Aisse Tounkara
11/08/2019
Professor Hall
When Is This Going To Stop
Everytime you turn on your TV you see something on the news with a police officer who shot and killed a African American because they felt threatened by their presence, or they felt like they were a threat to someone else.
In this first article “ Policing in black and white neighborhoods” it talks a lot about implicit bias and how that leads to preconceived notions. It states what Police Officers see when they encounter an African American person and vice versa. It’s crazy that this is the norm because this leads to terrible encounters which always ends up deadly. Over the past years we have seen a vast majority of African Americans unarmed men mostly and women lose their lives in the hands of police. When the time comes for justice to be served the excuse is always “ They felt threatened” and this article says that an officer is more likely to shoot an unarmed black person first rather a white man who is armed. This has to due with the fact that a black person will always be seen as a threat.
These preconceived notions never end well. It states “ These serious judgements often manifest themselves into even worse scenarios”. What this is saying is that it’s never going to be a positive interaction. When a researcher Kirsten Weir at the American Psychological Association asked Hillary Clinton “If Police were implicitly biased against black people” she herself knew that this was true and a problem. Her response was like everyone else’s trying to beat around the question. I learned the effects that implicit bias in the police and the extent that it leads too.
In this second article “ Confronting Implicit Bias in the New York Police Department” from the New York Times it talks about what can be done to change peoples biased towards African Americans especially men. It states “ an unarmed black man holding a cellphone, Stephon Clark, is fatally shot in his grandmother’s backyard in Sacramento and residents ask whether the officers only saw race while pulling the trigger 20 times”. The answer was yes. Stephon Clark may have been killed because of officers implicit bias. They felt harmed by his presence and this article does a good job explaining the steps it would take to confront the implicit bias. “The effort to train officers to tackle implicit bias is one Mayor Bill de Blasio has pushed for since his 2016 State of the City address.
They know that implicit bias is a problem so the fact that they care enough to do something about it says a lot. This article says that a lot of Police Officers have implicit bias and they don’t even know that they do. They are taking necessary trainings to decrease the number of police killings in African Americans when it comes to this implicit bias idea. That’s what I learned a lot about in this research. While reading and analyzing the source I learned that systematic racism and implicit bias goes hand and hand.
In the third article This source “Race and the Police” talks about other factors besides implicit bias that’s also a problem when it comes to Police Brutality. It states “Race continues to influence how people of African American descendants are treated by law enforcement.” They are treated very unfairly by members of law enforcement. So a police officer is more likely to pull the trigger on an African American compared to a Non African American for the same crime.
I learned from this source that race was another major issue when it came to Police Brutality. The whole idea behind preconceived notions and police is racism. If a police officer sees race before the law than the outcome of that is not going to be great. This source is a very reliable source and thorough research was done because it provided me with a lot of facts and research that the police foundation has done.
Overall, in this research that I concluded I learned what implicit bias is, and what are the different kinds of causes of action that leads towards police brutality when dealing with African Americans. What I found interesting is that police officers police different in certain neighborhoods, and how implicit bias training will make a change for the better.
The number of killings in the hands of law enforcement will change.
