Apparently Washington State University wanted to find out why racial “minorities” are shot more often in police incidents. The study did not go quite as the liberals in this country would have wanted it to. My explanation why the disparity exists will be at the end of the article.
WSU ‘deadly force’ lab finds racial disparities in shootings
Blacks more feared, but shot less quicklySPOKANE, Wash.—Participants in an innovative Washington State University study of deadly force were more likely to feel threatened in scenarios involving black people. But when it came time to shoot, participants were biased in favor of black suspects, taking longer to pull the trigger against them than against armed white or Hispanic suspects.
The findings, published in the recent Journal of Experimental Criminology, grow out of dozens of simulations aimed at explaining the disproportionate number of ethnic and racial minorities shot by police. The studies use the most advanced technology available, as participants with laser-equipped guns react to potentially threatening scenarios displayed in full-size, high-definition video.
The findings surprised Lois James, lead author and assistant research professor at Washington State University Spokane’s Sleep and Performance Research Center. Other, less realistic studies have found people are more willing to think a black person has a gun instead of a tool and will more readily push a “shoot” button against a potentially armed black person.
The findings also run counter to the public perception, heightened with the recent shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., that police are more willing to shoot black suspects. Statistics show that police shoot ethnic and racial minorities disproportionately to their population.
But the last comprehensive look at the racial makeup of justifiable and non-justifiable shootings was a 2001 study (pdf) using more than two decades of U.S. Bureau of Justice data, said James. And while statistics show black suspects are shot at more frequently than white suspects, the 2001 study found black suspects were also as likely to shoot at police as be shot at.
“At the moment, there are no comprehensive statistics on whether the police do inappropriately shoot at black males more than they do at white males,” said James. “Although isolated incidents of black males being shot by the police are devastating and well documented, at the aggregate level we need to understand whether the police are shooting black unarmed males more than they are white unarmed males. And at the moment, nobody knows that.”
Shootings in the field are particularly difficult to study because they can have a multitude of complex, confounding and hard-to-control variables. But WSU Spokane’s Simulated Hazardous Operational Tasks Laboratory can control variables like suspect clothing, hand positions, threatening stance and race, while giving observers precise data on when participants are fired upon and how many milliseconds they take to fire back.
James’ study is a follow-up to one in which she found active police officers, military personnel and the general public took longer to shoot black suspects than white or Hispanic suspects. Participants were also more likely to shoot unarmed white suspects than black or Hispanic ones and more likely to fail to fire at armed black suspects.
“In other words,” wrote James and her co-authors, “there was significant bias favoring blacks where decisions to shoot were concerned.”
When confronted by an armed white person, participants took an average of 1.37 seconds to fire back. Confronted by an armed black person, they took 1.61 seconds to fire and were less likely to fire in error. The 24-millisecond difference may seem small, but it’s enough to be fatal in a shooting
The recent study analyzed data from electroencephalograph sensors that measured participants’ alpha brain waves, which are suppressed in situations that appear threatening.
The participants, 85 percent of whom were white, “demonstrated significantly greater threat responses against black suspects than white or Hispanic suspects,” wrote James and her co-authors, University of Missouri-St. Louis criminologist David Klinger and WSU Spokane’s Bryan Vila. This, they said, suggests the participants “held subconscious biases associating blacks and threats,” which is consistent with previous psychological research on racial stereotypes.
However, the current study only measured the alpha waves of participants drawn from the general public, not law enforcement or the military. Consequently, wrote the authors, “results from this sample are not generalizable to sworn officers.”
“However,” they added, “there is some evidence from the field to support the proposition that an officer’s threat bias could cause him or her to tend to take more time to make decisions to shoot people whom they subconsciously perceived as more threatening because of race or ethnicity. This behavioral ‘counter-bias’ might be rooted in people’s concerns about the social and legal consequences of shooting a member of a historically oppressed racial or ethnic group.”
James said she has data on subconscious associations between race and threat from law enforcement subjects, and she awaits funding to analyze whether these biases predict decisions to shoot in the simulator. Like study participants from the general public, she said, “they were still more hesitant to shoot black suspects than white suspects. They took longer and they made fewer errors.”
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2014-09/wsu-wf082914.php
Ok, has anyone here figured out the real reason more “minorities” are shot in police incidents even though this study shows the opposite should occur? It’s pretty simple, the reason is right in the article, buried under a bunch of other information. Here’s the money quote.
the 2001 study found black suspects were also as likely to shoot at police as be shot at.
Yes, ladies and gentlemen. Right in the article it shows that a previous study proved that black suspects were far more likely to shoot at the police than any other group. Yet, somehow with that information there is still a mystery here that this research team needs Scooby and the gang to help figure out. Oh, and maybe the bit about police thinking that african americans might be more violent. Well, I’m not sure where they would get that Idea.
https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/ojjdp/228479.pdf
In 2008, although black youth account
ed for just 16% of the youth population
ages 10–17, they were involved in 52%
of juvenile Violent Crime Index arrests
and 33% of juvenile Property Crime
Index Arrests
http://ojjdp.gov/ojstatbb/crime/JAR_Display.asp?ID=qa05261
The Violent Crime Index arrest rate in 2011 for black juveniles (627) was 5 times the rate for white (125) youth, 6 times the rate for American Indian juveniles (105), and 15 times the rate for Asian juveniles (41).
In the 1980s, the Violent Crime Index arrest rate for black juveniles was 6 times the white rate. This ratio declined during the 1990s, holding at 4 to 1 from 1998 to 2004. Since 2004, the racial disparity in the rates increased, reaching 5 to 1 in the late 2000s.
My advice to people is if you want the cops to stop shooting your minority group “youths”, then you should get your children to stop killing cops and other people. It would go a long way to changing the perception of potential violence seen by the police responding.
I’m trying to put this information out there without coming off insensitive, but I think we’ve hit the point where the majority of violent crime is committed by one group in this country, and that same group screams racism anytime that the police are forced to stop a violent criminal. I don’t get how this solves anything. Believe me when I say that 99% of the police out there have no interest in killing someone. That is a situation that leaves scars that few ever fully recover from. (Their leadership with their militarization goals are something else entirely, it’s always easier when you aren’t the one pulling the trigger.) If people would take the time to stop blaming others for doing their job and actually take the time to engage with their own families (or in many of these cases even admit that they have a family) a lot of this could be solved.