Studies

Research on racial bias in policing

“Comparing nearly 8,000 police officers to millions of other IAT test-takers, researchers found alarming implicit and explicit bias among police…while Black people exhibited lower levels of bias, Black police displayed more pro-white/anti-Black bias than other Black people."

“Thus, taken together, change in blood pressure offers some qualified evidence that Black participants were more physiologically reactive to … images [of police violence] we presented, especially when they portrayed police force against Black targets."

On televised news, minorities “are presented in ways that appear to be more threatening, as well as being offenders of violent crimes. This both greatly over-represents them when compared to racial crime data and overrepresents the victimization of whites by blacks."

“Two background characteristics, race and educational attainment, exerted a significant effect on work-family conflict. Minority and better educated officers tended to have a lower level of WFC [work-family conflict] than their White and less-educated counterparts."

“Our findings suggest that neighborhoods with higher concentrations of immigrants enjoy lower robbery and homicide rates… Cities with higher representations of African American officers had lower neighborhood violent crime rates."

“We found… that high-risk Black girls were more likely to ‘get caught’ for their antisocial behavior, but were not more likely to actually engage in antisocial behavior as compared to their White counterparts."

“Many Black men feel wearing a mask is a bigger threat than the coronavirus… Black individuals also appear more likely to be targeted by police for simply wearing masks. In a heartbreaking calculus, many are choosing not to wear them at all."

“Analysis demonstrated, first, that Black officers were consistently rated more positively than both White and Asian officers” & “In sum, our findings offer some support for the idea that increasing the representativeness of UK policing, … will reap dividends."