Police Brutality And Stereotypes

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Examining researches, it has been suggested that the part of the problem with police violence against citizens is born of officers’ fears (Weaver, 2014). According to Weaver (2014), Gordon B. Moskowitz, chair of the psychology department at Lehigh University, suggestion is that the link between police violence and racism is not due to the fact that dislike and hatred of blacks by police officers. However, it is also guileless to suggest that those actions by the officers has no correlation to the race of victims (Weaver, 2014). Moskowitz suggestion for racial bias and police violence is that the influence of racism on our actions is very subtle. The most recent cases of police brutality and racism across the United States are most likely born …show more content…
(Banaji, Hardin, & Rothman, 1993) found evidence in their experiment a link between stereotyped knowledge of subject and social category of the target in producing implicit stereotyping. According to Banaji, Hardin, & Rothman (1993), the primed information affected the judgement of participants based solely on the social group of the targets. When we hear the word "lion", our brain immediately retrieves an image of a lion from our memory even though we may not want it. Similarly, Weaver (2014) suggests stereotypes of human groups happens where if a white police officer sees an African American man, it may triggers an cultural stereotype of this group such as danger, criminality, violence and strength that he or she may have learned. As the officer is primed to observe threat, the perception is similar and a moving hand (Weaver, 2014). Weaver (2014) thinks that even if the officer may not see himself as racist, this will happen unconsciously. Other example of implicit bias was found by (Hall et al., 2015) where they observed that health care providers seem to have implicit bias in which they had positive attitudes toward Whites and negative attitudes toward people of color, and the level of implicit bias was same across Black, Hispanic/Latino/Latina, and nonsignificant. dark-skinned. (Hall et al., 2015) suggestion is that implicit bias may result in health disparities for people of color. This might …show more content…
Also, (Payne, 2006) found in the experiment that participants falsely claimed to see a gun frequently after they were shown a face was black than when it was white. (Payne, 2006) conclusion from the research was that that racial stereotypes may influence people to claim to see a weapon even though there may be none. When decisions have to be made in matter of seconds, then the bias is maximized and has a significant effect on our behavior. In case of police officers, such bias has ramifications while making during encounter with suspects from racial minorities even though the officer may not be racist and trying to avoid racial behavior from occurring (Payne, 2006). Another research, Correll & Keesee (2009), found that even though police officers were less likely to shoot an unarmed person, their decision to not shoot an unarmed white suspect was quicker that their decision to not shoot an unarmed black suspect. The case was opposite in shooting an armed suspect, where they were less slow than an unarmed black suspect and slower to decide to shoot an armed white suspect than an armed black suspect.
Finally, Weaver (2014), referencing works of Phil Goff with police officers,

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