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IMPLICIT BIAS AND POLICE USE OF FORCE

8/28/2020

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A few years ago, several dozen young men gathered on the steps of the courthouse in Baraboo, Wisconsin, to take pictures before their high-school prom. It is not clear what was going through each of their heads—though one could guess—when most of them extended their right arms, mimicking the Nazi salute as a parent snapped a picture. The students dropped their arms and went to prom.  The head of the Baraboo School District issued a public apology and condemned the photograph.  https://www.jsonline.com/story/news/education/2018/11/14/nazi-salute-photo-baraboo-school-chief-issues-apology/2006409002/  Two years before the picture was taken, students filed 12 harassment complaints with the Baraboo district during the 2016-2017 school year, 11 of which were based on the victims' race.  Keegan Kyle and Eric Litke, Before Nazi salute picture, Baraboo schools saw a rise in racial complaints, Appleton Post-Crescent Nov. 20, 2018, https://www.postcrescent.com/story/news/2018/11/20/before-nazi-salute-picture-baraboo-schools-racial-complaints-rise/2016640002/

Despite the racially based harassment complaints, white students nonetheless stated that they had not noticed any problem with the culture at the school. White students also expressed surprise and confusion about why the picture was taken in the first place.  Another white student excused the conduct saying while the gesture was upsetting it was just a joke.  Susan Endres and Ben Bromley, Parents address school board as Nazi salutes in Baraboo High School prom photo spark outrage online Baraboo News Republic, WISC NEWS Nov. 13, 2018, https://www.wiscnews.com/baraboonewsrepublic/news/local/parents-address-school-board-as-nazi-salutes-in-baraboo-high-school-prom-photo-spark-outrage/article_3224ea4a-7423-5fc1-b2ca-20159f7129e5.html  Various parents suggested education would be the answer to help students understand the gravity of their actions and the symbolism in which they partook.  Id.

As the Baraboo parent suggested, we need to educate ourselves and make ourselves aware of our hidden biases that we have so that we recognize them and how they affect our thinking.  Just as the white students expressed surprise and confusion about the picture showing fellow classmates doing a Nazi salute, we may be surprised by our own hidden biases in this case.  If you are curious about your own biases, test yourself for hidden biases at the Implicit Association Test. https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/takeatest.html  The test measures racial prejudices that we cannot consciously control. I have taken it three times now.  My hidden bias, while present, has come in significantly below the average for white people like me.

IMPLICIT BIAS
People are not born with hidden biases or racial prejudices. We may never even have been “taught” them.  Rather, prejudice draws on many of the same tools that help our minds figure out what is good and what is bad.  In evolutionary terms, it is efficient to quickly classify a grizzly bear as “dangerous.”  The trouble comes when the brain uses similar processes to form negative views about groups of people.  As Justice Brennan explained, “racial bias inclines one to disbelieve and disfavor the object of the prejudice, and it is similarly incontestable that subconscious, as well as express, racial fears and hatred operate to deny fairness to the person despised.”  Turner v. Murray, 476 U.S. 28, 42 (1986) (Brennan J., dissenting). 

Our tendency to link individuals to the stereotypes associated with their group(s) is automatic and occurs outside of conscious awareness.  These are “blink responses”; they reflect our “thinking without thinking.”  Implicit bias is “an automatic and unconscious process, (and) people who engage in this unthinking discrimination are not aware of the fact that they do it.”  Implicit biases can manifest even in people who, at the conscious level, reject prejudice and stereotyping.  Greenwald, A. G., Mcghee, D. E., & Schwartz, J. L. K. (1998). Measuring Individual Differences in Implicit Cognition: The Implicit Association Test. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 74(6), 1464–80 (p. 1474), https://www.isu.edu/media/libraries/aaeo/drc/brown-bag-resources/Measuring-Individual-Differences-in-Implicit-Cognition---The-IAT---Greenwald-et-al.pdf;  

Understanding implicit bias for police officers is recognizing that “officers might have biases that influence their behavior, judgments, and decisions, even if they are not explicitly or overtly biased against a particular group of people.”  Renee J. Mitchell and Lois James, “Addressing the Elephant in the Room: The Need to Evaluate Implicit Bias Training Effectiveness for Improving Fairness in Police Officer Decision-Making,” Police Chief Online, November 28, 2018, https://www.policechiefmagazine.org/addressing-the-elephant-in-the-room/  “Police officers are likely to be just as susceptible to implicit bias as any other professional group—perhaps more so, given the nature of their work, which often focuses on negative aspects of human behavior.”  Id.

Police Chief Magazine, the publication for the International Association of Chiefs of Police, has stated:
Perhaps the most salient example of implicit bias among police comes from widespread allegations of racially motivated policing. Cases in which police officers shoot unarmed black citizens typically result in public outcry, with the belief that officers were driven by racial bias. Officers, on the other hand, tend to assert that they were, in fact, responding to threat cues that they perceived. Interestingly, both groups might be correct. An illustrative example comes from George Fachner and Steven Carter’s threat perception failures (TPF).  These researchers showed that implicit bias can influence an officer’s decision to shoot or not to shoot, by influencing the officer’s perception of reality. In this case, an officer incorrectly perceives that the suspect poses a deadly threat, due to the misperception of an object (such as a cellphone) or an action (such as reaching for a cellphone). When these researchers analyzed officer-involved shootings by the Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Police Department (PPD), they found that TPF more frequently explained the shootings of unarmed African Americans compared to unarmed whites, speculating that officers may be subconsciously “on guard” with African American suspects.  Renee J. Mitchell and Lois James, “Addressing the Elephant in the Room: The Need to Evaluate Implicit Bias Training Effectiveness for Improving Fairness in Police Officer Decision-Making,” Police Chief Online, supra.  See, George Fachner and Steven Carter, COLLABORATIVE REFORM INITIATIVE An Assessment of Deadly Force in the Philadelphia Police Department (Office of Community Oriented Policing Services, U.S. Department of Justice 2015), https://www.phillypolice.com/assets/directives/cops-w0753-pub.pdf

Various studies have examined the Black-crime implicit bias.  The studies found that subjects shot an armed male more quickly if he was Black than if he was White. Conversely, they more quickly decided not to shoot an unarmed White than an unarmed Black. The most common errors were shooting an unarmed Black man and not shooting an armed White man.  L.A. Fridel, The Science of Implicit Bias and Implications for Policing, in Producing Bias-Free Policing A Science-Based Approach, Chap. 2, p. 7-30 (Springer Briefs in Translational Criminology 2017), https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9783319331737  Black suspects are more than twice as likely to be killed by police than are persons of other racial or ethnic groups.  Fagan and Campbell, Race and reasonableness in police killings, 100 Boston Univ. L. Rev. 951 (2020), https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3660&context=faculty_scholarship.  Individuals misidentified tools as guns more often when primed with a Black face than with a White face.  Payne, Prejudice and perception: The role of automatic and controlled processes in misperceiving a weapon. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 81(2), 181–192 (2001), http://web.missouri.edu/~segerti/capstone/PayneBias.pdf.

FBI Director James Comey encouraged police departments to confront their own implicit biases, “Much research points to the widespread existence of unconscious bias. Many people in our white-majority culture have unconscious racial biases and react differently to a white face than a black face.”  Director James B. Comey Federal Bureau of Investigation, "Hard Truths: Law Enforcement and Race" Georgetown University Washington, D.C. February 12, 2015, official transcript, https://www.fbi.gov/news/speeches/hard-truths-law-enforcement-and-race

EFFECTS ON THE INDIVIDUAL POLICE OFFICER WHEN CONFRONTED WITH A USE OF FORCE SITUATION
The dangers of a police officer shooting to bystanders is known.  When police fired 16 times at an armed man, they hit nine bystanders and left 10 bullet holes in the suspect.  This data shows what any police officer who has ever been involved in a shooting can tell you–firing accurately in a stressful situation is extremely hard.  Amanda Ripley, Your Brain in a Shootout: Guns, Fear and Flawed Instincts, Time January 16, 2013, https://swampland.time.com/2013/01/16/your-brain-in-a-shootout-guns-fear-and-flawed-instincts/  This is true whether the officer is an experienced officer or officers with minimal experience.  Lewinski et al., The real risks during deadly police shootouts: accuracy of the naive shooter, 17 Intl. Jrl. of Police Science & Mgmnt 117 (2015), https://pdf4pro.com/view/the-real-risks-during-deadly-police-shootouts-22ead5.html 

In most cases, officers involved in shootings experience a kaleidoscope of sensory distortions including tunnel vision and a loss of hearing. Afterward, they are sometimes surprised to learn that they have fired their weapons at all.  Rostker, Hanser, Hix, Jensen, Morral, Ridgeway, Schell, Evaluation of the New York City Police Department Firearm Training and Firearm-Discharge Review Process (RAND Center on Quality Policing 2008), https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/monographs/2008/RAND_MG717.pdf

Under sudden attack, the brain does not work the way we think it will.  As happens for most people in life-or-death situations, an officer’s brain manipulate’s his perception of time, slowing down the motion.  Id.  For instance, one experienced officer in the middle of a gunfight raised his hands to shoot his weapon at an attacker only to realize he had dropped his weapon.  Id.  Without being aware of it, the officer had dropped his gun in the hallway when he reached over to help another wounded officer. In moments of extreme stress, the brain does not allow for contemplation; it does not process new information the way it normally does. The more advanced parts of the brain that handle decisionmaking go off-line, unable to intervene until the immediate fear has diminished.  Id.  “Race stereotypes can lead people to claim to see a weapon where there is none. Split-second decisions magnify the bias by limiting people’s ability to control responses. Such a bias could have important consequences for decision making by police officers and other authorities interacting with racial minorities. The bias requires no intentional racial animus, occurring even for those who are actively trying to avoid it.”  Payne, Weapon Bias: Split-Second Decisions and Unintended Stereotyping, 15 Current Directions in Psychological Science 287 (2006), https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.1467-8721.2006.00454.x
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Racial bias can influence the “gut feelings” and conclusions about the amount force police perceive is needed in a situation.  Awareness of these biases will help officers, like anyone else, fight them.  See, Anthony Greenwald & Linda Krieger, Implicit Bias: Scientific Foundations, 94 Calif. L. Rev. 945, 948-51 (2006), https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/c7b0/f3376d8e153cd7725de479447aa4c113ec8b.pdf?
_ga=2.256171468.639383428.1594653929-1128881295.1594653929
  Research suggests that once we understand the psychological pathways that lead to prejudice, we just might be able to train our brains to go in the opposite direction.  Janice Gassam Asare, Does Unconscious Bias Training Really Work? Forbes (Oct 29, 2018) ("The first step towards impacting unconscious bias is awareness.") https://www.forbes.com/sites/janicegassam/2018/10/29/does-unconscious-bias-training-really-work/#4141efb0b8a2

the Wisconsin Office of Justice Assistance, a division of the Wisconsin Department of Administration, has stated without qualification that “[r]acial disparities permeate the entire criminal justice continuum, in the number of arrests, cases charged, sentences and probation and parole revocations.”  Wisconsin Office of Justice Assistance, Racial Disparities, http://oja.wi.gov/section.asp?linkid=1344&locid=97.  Since racial disparities permeate the entire criminal justice continuum, it would be foolish to argue racial disparities do not extend to how police use force: “Black men tend to be stereotyped as threatening and, as a result, may be disproportionately targeted by police even when unarmed.”  Wilson, J. P., Hugenberg, K., & Rule, N. O. Racial bias in judgments of physical size and formidability: From size to threat. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 113(1), 59–80 (2017), https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2017-11085-001; Frank Edwards, Hedwig Lee, and Michael Esposito, Risk of being killed by police use of force in the United States by age, race–ethnicity, and sex PNAS (2019) (“people of color face a higher likelihood of being killed by police than do white men and women.”) https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/116/34/16793.full.pdf; Hehman, Flake, and Calanchini, Disproportionate Use of Lethal Force in Policing Is Associated With Regional Racial Biases of Residents, Social Psychological and Personality Science Volume 9 Issue 4, May 2018 (only the implicit racial prejudices and stereotypes of White residents, beyond major demographic covariates, are associated with disproportionally more use of lethal force with Blacks relative to regional base rates of Blacks in the population.) https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1948550617711229; Using data on over 2 million police stops in New York City from 2007 to 2014, findings show that Black and White civilians experience fundamentally different interactions with police. Black civilians are particularly more likely to experience potential lethal force when police uncover criminal activity and this disparity is greatest for black youth compared to white youth. Rory Kramer and Brianna Remster, Stop, Frisk, and Assault? Racial Disparities in Police Use of Force During Investigatory Stops, Law and Society Review Vol. 52, Issue 4 Dec. 2018, p. 960-93, https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/lasr.12366.  


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CRIME SHOULD NOT PAY, BUT IT ALSO SHOULD NOT BE TOO COSTLY TO TAXPAYERS

8/27/2020

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The Conference of Chief Justices adopted a resolution which states that “despite increasing use of incarceration and greater spending on corrections, recidivism rates have continued to escalate” so that the “the public desires and deserves criminal justice systems that promote public safety while making effective use of taxpayer dollars.” Resolution 12 In Support of Sentencing Practices that Promote Public Safety and Reduce Recidivism, CONFERENCE OF CHIEF JUSTICES CONFERENCE OF STATE COURT ADMINISTRATORS, https://ccj.ncsc.org/__data/assets/pdf_file/0023/23657/08012007-support-sentencing-practices-promote-public-safety-reduce-recidivism.pdf.  

Despite this resolution which courts were urged to follow, Wisconsin sentencing courts continue to rely too heavily on incarceration to solve its crime problem at great cost to Wisconsin taxpayers.  Wisconsin incarcerates 716 people for every 100,000 of its residents: more than countries like Cuba (510) and Rwanda (492).   Even the Russian Federation incarcerates less of its residents per capita than Wisconsin at 475.  States of Incarceration: The Global Context (Prison Policy Initiative 2014), http://www.prisonpolicy.org/global/.  Sadly, a 2019 analysis of state prison populations by the Legislative Audit Bureau showed the state's adult prison inmate population increased by 7.9 percent between 2011 and 2018, from nearly 22,000 people to about 23,600.  "When compared with six other Midwestern states," the report's authors wrote, "only Wisconsin experienced an increase in its inmate population from 2009 to 2018."  Adult Corrections Expenditures, State of Wisconsin, Report 19-4 (May 2019), p. 4, http://legis.wisconsin.gov/lab/media/2845/19-4full.pdf  Emphasis added.  As of 2015, Outagamie County was one of the top ten of 72 counties contributing to Wisconsin’s prison population explosion.  Incarceration trends in Wisconsin (Vera Institute of Justice December 2019), https://www.vera.org/downloads/pdfdownloads/state-incarceration-trends-wisconsin.pdf










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How much does imprisonment cost Wisconsin’s taxpayers?  Total operating expenditures for adult correctional institutions increased from an estimated $909.3 million in FY 2013-14 to $933.9 million in FY 2017-18, or by 2.7 percent. This cost was mostly funded by general purpose revenue (GPR) at more than 93 percent of total expenditures in both years.  Id.  To provide a more complete accounting of the costs of imprisonment, researchers from the Vera Institute of Justice collected and analyzed data from forty states (including Wisconsin).  Their findings were published in the Federal Sentencing Reporter at 25 Fed. Sent. Rep. 68 (2012).  In calculating average cost per inmate, the Vera researchers found Wisconsin imprisonment cost the state’s taxpayers $37,994 a year.  Unlike Wisconsin, other states have found a way to trim their prison budgets.  For instance, Wisconsin spent over one billion dollars on corrections in 2010, in comparison with Minnesota’s $439 million.  Marquette Law Professor Michael O’Hear, “Thoughts on Imprisonment in Wisconsin: Past, Present, and Future,” Life Sentences Blog, http://www.lifesentencesblog.com/?p=6700#_ftn1 (“Thoughts on Imprisonment in Wisconsin”).
 “If Wisconsin had Minnesota’s imprisonment rate, hundreds of millions of dollars would be freed up for other valuable purposes, such as tax relief, education, and infrastructure improvement.  Savings could also be directed to other purposes that might reduce crime and violence more effectively than institutional warehousing, such as increased funding for community policing, problem-solving courts, and treatment for addiction and chronic mental illness.”  Id.  
 
Unfortunately, evidence shows that while spending on education, treatment, and other services that help people improve their well-being have been shown to be a more effective public safety strategy than locking people up, between 2005 and 2009 state spending on corrections grew faster than any other category, including education, Medicaid and public assistance such as Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), a program providing temporary financial assistance for pregnant women and families.  Sarah Lyons and Nastassia Walsh, “Money Well Spent: How Positive Social Investments Will Reduce Incarceration Rates, Improve Public Safety, and Promote the Well-Being of Communities,” Justice Policy Institute (2010), http://www.justicepolicy.org/research/1904  Investments in job training, employment and education have been associated with heightened public safety as well as community well being. Id.  In addition, people who are incarcerated are more likely to report having had extended periods of unemployment and lower wages than people in the general population.  Id. 
 
Incarceration also imposes significant costs beyond the criminal system to society and families.  The Pew Charitable Trusts, Collateral Costs: Incarceration’s Effect on Economic Mobility (Washington, DC: Pew Charitable Trusts, 2010), https://perma.cc/XHL8-KHVA.  For instance, imprisonment encourages unemployment which leads to crime.  Wells, Lenard, Ph.D., “The effects of a criminal history and race on the willingness to hire ex -offenders in the labor market,” (Cardinal Stritch University 2008) publication number 3313857 http://gradworks.umi.com/33/13/3313857.html.  See also, Devah Pager, Marked: Race, Crime, and Finding Work in an Era of Mass Incarceration (University of Chicago Press 2007) (based on her work with the Transitional Housing Authority in Madison, WI, the author finds the criminal system is not a peripheral institution in the lives of young black disadvantaged men who are asked more often by job interviewers if they have a criminal record than white applicants). 
 
Requiring cost effective criminal sentencing is not some “pie in the sky” liberal babble.  A Pew Report quotes a number of US business leaders across various states “adding their voices to calls for more cost-effective ways to protect public safety and hold offenders accountable, while also providing the education and infrastructure they need for a thriving economy.”  Right Sizing Prisons: Business Leaders Make the Case for Corrections Reform (Pew Center on the States 2010), https://www.pewtrusts.org/-/media/legacy/uploadedfiles/pcs_assets/2010/rightsizing20prisonspdf.pdf  As Dave Adkisson, Chairman of the Board, American Chamber of Commerce Executives, put it, “I began talking with other business leaders about whether we were spending our corrections dollars effectively…. we were alarmed that money was being siphoned off from education and channeled into the growing cost of corrections, and we knew we needed to address this issue.”  James R. Holcomb Vice President for Business Advocacy and Associate General Counsel, Michigan Chamber of Commerce added “every dollar spent on incarceration is a dollar that is unavailable for tax relief or other economic revitalization efforts.”

The clear message to a sentencing court, as put by Dr. Glenn C. Loury, Merton P. Stolz Professor of the Social Sciences, Department of Economics, Brown University, is that “[t]he amount of public safety ‘purchased’ for society by using prisons on the scale that we are now using them does not justify the cost incurred to hold prisoner behind bars, let alone the cost we're imposing on prisoners and the communities from which they come.”  Responsive Testimony to Questions from Representative Robert C. ``Bobby'' Scott before the Joint Economic Committee Hearing of the 110th Congress, First Session (October 4, 2007) , p.54, https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CHRG-110shrg39645/html/CHRG-110shrg39645.htm


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Racial disparities do extend to how police use force

8/24/2020

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I am amazed with the police shooting in Kenosha of a black man that some people try to maintain there are no racial disparities in how police use force.  Eliott C. McLaughlin and Alta Spells, CNN "Wisconsin police shoot Black man as children watch from a vehicle, attorney says" August 24, 2020.  https://www.cnn.com/2020/08/24/us/kenosha-police-shooting-jacob-blake/index.html  The Wisconsin Department of Administration, has stated without qualification that “[r]acial disparities permeate the entire criminal justice continuum, in the number of arrests, cases charged, sentences and probation and parole revocations.”  Wisconsin Office of Justice Assistance, Racial Disparities, http://oja.wi.gov/section.asp?linkid=1344&locid=97. 

Since racial disparities permeate the entire criminal justice continuum, it would be foolish to argue racial disparities do not extend to how police use force: “Black men tend to be stereotyped as threatening and, as a result, may be disproportionately targeted by police even when unarmed.”  Wilson, J. P., Hugenberg, K., & Rule, N. O. Racial bias in judgments of physical size and formidability: From size to threat. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 113(1), 59–80 (2017), https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2017-11085-001; Hehman, Flake, and Calanchini, Disproportionate Use of Lethal Force in Policing Is Associated With Regional Racial Biases of Residents, Social Psychological and Personality Science Volume 9 Issue 4, May 2018 (only the implicit racial prejudices and stereotypes of White residents, beyond major demographic covariates, are associated with disproportionally more use of lethal force with Blacks relative to regional base rates of Blacks in the population.) https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1948550617711229; Using data on over 2 million police stops in New York City from 2007 to 2014, findings show that Black and White civilians experience fundamentally different interactions with police. Black civilians are particularly more likely to experience potential lethal force when police uncover criminal activity and this disparity is greatest for black youth compared to white youth. Rory Kramer and Brianna Remster, Stop, Frisk, and Assault? Racial Disparities in Police Use of Force During Investigatory Stops, Law and Society Review Vol. 52, Issue 4 Dec. 2018, p. 960-93, https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/lasr.12366.  

There are racial disparities in arrests and use of force:










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Disparities in police stops, in prosecutorial charging, and in bail and sentencing decisions reveal that implicit racial bias has penetrated all corners of the criminal justice system.  Race and Punishment: Racial perceptions of crime and support for punitive policies (The Sentencing Project 2014) p.4, https://www.sentencingproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/Race-and-Punishment.pdf. 
 
As summarized in Helen A. Neville (Editor), Miguel E. Gallardo (Editor), Derald Wing Sue (Editor), The Myth of Racial Color Blindness: Manifestations, Dynamics, and Impact Copyright © 2016 by the American Psychological Association:

The 2014 killing of Michael Brown symbolizes these later abuses. On August 9 of that year, Michael Brown, an unarmed African American teenager, was shot and killed by a White officer, Darren Wilson, in Ferguson, Missouri.  The African American community erupted in protest after the shooting.  The subsequent disrespectful and shameful handling of the situation: Brown’s lifeless body was left by law enforcement personnel in the street for more than 4 hours, and community members reported that the police desecrated the impromptu memorial site. Police responded to the mostly peaceful demonstrators in riot gear and with military-grade weapons. They even patrolled the neighborhood in armored vehicles and brandished tear gas, a chemical weapon that has been banned in war by most nations, including the United States, since the Chemical Weapons Convention of 1993 (Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, 1993). Cities throughout the nation protested again after the acquittal of Wilson by a grand jury; for some, the acquittal symbolized the mounting injustice of the killing of unarmed Black and Latino people by police officers that have gone unpunished. These incidents provided impetus for the development of the Black Lives Matter movement and other calls to action to affirm the humanity of Black people in the face of racial oppression;
Early in 2015, the U.S. Department of Justice (2015) released an investigative report on the Ferguson Police Department, which described the prevalence of racial bias on the force:

Ferguson’s approach to law enforcement both reflects and reinforces racial bias, including stereotyping. The harms of Ferguson’s police and court practices are borne disproportionately by African Americans, and there is evidence that this is due in part to intentional discrimination on the basis of race. (p. 5)
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The killings of unarmed boys and men of color by police around the United States, including Eric Garner (Bronx, New York), Michael Brown (Ferguson, Missouri), Ezell Ford (Los Angeles, California), and Darrien Hunt (Salt Lake City, Utah)—all of which occurred in the summer of 2014—speak to potential police misconduct directed at communities of color. These were followed by two more deaths in early 2015—those of Walter Scott (Charleston, South Carolina) and Freddie Gray (Baltimore, Maryland); in both cases, police were charged with murder. Although the killing of unarmed girls and women of color by police are less frequent and does not receive attention, they occur and further highlight police misconduct. For example, within a span of 3 months, Tanisha Anderson (37) was killed by Cleveland police in November 2014 and Jessica Hernandez (17) was killed by Denver police in February 2015; both killings were ruled homicides

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    These are reflections I have had about our criminal justice system.  Some of it may make sense, some of it might not.

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