The Black Lives Matters folks and their enablers in the press won't like this one bit.
On Wednesday, Washington Post writer Tom Jackman, at the paper's True Crime blog, reported on a rigorous study of police behavior which found that, in his words, "even with white officers who do have racial biases, officers are three times less likely to shoot unarmed black suspects than unarmed white suspects." Talk about busting a meme.
Additionally, this result isn't a one-off. The study's authors, using techniques with which tampering would appear to be difficult, have reached a similar conclusion two previous times (bolds are mine throughout this post):
This study found race matters in police shootings, but the results may surprise you
The conventional thinking about police-involved shootings, and some scientific research, has been that black suspects are more likely to be shot than white suspects because of an implicit racial bias among police officers. But now a new study has found exactly the opposite: even with white officers who do have racial biases, officers are three times less likely to shoot unarmed black suspects than unarmed white suspects.
The results come from a laboratory project at Washington State University using highly realistic police simulators, in which actors in various scenarios approach and respond to officers on large, high-definition video screens in an attempt to recreate critical situations on the street. The officers are equipped with real guns, modified to fire infrared beams rather than bullets, and the scenarios can branch into conflict or cooperation, depending on the officers’ words and actions.
It’s the third time researchers at Washington State — Lois James, Stephen M. James and Bryan J. Vila — have set up simulations to monitor the differing reactions of police when confronted by white or black suspects. And all three times, they found that officers took significantly more time to fire their weapons if the subject was black, according to their latest report, “The Reverse Racism Effect,” to be published in the journal Criminology & Public Policy.
The research finding contradicts the "trigger-happy white cops are eager to gun down innocent black people" meme in the real world.
Additionally, that finding extends to white "non-police participants":
... there has also been a contrary narrative, that officers are hesitant to fire at black suspects, starting with a 1977 analysis of reports from major metropolitan departments which found officers fired more shots at white suspects than at black suspects, possibly because of “public sentiment concerning treatment of blacks.” And in 2004, David Klinger at the University of Missouri-St. Louis interviewed more than 100 officers and found “evidence of increased wariness about using deadly force against black suspects for fear of how it would be perceived and the associated consequences.”Into this conflict of views enters Lois James at Washington State, who has made studying the race factor in police shootings a specialty. For the most part, simply using data from police reports doesn’t include the episodes where an officer doesn’t shoot or doesn’t hit a target. So she has turned to the lab to try to simulate the circumstances officers face on the job ...
... In two previous tests using police simulators, James monitored the neurophysiological reactions, such as brain waves, of both police officers and civilians to deadly encounters. She said in an interview Tuesday that she found that “the participants were experiencing a greater threat response when faced with African Americans instead of white or Hispanic suspects.” But even with that response, in both studies the police and non-police participants were “significantly slower to shoot armed black suspects than armed white suspects, and significantly less likely to mistakenly shoot unarmed black suspects than unarmed white suspects.”
... for this (recent third) study the officers were given a battery of written and oral tests. Again, there was no mention of a racial component. But one of the tests was the Harvard Implicit Association Test, designed to detect racial bias by linking pictures of black and white faces with pictures of weapons. Perhaps stunningly, 96 percent of the nearly all white officers demonstrated implicit racial bias, with 78 percent strongly or moderately associating blacks with weapons, and zero percent associating whites with weapons. So that’s the baseline test group for the study.
Let's stop there.
That evalution of officers' implicit attitudes isn't "stunning," because the Harvard Implicit Association Test does not prove what its fans think it proves.
The Harvard test is of the same ilk used by the Associated Press in 2012. in a preemptive blame-game effort guarding against the possibility that incumbent President Barack Obama might lose to Mitt Romney in that year's presidential election, the wire service accused white America of still harboring racist thoughts that might swing the election to Romney. As I wrote at the time:
... if you're familiar with crime statistics broken down by race which consistently show blacks involved with violent crime at a rate that far exceeds whites and you indicate ... that "violent" is an adjective which describes most blacks "slightly well," you probably tripped the survey's "Racistometer," when all you've actually done is recite reality. Similarly, if you are aware that the welfare and education systems have inarguably done serious damage to the life prospects of millions of black kids for at least two generations, a "slightly well" or "moderately well" answer as to whether "most blacks" are "irresponsible" will probably cause the "Racistometer" to go into the red.
Similarly, officers, perhaps particularly in the State of Washington, who are "strongly or moderately associating blacks with weapons, and zero percent associating whites with weapons," are more than likely reflecting their on-the-job experience. Reacting based on experience is not presumptive evidence of "implicit racism." So that element of Ms. James's work which tarred the subject officers with implicit racism is highly suspect at best, and a smear at worst.
Continuing with Jackman's post:
... Now to the shooting scenarios. With all other variables constant, “officers took significantly longer to shoot armed black suspects than armed white suspects,” an average of 0.23 seconds slower, James wrote. When looking at shooting errors, where an unarmed suspect is wrongly shot, “officers were significantly less likely to shoot unarmed black suspects than unarmed white suspects.” Of the wrongful shootings, white people were shot 54 times and black people were shot twice. Adjusting for the fact there were fewer black scenarios, “we found that officers were slightly more than three times less likely to shoot unarmed black suspects than unarmed white suspects.
But why? James’ team did not interview the Spokane officers. But she did not think that a 0.23 second delay in firing enabled the officers to consciously decide based on race. She considered whether the fact the officers knew they were being observed played into their actions, but she said the police did not know that race was a factor in the project. More likely, James concluded, was the reverse racism “rooted in people’s concerns about the social and legal consequences of shooting a member of a historically oppressed racial group…paired with the awareness of media backlash that follows an officer shooting a minority suspect.”
In other words — I told you that the Black Lives Matter movement and their press enablers won't like this — the police are already giving black suspects more of a benefit of the doubt before pulling the trigger. It's reasonable to believe that the documented "Ferguson Effect" driven by the BLM movement has further increased officer wariness.
This means, on the whole, that the Black Lives Matter movement's complaint about trigger-happy cops is not only invalid. It's the opposite of what is happening in the real world.
One suspects that Ms. James will have more than a little difficulty promoting her work at other establishment press outlets, despite the good job the Post's Jackman did writing up her work.
Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.
