I’m sure that’s one of the reasons followup studies are planned.
Although it may not be for the reasons you imagine.
The Police Officer’s Dilemma: A Decade of Research on
Racial Bias in the Decision to Shoot
http://www.csun.edu/~dma/Correll,%20Hudson,%20Guillermo,%20&%20Ma%20(2014).pdf
(you have to paste the link into your browser)
@Cardinal Fang The paper you just suggested would appear to directly contradict a number of your posts, including #571, above. Why did you do that?
More specifically, where you said
“In the lab, police officers are quicker to shoot black people than white people, and we have no reason to believe it’s any different in the field.”
The abstract specifically says;
“they (police officers) generally do not show a biased pattern of shooting. We suggest that police performance depends on the exercise of cognitive control, which allows officers to overcome the influence of stereotypes…”
@JustOneDad, Did you read the paper, or did you just read the abstract? As you quoted, I said that “In the lab, police officers are quicker to shoot black people than white people, and we have no reason to believe it’s any different in the field.”
And here is what the paper said:
[quote]
Although they showed no bias in their decision
criteria, we observed clear, robust evidence of bias in officers’ response times. Just like the
community, **officers were faster to shoot armed targets when they were Black/b, and they were faster to choose a don’t-shoot response if an unarmed target was White
(rather than Black). /quote
Let me be clear: I don’t think that police officers should shoot white 12-year-olds sitting in parks with toy guns, and lie about it. I don’t think police should shoot white 17-year-olds walking away from police, and lie about it. I don’t think police should choke white people who are already restrained, and who were never a lethal danger in the first place, and lie about it. I don’t think police should shoot unarmed white guys who are twenty feet away and running away, and then plant evidence next to them suggesting they had a weapon. To the extent that police officers are killing white guys who weren’t a threat, and then lying about it, they should not be doing that and I oppose it.
But in the present situation, in the last year or so we have video of police officers doing all those things to black men and boys. The present problem is unjustified killings of black men and boys. The police lie, and then video surfaces that they were lying, which makes me doubt every word out of their mouths in situations where a video doesn’t surface. Sometimes, I assume most times, the police are telling the truth, but since we know some killings are unjustified, and police never admit killings are unjustified, I can’t believe them when they say the killings are justified.
To bring this back to the original topic, the Editorial Board of the New York Times calls for Princeton to remove Wilson’s name:
I’m still wary of such a demand (where does it stop?), but I must say I had no idea the breadth and long-term impact of Wilson’s role in purging blacks from the government rolls. I am grateful for the education.
I don’t think Cobrat’s post #531 quite rises to the level of an “appropriation” of Princeton culture or even affinity. Some of his h/s friends happened to go to Princeton in the 1990s and they were the ones who were doing the opining. Btw, what Cobrat related doesn’t sound imaginary to me at all.
I, myself, had similar conversations with African American alumni of another Ivy - coincidentally, also in the `90s. It was clear to me that whatever it was they had experienced had left them embittered, perhaps for life. I can well imagine them counseling prospective students to enroll “with their eyes open” even today.
@Cardinal Fang Your posts clearly claim “police officers are quicker to shoot black people”, conveniently neglecting to note the researchers found that they are slower when the black person is unarmed.
You also neglected to convey the main conclusion of the entire paper which was summed up in the abstract as;
“Although police are affected by target race in some respects, they generally do not show a biased pattern of shooting. We suggest that police performance depends on the exercise of cognitive control, which allows officers to overcome the influence of stereotypes”
After watching the Chicago video I am perhaps more concerned about why it took 13 months to charge the cop and why did the other cops just stand around and do nothing. The cover up by the police and the prosecutors seems appalling. That would give more reason for more student protests
Neither of us is doing a good job summarizing the paper, JustOneDad. Let’s start over again, and look at the whole paper with care.
The authors start out summarizing previous research. In the lab, people in general (not cops) are more likely to shoot when the target is black rather than white. They are more likely to “correctly” shoot an armed black guy than an armed white guy, and also more likely to “incorrectly” shoot an unarmed black guy than an armed white guy. (p 204)
Also, in the lab, people who practice the task of differentiating armed from unarmed shooters are able to be trained not to make race-based errors. People were presented with either a black or a white face, paired with either a gun or a neutral object, and had to “shoot” or not “shoot.” Initially, the participants made race-based errors, but with a session of practice, they learned not to make those errors. (p 205)
Then the authors talked about their own research. They first took some police officers, and some community members, and tried them on the shoot/don’t shoot task with photos of black or white people with or without guns. The police officers were faster and more accurate than the general public. While the general public made race-based errors, the police did not. Even when the task was made harder, by having the participants make their shoot/don’t shoot decision faster, the police didn’t make race-based errors. (p 206)
However, the researchers noticed the police were faster to shoot when the target was black, and faster to choose “don’t shoot” when the target was white. The researchers hypothesized that the police officers had the same unconscious bias as the community members, but their training allowed them to suppress it. (p 206)
The researchers compared “beat cops,” who would normally deal with all members of the public just going about their business, with cops from gang and street crime units, who focus on gangs and criminals. They discovered that “As described above, beat cops generally show no evidence of SDT bias [race-based errors] in our task. The
special-unit officers, however, showed robust bias. Similar to untrained members of the community, these officers showed clear SDT bias [race-based bias].” In other words, the police officers who don’t shoot people as part of their normal job don’t show bias, but the police officers who do draw their guns as part of their normal job show just as much race bias as the general public. (p 208-209)
The researchers hypothesized that training teaches people to consciously override their unconscious biases. They tested whether increasing the cognitive load of the task, which would lessen the ability of the participants to exercise conscious control over their biases, would induce more errors. It did. Participants who had been trained not to make race-based errors reverted to their previous race-based errors when they were distracted with a mental number task. The researchers didn’t test police officers in this task, so we don’t know how well they would have done. (p 209)
In summary, in the shoot/don’t shoot task in the lab,
(1) Random community members shoot black people more than white people
(2) Random community members trained in the lab task don’t shoot black people more than white people
(3) Police officers don’t shoot black people more than white people, although they show racial bias in their response time
(4) Special unit police officers were just as bad as the general public in shooting black people more than white people
(5) In cognitively complex tasks, people who are trained in the shoot/don’t shoot task lose all the benefit of their training, and shoot black people more than white people.
I too am wondering why it took the Chicago prosecutor 13 months to even arrest the killer. Does it take over a year to arrest other potential murderers when the evidence is so glaring? I’d also like to know what happened to the other video, the video from the Burger King that the police confiscated.
As a regular Times reader who agrees with a lot of the paper’s editorial stances, I nevertheless feel that the Editorial Board can sometimes be a progressive echo chamber, taking every chance it’s given to rush to defense of groups they perceive as underprivileged.
The regular contributors have some diversity of opinions (though Republicans are conspicuously absent at times, perhaps because being published in the NYT is a mark of shame in some conservative circles). They each have their pet issues, and disagree with the left on a number of points. Their ranks include several prominent centrists. Put the Editorial Board in a room together, however, and the maverick opinions often give way to the consensus which - as seems to be the case here - is far left of center.
You apparently do not live in Chicago. Without video evidence, the police cover for their own. Here is a video from 2007 of a drunk off duty cop beating up a female bartender:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=49kgG0s7lVk
It took until 2012 for this case to go court:
Circuitrider
While I’m not going to take up the issue of cultural appropriation, basically cobrat used anecdotes and personal stories to refute statistics.
Fact: Princeton had more black students than H&Y in the mid-1980s and mid-1970s.
Cobrat: H & Y accepted 4-5 times the number of students each from my and 2 earlier graduating classes which reflected their greater openness in admitting public magnet and public school students compared with P in that period (plus, URMs I spoke to didn’t like Princeton).
Generalizing from your own personal experience is quite a slippery slope.
And only the NY Times would consider Princeton students “underprivileged” instead of some of the most privileged students in the country, which is what they are.
In fairness, soccerguy, you really oughta read NYTimes commenters. There are quite a few times that they will call b.s. on the NYT liberal agenda.
This is one of the big weaknesses (and letdowns) my DSs find in their classes; that is, students who are supposedly the cream of the crop are totally ignorant of basic facts of American history.
A seminar for my one DS was in had to literally end early because none of black students knew that the KKK, Jim Crow, and anti-black Union’ laws were all democratic / liberal creations. The kids were blaming conservatives, like my DS, for holding them down in the late 19th century to mid-20th century with these institutions that were liberal incarnations. None had a clue it was a majority of liberals who voted against the civil rights act in 1965. The minority students thought it was only white conservatives who were against. My DS said it was like debating with the clueless.
The result of hearing a different point of view from my DS and a couple others, which happened to be supported factually, was to call people racists and against black people - even though nothing was ever said against black people, as it was a political science class and discussing the use of political power, and how until recently, the South was a liberal / progressive stronghold.
Yep, even at the number #1 university, they are accepting downright ignorant students.
I bet they cannot handle the truth about President Johnson either.
I do read a fair amount of NYTimes… I hit my monthly article limit on multiple computers =P
^^ Ah, cool, you are smart enough not to pay for it. I hit my limit too.
What’s your definition of liberal in those examples, @awcntdb ?