Blacks more feared, but shot less quickly

PUBLIC RELEASE DATE: 2-Sep-2014

Contact: Lois James
Washington State University
WSU 'deadly force' lab finds racial disparities in shootings
Blacks more feared, but shot less quickly

SPOKANE, Wash.—Participants in an innovative Washington State University study of deadly force were more likely to feel threatened in scenarios involving black people. But when it came time to shoot, participants were biased in favor of black suspects, taking longer to pull the trigger against them than against armed white or Hispanic suspects.

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But the last comprehensive look at the racial makeup of justifiable and non-justifiable shootings was a 2001 study (pdf) using more than two decades of U.S. Bureau of Justice data, said James. And while statistics show black suspects are shot at more frequently than white suspects, the 2001 study found black suspects were also as likely to shoot at police as be shot at.

"At the moment, there are no comprehensive statistics on whether the police do inappropriately shoot at black males more than they do at white males," said James. "Although isolated incidents of black males being shot by the police are devastating and well documented, at the aggregate level we need to understand whether the police are shooting black unarmed males more than they are white unarmed males. And at the moment, nobody knows that."

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James' study is a follow-up to one in which she found active police officers, military personnel and the general public took longer to shoot black suspects than white or Hispanic suspects. Participants were also more likely to shoot unarmed white suspects than black or Hispanic ones and more likely to fail to fire at armed black suspects.

"In other words," wrote James and her co-authors, "there was significant bias favoring blacks where decisions to shoot were concerned."

When confronted by an armed white person, participants took an average of 1.37 seconds to fire back. Confronted by an armed black person, they took 1.61 seconds to fire and were less likely to fire in error. The 240-millisecond difference may seem small, but it's enough to be fatal in a shooting.

The recent study analyzed data from electroencephalograph sensors that measured participants' alpha brain waves, which are suppressed in situations that appear threatening.

The participants, 85 percent of whom were white, "demonstrated significantly greater threat responses against black suspects than white or Hispanic suspects," wrote James and her co-authors, University of Missouri-St. Louis criminologist David Klinger and WSU Spokane's Bryan Vila. This, they said, suggests the participants "held subconscious biases associating blacks and threats," which is consistent with previous psychological research on racial stereotypes.

However, the current study only measured the alpha waves of participants drawn from the general public, not law enforcement or the military. Consequently, wrote the authors, "results from this sample are not generalizable to sworn officers."

"However," they added, "there is some evidence from the field to support the proposition that an officer's threat bias could cause him or her to tend to take more time to make decisions to shoot people whom they subconsciously perceived as more threatening because of race or ethnicity. This behavioral 'counter-bias' might be rooted in people's concerns about the social and legal consequences of shooting a member of a historically oppressed racial or ethnic group."

James said she has data on subconscious associations between race and threat from law enforcement subjects, and she awaits funding to analyze whether these biases predict decisions to shoot in the simulator. Like study participants from the general public, she said, "they were still more hesitant to shoot black suspects than white suspects. They took longer and they made fewer errors."

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