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How deeply rooted biases affect how police enforce the law: Otter Voice Meeting Notes

How deeply rooted biases affect how police enforce the law

Christina Lane8min

Speaker 1

00:09

Now Race and Justice in America. Tonight we look at efforts in Oakland, California to address bias where it exists in law enforcement. Special correspondent Jackie Judd has the story.

Speaker 2

00:24

Racial turmoil in the US stemming from encounters between police and black men strikes a chord with Jennifer Eberhardt. The social psychologist at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, has spent her career exploring racial bias and how that plays out in the criminal justice system. Still, it came as a shock to her how embedded biases can be biases we're not even aware of.

Unknown Speaker

00:52

I'm on an airplane with my son and he looks up and he sees a black man and he says, Hey, that guy looks like daddy. And I look at the guy who doesn't look anything like my husband and I noticed he's the only black guy on the plane. Yeah, he says, I hope he doesn't rob the plane. And I said, Why would you say that? And he looked at me, he said, I don't know why I said that. And so we're living with such severe racial stratification that even a five year old can tell us what's supposed to happen next.

Speaker 2

01:30

Everhardt has moved from the research lab to the streets of Oakland, 35 miles north of Palo Alto and a world away to help a troubled Police Department change its ways. Like Ferguson, Cleveland and Staten Island the Oakland Police Department has an uneasy relationship with the minority community it serves.

Speaker 3

01:52

There's times when I'm walking down the street. And I'm accosting

Unknown Speaker

01:56

he didn't even ask me for my name. First thing he said. Are you on probation or parole?

Unknown Speaker

02:00

Only 28% of the population here is black, but the majority of police stop searches and arrest involves black residents. In 2009, an unarmed black man Oscar Grant was shot dead at the Fruitvale BART station. Even though a transit officer killed Grant long simmering resentment towards city officers erupted.

Speaker 4

02:23

This area is known as the Fruitvale area of Oakland.

Speaker 2

02:27

Rashida Grinage became a community organizer after a confrontation in her home 21 years ago, which led to the deaths of her husband who was black, their son and a police officer. This is Rashida today while Grinage says there are some fine officers and progressive commanders in the department. She believes two systems of justice prevail, one for wealthy whites in the hills around Oakland and another for minority residents in the flatlands.

Unknown Speaker

02:59

There is an intuition that officers have about what they can do under which circumstances depending on what neighborhood they're in, depending on what they believe to be the socio economic profile, the resources of that person or that person's family and the police department would probably say because that's where most of crime takes place. But we're basing the assumptions on the group someone belongs to, and that is racial or ethnic profiling.

Unknown Speaker

03:31

Back in 2003, The Oakland Police Department agreed to implement court ordered reforms that grew out of the case in which several officers were accused of framing criminal suspects. To this day leaders are still struggling to improve relations between the police and the public. Assistant Chief Paul Figueroa tasked with finding ways to eliminate racial bias as the court ordered is teamed with Jennifer Eberhardt to help change the entrenched culture.

Speaker 5

04:01

Those are the questions that I get asked quite a bit. Okay, various means well, whats it like in East Oakland compared to West Oakland?

Speaker 6

04:07

One of the big things that I focused on what I call the race crime association or the black crime Association, so it's not surprising really, you know that people might associate a blackness with crime, but it can come up in surprising ways or it can influence us in ways that we don't always recognize or know about.

Speaker 2

04:31

And that so called implicit bias is what Eberhardt is sharing with department supervisors. Among the many studies of bias that she's conducted, one in particular brought a startling discovery. Study participants were shown pictures of black and white men all in very rapid fire succession. Then they were shown fuzzy images of weapons, which slowly became clear.

Unknown Speaker

04:57

The black faces facilitated the detection of the crime objects, whereas the white faces inhibited the detection of those very same crime objects. So for those objects, just been exposed really quickly to these black male faces led them to read less information or fewer frames before they could pick out what those objects were or gone. Yeah, right, exactly. So they needed fewer frames before they said thats a gun or knife. The stereotype of blacks as hostile, dangerous and criminal is one of the strongest stereotypes in American society.

Unknown Speaker

05:31

It is not always easy for department supervisors to hear what Eberhardt has to say. But they listen, and they're trying to sensitize officers, you're not alone in this right. You're not the only one sitting in the classroom thinking wow,you know, you could see the looks on everyone's face that they're going Oh, okay.

Speaker 2

05:47

What kind of pushback do you get from officers when you're asking them to do things having to do with racial sensitivity?

Speaker 5

05:54

Oftentimes, the some of the pushback is as well are we being called a racist? This is what you know, what's all the accusations coming at us? And we're working as hard as we can to bring about safety to the community. And that's part of the conversation.

Unknown Speaker

06:10

agenda is to look at the multiple stop data.

Speaker 2

06:12

Eberhardt and a team of students researchers also are in the midst of analyzing stop data, and importantly, body cam videos from Oakland Police to determine what happens in that crucial and sometimes fraught moment between officer and citizen.

Speaker 6

06:31

You can look at things like pitch you can look at the rate at which people speaking and you can look at loudness and those things can tell you a lot about whether things are heated whether things are going to escalate.

Unknown Speaker

06:45

It is the power of videos that brought tragedies like those in Cleveland and Staten Island to public attention. Everhardt hopes the videos she is examining become tools that lead to better policing.

Speaker 6

06:59

I feel like we're in a moment now where things can really shift. We're in a position to actually know to really understand and to know what happens in these interactions and why it is that sometimes they go awry.

Unknown Speaker

07:13

I really think Jennifer's research is gonna help us identify what issues are there and design some strategies to help us intervene in some circumstances. And in others question our programs and policies that are leaning in some of these outcomes.

Speaker 2

07:29

Assistant Chief Figeuroa, it acknowledges it will take years to transform the department. promises have been made before Lieutenant Loren Armstrong who leads his own racial sensitivity sessions knows the department. He has a lot of convincing to do.

Speaker 7

07:45

We're as close as we've ever been to finally coming in to compliance with all the requirements to negotiate a settlement agreement. Does the community feel it? I don't know if the community feels it because when you look at the climate in the community currently doesn't seem that way.

Unknown Speaker

08:04

I think people are feeling vulnerable in different ways on both sides. I mean, you have community members who feel vulnerable around the police and then there's a vulnerability on the police side, where when something happens in Ferguson or anywhere in the country, police departments all over the nation feel it.

Speaker 8

08:25

You're supposed to be feeling safe because the police are there but it's like whenever I do see and it's like I don't feel as safe. It's kind of like irony.

Speaker 2

08:34

This is Jackie John in Oakland, California for the News Hour.

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