U.S. police killings linked to racial bias

Ryerson prof’s study finds community attitudes play role in shooting of Black people

Police in the United States are more likely to disproportionately kill Black people in areas where white residents have stronger implicit racial biases, according to a new study by a Ryerson University professor.

Lead author Eric Hehman said this research is initial evidence that racial attitudes in a community play a role in police killings — something that’s long been speculated, but hard to prove due to a lack of data.

The researchers were able to determine this link even without studying police directly, suggesting that racist attitudes are prevalent across communities and not just in police forces.

“In a lot of the media stories, there’s kind of this onus on the police — that they’re responsible or that they’re racist, and that’s why these events are happening,” said Hehman, who has been a psychology professor at Ryerson University for two years.

“I’m not saying that the police don’t have these biases themselves. What I’m saying is it’s not just the police that have these biases.”

Hehman said he’d like to do a similar study in Canada, but there’s a lack of available police data. He’s also missing years of key demographic information from when the Conservative government nixed the mandatory long form census in 2010.

“We’d expect this to be happening in Canada as well, absolutely, whether it’s with Blacks or First Nations,” said Hehman, who said implicit bias has a global impact.

University of Toronto psychology professor Nicholas Rule said that although police should take responsibility for their actions, this research shows a need to look at the broader “climate” of racism in society.

“The police don’t live in a vacuum,” said Rule, who testified about implicit bias at the inquest into Andrew Loku’s death.

Nigel Barriffe, president of the Urban Alliance on Race Relations, said he’s glad to see quantitative research that confirms what has always been “deeply felt” among the African Canadian community.

“Racism is pervasive, not just in the police force but in society in general,” Barriffe said.

He said there needs to be pressure on police, however, because racism in the force can have deadly repercussions, adding it’s critical that police receive anti-racism and anti-oppression training.

The study’s researchers compared lethal force data from different re- gions of the U.S. in 2015 with levels of racial bias in those areas, as well as demographic information.

They measured racial bias using roughly a decade’s worth of data already collected from Project Implicit— a website hosted by Harvard University where people can take “Implicit Association Tests” measuring attitudes and beliefs that they are “either unwilling or unable to report.”

The racial prejudice test measures how quickly and accurately participants pair white and Black faces with positive or negative attributes.

Another test measuring implicit racial stereotypes looked at how strongly participants associated Black faces with weapons.

The study, published Thursday by the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science, found that implicit racial bias among whites was the only factor associated with police disproportionately killing African Americans — demographic factors such as income, segregation or education levels didn’t play a role.

“It’s really just the attitudes of whites in an area that’s driving to what extent Blacks are killed by police,” Hehman said, noting that this relationship was particularly strong in communities that strongly associated Black faces with weapons.

Hehman noted they still don’t know “what’s causing what.” More bias in a region could lead to more police killings, he said, but it’s also possible that more homicides could lead to more community bias.

Research on what’s causing police killings has been difficult until recently, he said, as the U.S. does not have a comprehensive record of people killed by police officers. This study used data from the Guardian’s newspaper the Counted database, which began tracking the number of U.S. police killings in 2015.

Hehman hopes his research encourages better data collection among law enforcement agencies.

“This analysis should have been able to be conducted much more easily and a long time ago,” he said. “I don’t think that either Canada or the U.S. should be relying on independent news agencies to put together databases on their own of these really important outcomes.”

Jessica Flake, from York University, and Jimmy Calanchini, from Albert Ludwigs University of Freiburg (Germany), also conducted the research.

Demographic factors, such as income, segregation or education levels, didn’t play a role in high rates of police killings