quarter of White Americans as well as a third of all adults nationally, agrees. (Race Relations 2015).

“Despite making up only 2% of the total US population, African American males between the ages of 15 and 34 comprised more than 15% of all deaths logged this year by an ongoing investigation into the use of deadly force by police. Their rate of police-involved deaths was five times higher than for white men of the same age…”(Swaine et al, 2015; para. 2).

For decades, civilian deaths caused by police have been a reason for concern in the United States. However, the police are not entirely to blame for their image after these events. Media plays a crucial role in how the public view law enforcement. More often than not, people form their views and opinions of police based off of what they hear and see from others; mainly the media. Stories told by press make up a small percentage of actual events. For example, an African American being shot is more likely to become a big story, even though Caucasians have actually been shot more. The media should release all information they received in as unbiased a manner as possible, to allow the public to form their own opinions. Although white privilege