Shooting Bias

Issues>Criminal Justice>Shooting Bias

In The Consequences of Race for Police Officers’ Reponses to Criminal Suspects, E. Ashby Plant and B. Michelle Peruche wanted to see if police officers were more likely to shoot African American suspects.  They had 48 anonymous police officers use a computer simulation that presented them with photographs of white and black suspects.  The photographs appeared in five different areas of the computer screen and each photograph had superimposed within it a to-scale image of either a gun or a non-harmful object such as a wallet. The decisions were made quickly as the test was designed to measure how bias might affect split-second decisions.

The results are disturbing.  Police officers were, on average, somewhat more likely to shoot a black suspect holding a neutral object than a white one and more likely to accidentally not shoot an armed white suspect than an unarmed black suspect. . The silver lining on this particular cloud is that, over time, with repetitions of the test, police officers gradually eliminated the shooter bias.  The question is whether or not they simply did better on the test or whether computer simulations are a good way to train police officers for the real world.