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SPSSI Members Discuss Developments in Ferguson, MO
Five SPSSI members offered their thoughts on the troubling developments in Ferguson, MO, where two weeks ago a police officer shot and killed an unarmed young black man named Michael Brown. His death brought sustained national attention to the issue of police-minority relations, as did the seemingly disproportionate response from the police to the community's largely peaceful demonstrations.
Elena Stepanova, Kimberly Kahn and Faye Belgrave each discuss different aspects of the psychology of police interactions with African Americans. Even if they are not deliberately discriminatory, many officers may harbor subconscious attitudes and associations that make them more likely to respond aggressively to black men. Alvin Thomas suggests some ways minority-police relations can be repaired, and Laurence French situates the tragedy in historical context, showing how outmoded theorizing about black crime continues to affect how police behave toward minority groups.
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Elena V. Stepanova
The University of Southern Mississippi
In the Weapons Identification Task, individuals were shown on computer screens images of either an African American or a European American face, then asked to classify a target object (a gun or a tool) as either a weapon or a non-weapon. More here.
Kimberly Barsamian Kahn
My own research has demonstrated that individuals are more likely to mistakenly shoot darker-skinned black suspects compared to lighter-skinned black suspects, and that bias is not only prevalent at the shooting-decision level, but can be seen across the range of use-of-force decisions. More here.
Faye Z. Belgrave
Virginia Commonwealth University
For black men, the outcome of these subconscious biases is that they are stopped, arrested, killed and generally fare worse in the criminal justice system than other racial/ethnic groups. More here.
A recent survey suggests that black youth are twice as likely as other youth to be harassed by the police, and fewer black youth (at 44 percent) trust the police compared to youth of any other race, and especially compared to white youth (at 71 percent). More here.
Laurence Armand French
Justiceworks Institute/University of New Hampshire
frogwnmu@yahoo.com
The situation that is playing out in Ferguson, Missouri, like so many others in recent years involving the shooting death of unarmed black males, has its roots in the ideology that emerged in the aftermath of the 1960s and early 1970s. More here.