A fascinating new study reported in the Chronicle of Higher Education today has “found that higher stress levels helped [police] officers (no matter what race) make better decisions about whether to shoot, but only when the fictional assailants on the screen were black.” Sounds like just another claim of police racism, right? Wrong.
First, as one of the authors explained, “one surprising finding from our study is that under stress, officers were no more likely to mistakenly shoot a black target than a white target.”
Moreover, the error caused by racial stereotyping was not in shooting too many blacks; it was not shooting enough whites! As the study’s author explained:
Since there is a widely shared societal stereotype linking blacks to danger, just seeing a black target can trigger an automatic response to consider this perceptual cue as dangerous. Moreover, in the case where the target is armed (or paired with a danger-related perceptual cue), the correct response to shoot is facilitated by the stereotypic association.
The Chronicle reporter was apparently discombobulated by this finding, and pursued it:
Q. So the stereotype is actually helpful?
A. While it might appear that the stereotype is helpful when examining error rates for armed black targets, when you look at error rates for armed white targets, it becomes clear that the stereotype can be rather harmful. Officers did not correctly shoot armed white targets. White targets were not presumed to be potentially dangerous, so as we see in our results, officers made more errors when white targets were armed, which is certainly harmful as it could put officers’ and civilians’ lives in danger.
Sounds like the police need to make much greater efforts to combat the racial stereotype — but not the stereotypical racial stereotype — that whites aren’t likely to be an armed and dangerous threat.
