Implicit Bias In Criminal Justice

The past few years leading up to 2016 has been some of the most eye-opening years for me. They have been a testimony to how an issue plaguing criminal justice can completely outgrow itself and evolve into something much bigger. For me, it started in 2012, which was the year that Trayvon Martin was fatally killed by George Zimmerman. This incident sparked a national debate over how young African American men and women who were unarmed at the time of these incidents were being unjustly killed. What followed was a hashtag, #BlackLivesMatter, that began to encompass all the other string of innocent people whose lives were taken from them. Famous examples include Eric Garner who died in a chokehold while saying “I can’t breathe” in 2014, Michael …show more content…
For example, when someone sees a white person then they automatically associate them with positive associations. However, when they see a black person, they tend to form negative associations. When I heard this in the discussion, all I could think was this is exactly what it is. I feel like in the entire history of America, that the criminal justice system has been plagued by implicit bias. It often translates into public policy. This idea of implicit bias was further supported by the second discussion we had that day by Professor Drakulich who discussed his research on the Rhode Island Traffic Stop Data Collection and Analysis Project. In this project, they surveyed who was being stopped for traffic violations in Rhode Island. The results were that African Americans were being pulled over and given citations a lot more than their Caucasian counterparts. This supports the whole idea of implicit bias which was introduced in the earlier discussion by Professor McDevitt. One of the solutions that was proposed for this problem was to educate officers about implicit bias. This is something that has been adopted by a good number of police departments around the nation. The whole idea behind it is that if you know that you’re engaging in it then maybe you’ll be able to recognize that and reassess if you’re approaching a situation in an unbiased way. Another solution that has been proposed outside of this discussion on the same issue has been laws that require officers to be equipped with body cameras. This is one solution that has a lot more room for failure because officers can still find ways to get around a body camera or justify their actions even if it has been caught on tape just like they’ve been doing with these different police brutality cases. However, the solution proposed during the discussion in class which proposes educating officers