How Racially Biased is our Police Force?

Based on a CNN special report and research done by the Kirkwan Institute on Implicit Bias Review.

Following the shooting of teenager Michael Brown by police officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri, many Americans have been accusing the police force as being biased against minorities, particularly African Americans. However, recent research done by Ohio State University actually suggests the opposite of what many suspect.

Funded in part by the Department of Defense, a team of researchers, tasked with the controversial topic of researching racism in the police force, have put a number of police officers in a realistic simulation, monitoring their heart rates and brain activity when in the face of danger. They had a fake gun and were told to use it when necessary as if it were a real situation. The research is being done in the government's effort to make the legal system more engageable to minorities and able to enforce the law for all.

The results of the experiment were unexpected and fairly shocking. Researchers found that police felt more threatened (based off their heart and brain activity) when the suspect was african american but they were less likely to pull a gun out on the individual because they were subconsciously overcompensating for "their automatically activated negativity" (page 19). They tended to be more positive to minorities than individuals who are generally not considered to be minorities because they were attempting to compensate for their subconscious feelings of bias.