{"title":"Disrupting the Effects of Implicit Bias: The Case of Discretion & Policing","authors":"Jack Glaser","doi":"10.1162/daed_a_02053","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Police departments tend to address operational challenges with training approaches, and implicit bias in policing is no exception. However, psychological scientists have found that implicit biases are very difficult to reduce in any lasting, meaningful way. Because they are difficult to change, and nearly impossible for the decision-maker to recognize, training to raise awareness or teach corrective strategies is unlikely to succeed. Recent empirical assessments of implicit bias trainings have shown, at best, no effect on racial disparities in officers' actions in the field. In the absence of effective training, a promising near-term approach for reducing racial disparities in policing is to reduce the frequency of actions most vulnerable to the influence of bias. Specifically, actions that allow relatively high discretion are most likely to be subject to bias-driven errors. Several cases across different policing domains reveal that when discretion is constrained in stop-and-search decisions, the impact of racial bias on searches markedly declines.","PeriodicalId":47980,"journal":{"name":"Daedalus","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.1000,"publicationDate":"2024-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Daedalus","FirstCategoryId":"90","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1162/daed_a_02053","RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"0","JCRName":"HUMANITIES, MULTIDISCIPLINARY","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Abstract Police departments tend to address operational challenges with training approaches, and implicit bias in policing is no exception. However, psychological scientists have found that implicit biases are very difficult to reduce in any lasting, meaningful way. Because they are difficult to change, and nearly impossible for the decision-maker to recognize, training to raise awareness or teach corrective strategies is unlikely to succeed. Recent empirical assessments of implicit bias trainings have shown, at best, no effect on racial disparities in officers' actions in the field. In the absence of effective training, a promising near-term approach for reducing racial disparities in policing is to reduce the frequency of actions most vulnerable to the influence of bias. Specifically, actions that allow relatively high discretion are most likely to be subject to bias-driven errors. Several cases across different policing domains reveal that when discretion is constrained in stop-and-search decisions, the impact of racial bias on searches markedly declines.
期刊介绍:
Daedalus was founded in 1955 as the Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. It draws on the enormous intellectual capacity of the American Academy, whose members are among the nation"s most prominent thinkers in the arts, sciences, and humanities. Each issue addresses a theme with authoritative essays on topics such as judicial independence, reflecting on the humanities, the global nuclear future, the challenge of mass incarceration, the future of news, the economy, the military, and race.