![]() Researchers believe racial bias is to blame, with police officers drawing on stereotypes that Black men are dangerous in deciding to use lethal force. Police killed roughly five times as many Black suspects as white suspects per capita between 19, federal statistics show. ![]() “Realism may provide officers with an opportunity to practice handling the full cognitive, physical and emotional complexity of a potentially lethal encounter,” the researchers wrote. Namely, that police departments should consider training their officers under the same conditions they’re likely to face in the field, when they’re scared and tired. But the results also offer some insight into the types of police training that could be more effective. The findings are bleak and seem to challenge the value of training intended to reduce racial bias among police officers, the researchers note. ![]() “That could and should help inform further research in this field to really understand how these complex cognitive processes occur.” “This study really suggests that this type of process-of very quickly looking at whether the object is a gun or a cellphone-is relatively inefficient,” said Balbir Singh, a CU Boulder social psychology graduate student and the paper’s lead author. Participants incorrectly shot unarmed Black targets more often than unarmed white targets, and they failed to shoot armed white targets more often than armed Blacks.įrom these results, researchers posit that deciding whether or not to shoot a suspect is a multifaceted, cognitively difficult process and, unless police officers are working in optimal conditions-that is, they’re not under cognitive load-training likely won’t help reduce racial bias on the job. But when trained participants also had to think about something else while performing the simulation, the benefits of practicing the simulation disappeared. The researchers found that practicing the simulation helped improve participants’ accuracy in determining when to shoot and when not to shoot armed and unarmed Black and white men shown on a screen.
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