Shooting unarmed suspects: A matter of race?

By dmunger on November 30, 2006.

The recent controversial shooting of an unarmed black man in New York has generated terrible grief and perhaps justifiable anger. But if officers honestly believed the man was armed and intended to harm them, weren't they justified in shooting?

Perhaps, but an important additional question is this: were they predisposed to believe he was armed simply because he was black? Consider this quick movie:

It will flash two pictures. One man is armed, the other unarmed. Who do you shoot? I've primed you to think about race, so it's not really a fair test. If you were a police officer who believed his life to be in danger, would you respond in the same way? (You can use the slider to see which man really was armed.)

In 2003, a team led by J. Correll flashed random photos of white and black faces, some superimposed with guns, others with harmless items such as cell phones and wallets. They asked college students to press one key indicating "shoot" the suspect, and another indicating "don't shoot." The students were more likely to mistakenly fire at black faces that were unarmed compared to unarmed white faces.

But what about police officers? With their special training and rules about when to fire, perhaps they will do better. A study by E. Ashby Plant and B. Michelle Peruche tested police officers on a similar task.

They created composite images by superimposing guns and harmless items on the faces of 9 white men and 9 black men. The faces were previously matched for attractiveness. These faces were randomly flashed on a computer screen; each face was shown both with a gun and with a harmless object.

48 mostly white police officers who volunteered to participate in the project were told only that the study was about "decisions to shoot." They had 630 milliseconds after each face was displayed to press the "shoot" or "don't shoot" button on the computer running the test. As the test began, results were the same as with college students: Police officers were more likely to mistakenly shoot black suspects holding harmless items than white suspects holding the same items. They made an average of 3.63 errors over 20 trials when the suspect was black, but only 2.65 errors when the suspect was white.

But an interesting result occurred as the test continued. After another 80 trials, about 40 of which included the key situation of a person holding a harmless object, the disparity between reactions to white and black suspects disappeared. During the second half of the experiment, the average number of errors for black suspects diminished to 2.60, statistically indistinguishable from the rate for white suspects.

Plant and Peruche believe this is a hopeful result, suggesting that police officers can be trained to eliminate bias in their work. They may be right, but I do have one potential objection: police are also "trained" by what they actually see every day as the patrol the streets. Won't this training -- for better or for worse -- trump whatever they learn in a few hours in the training room?

The problem in the Queens shooting of Sean Bell was, like most police incidents, more complex than the scenario presented in this study. An informant may have told the police Bell was armed, and he had attempted to ram the police with his car more than once. Also, the question was less about whether shooting at all was justified, and more about whether so many shots should have been fired. Police may have assumed other officers were justified in firing, and so that's why they fired themselves.

Malcolm Gladwell, in his book Blink, offers another, counterintuitive solution to the problem of accidental police shootings: Police should most often work alone. With the variable of other officers removed from the problem, individuals are more likely to think for themselves. Without the option of "backup," they are less likely to get themselves into dangerous situations in the first place.

Plant, E.A. & Peruche, B.M. (2005). The consequences of race for police officers' responses to criminal suspects. Psychological Science, 16(3), 180-183.

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All right, I'm going to have to disagree here. If we were talking about Barney Fife in Mayberry (or Davidson for that matter), I would be more likely to agree with you that police officers should work alone. However, I will argue that cops in New York should probably not work by themselves. Cops are supposed to "get themselves into dangerous situations." That's why if someone breaks into your house, you call them. Solitary police officers are much more vulnerable - and much less accountable for their own actions. If something bad happens to a good cop, there's no one there to call for help. If you're a bad cop, it's a lot easier for you to get away with what you're doing if there's no one there watching.

"If you're a bad cop, it's a lot easier for you to get away with what you're doing if there's no one there watching."

Ummm.... maybe. Unfortunately, upon reading that sentence, I immediately began recalling several incidents in which groups of armed authority figures committed violent bad deeds and then tried to cover up their behavior as a group.

I remember learning about the concept of "diffusion of responsibility". I recently read something about "plurality of ignorance", and it sounded very similar.

Sometimes the behavior of social systems can be counter-intuitive.

"Cops are supposed to "get themselves into dangerous situations." "

Personally, I'd prefer they did this less often that they do, becuase the situations seem to be more often dangerous for everyone else rather that to the police.

When police go undercover or engage in dangerous operations in plain clothes they seem to become quite aggressive in making absolutely sure no police are hurt or killed, which means that a lot of other people end up getting hurt or killed.

This case seems pretty much symptomatic of police in hazard mode.

I think a lot of the "undertaking of danger" in police work is unnecessary, I think far too much work is done by plain-clothes officers that ought to be done by uniformed officers, and I think far too few precautions are taken to protect citizens from tribalistic, overprotective cops when hazards are undertaken. This has been the case again and again in NYC.

And I don't just mean Diallo, there's also Ousmane Zongo and Alberta Spruill and Vivian Rodriguez and . . . A lot of folks get killed or hurt when the police go after non-existent or relatively innocuous criminals through extremely hazardous means --plain clothes, undercover, at night, etc.

Being a policeman is not nearly as dangerous as a lot of people suppose, and one of the reasons for that is that police are very good at transferring hazard from themselves to the general public, and they seemingly have official sanction to so.

I don't think it's a bad idea to have a close look at the risks police undertake (on our behalf) and how they deal with it. Policing alone may be one option.

I've been commenting to a lot of these police brutality threads mentioning the de-arming of patrolling police as a method to control their behaviour. The reasoning is a lot like yours, Oran. Police are far too ready to jump into situations without exercising a lot of judgment, which they tend to compensate for by using excessive force. They need to use that force, in many cases, to protect their own, but as you point out that strategy ends up costing a lot of innocent lives.

Without a gun or taster right there on his hip, the patrol cop will have to think twice before going in to a dangerous situation. Frankly, that's exactly what I want my cops to be doing: thinking. And it doesn't preclude having access to weapons in situations where they're actually needed, either. But I would argue that fatal weapons aren't needed for the vast majority of police officers the vast majority of the time.

Here's an interesting thought I had. It's not such a good idea to make cops work alone, I don't think. It's much better if they have some degree of backup. And maybe there is a unique situation in America where the British solution of not issuing sidearms to patrol officers doesn't work. (This premise is not one I accept, but let's just run with it.) What if only one officer on a team is issued a weapon? So it's there if needed, but overkill is reduced. As for tactics, have the unarmed officer be the main contact as far as talking to people and physically restraining suspects. That way, there's no danger of a suspect grabbing that cop's gun during a struggle, because the cop in the struggle doesn't have a gun. However, his partner does, and that guy is free to keep an eye out for threats beyond the immediate since he's not involved with the direct interaction.

It's just a suggestion, and I don't know how practical it is, but it's very clear that police brutality is a very real problem that needs to be addressed in a sensible way.

There's very good reason for cops in NYC and elsewhere to be more likely to suspect blacks will commit homicide when challenged by police than whites, just as elsewhere.

According to FBI statistics, blacks are 8x more likely (i.e. per capita) to commit murder than whites.

That's absolutely no reason to convict some individual black man of murder and let a white off. There is lots of individual information available about the crime committed by someone there, and that is obviously all that should be used. Our rules

The information about the queens bridegroom shooting available so far indicates both that someone aparently among the group fleeing had shouted he was getting a gun, and more importantly, the getaway car driven by the black man who was shot dead, was either trying to kill the cop who was blocking his way in front of the car, or had indifference as to whether he did.

In that situation, and believing with reason that men in that car were armed, the late arriving cops seeing an officer being about to be killed opened fire.

Did the fact that it was a group of blacks who'd be in a nortorious illegal drugs and sex involved strip joint that the cops were in the process of getting enough evidence enough to close have any bearing on the cop's split second evaluation of the situation? Yes. Should it have? Yes.

I'm not so happy with the fifty shots. That was overkill. But shooting to incapacity (with a very high risk of killing) the black driver who seemed to be trying to vehicularly kill a cop who was barring his getaway doesn't seem unreasonable on available evidence to me at all.

I sure as hell would never act the way that driver did in that situation.

As usual, when a black guy commits a crime and the white po-lice enforce the law and defend themselves, they're branded the racists scum and the po' innocent brotha gets a pass. What are white cops supposed to do when confronted with a black guy trying to run one of their own down? Roll over and play dead? They did the right thing. The 50 shots as overkill is ridiculous. You get the same outcome if the driver was shot a few times or 50 times: He's dead. The threat has been elimnated. Quit the whining.

Oh, forgot one thing. This guy was armed; with a 2000 lb weapon. Let's not forget that.

They were undercover cops, maybe the black guys thought they were being robbed and were just trying to get out of there. That is the problem when a police force uses large groups of undercover cops. Because none of them were in uniform they had lost their normal protection and ID for the citizens who they are serving.

The cops (in disguise) blew somebody away who was not a criminal, not the cops job. Quit whining yourself Requi34.

"po' innocent brotha gets a pass"

The man is dead. We have no idea whether or not he was innocent, because he wasn't afforded a trial. This is not to say that the police didn't do the right thing, but I think leaping to conclusions -- in either direction -- in this case is premature.

"This guy was armed; with a 2000 lb weapon."

You could say that about anyone in a car; early reports suggest that he was indeed using it as a weapon, but it's also possible that this is a cover-up story used by the officers after they realized what a terrible mistake they made.