SPD personnel attend cultural training
All Starkville Police Department personnel attended cultural competence, unconscious bias and trauma informed training Thursday and Friday.
The training was presented by Southern Illinois University Political Science Assistant Professor Randy Burnside, an alumnus of Mississippi State University, and covered topics including cultural differences, unconscious biases and results of trauma.
“I think several people have heard of implicit bias or unconscious bias, and people are confused about what it really is and how it really operates,” Burnside said. “What I do is take a simplistic approach so they understand what it is, and one of the things you find out is when you take that approach, when you take it out of academia and take it into a more applied approach, people understand it, and they go, ‘oh. OK, now it makes sense.'”
In his presentation, Burnside defined unconscious biases as social stereotypes about certain groups that individuals form outside their own conscious awareness, resulting in a subtle and often unconscious negative bias towards these groups.
Burnside said officers who are trauma informed are aware of views certain groups may have, based on what they see of police in the media and elsewhere, citing the coverage of incidents involving African-American males and police officers
“Then, when you do interact with them only in a law enforcement capacity, then guess what happens? You're way more likely to get into a situation that escalates.
Burnside said several states, including Illinois passed laws requiring law enforcement personnel to go through the training, or are considering passing similar laws.
“The return is going to improve our relationship with the public,” said Starkville Police Chief Frank Nichols. “It's up to us to un-
derstand why people conduct themselves in different manners, and I think a lot of that is cultural. It's up to us to educate ourselves and find out what's going on in our public that we're servicing.”
Nichols said many officers came out of the police academy with a mindset of treating all people the same, which he said was not correct due to many factors.
“You're not going to treat a 75-yearold person the same way you do a 20-year-old,” Nichols said. “I think this is definitely educating us to understand different age groups, cultures, ethnicities, all of that.”
Nichols specified that the training was not done in response to any incident involving the SPD, but was done in the wake of many high-profile incidents involving police and minorities in the past few years. He added that the department would continue to receive this training at least annually.
The training was funded from the SPD training budget.
“Not talking about it just makes things worse,” said Public Information Officer Brandon Lovelady.