Are cops biased? New NYPD training says everybody is

On a Sunday morning in mid-July, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio marked the second anniversary of Eric Garner’s death at First Central Baptist Church, about a mile from where the black Staten Islander died after an officer attempting to arrest him for allegedly selling untaxed cigarettes placed Garner in a chokehold.

De Blasio told the congregation that the city, like the country, has grown less discriminatory over the past few decades. But issues linger, he said, and the NYPD was working hard to become an institution that engaged in “policing of, by and for the community” through neighborhood policing and training initiatives.

Earlier that day, when asked about statements by Garner’s widow that officials were dragging their feet on holding those involved accountable, de Blasio said that the training would help police identify and overcome biases. “The real issue is preventing these tragedies,” the mayor told a 1010 WINS reporter. “That’s the discussion that’s happening all over America, and I have to say, the NYPD is doing some of the very best work in the country in terms of retraining our officers in how to de-escalate incidents and to avoid the use of force when possible, and into how to recognize that all of us as human beings have bias, have blind spots. The NYPD is systematically retraining the entire police force to recognize those implicit biases, overcome them, and protect everyone including, of course, our officers in the process.”

Implicit bias training hinges on the theory that the brain groups objects – and people – together in an effort to create shortcuts and decrease its workload. And even when people consciously hold egalitarian beliefs, they are often unaware that their mind categorizes people based on their race, religion, gender or other demographic characteristics and, in doing so, views individuals through the prism of stereotypes.

“It’s basically meant to make people – and so in this instance, cops – aware of the fact that they have the potential to be influenced by biases that operate at a relatively spontaneous, automatic, non-conscious level,” explained Destiny Peery, a social psychologist who teaches criminal law at Northwestern University. “And the first and biggest step to dealing with those biases is being aware that it’s possible for you to be influenced by things you don’t realize you’re being influenced by.”

Efforts to help personnel identify their implicit biases and counteract them have made so-called implicit bias training more and more commonplace: The U.S. Department of Justice announced last month it would put through staff through such a program, the federal government's task force on policing recommended the tactic to other law enforcement officials and one industry leader – Lorie Fridell – said she fields at least one call a day from police departments across America and Canada.

In New York, a federal judge noted it may be appropriate for officers to undergo training on the effect of unconscious racial bias while ruling in 2014 that the NYPD’s use of stop-and-frisk violated the rights of New Yorkers and calling for a court-appointed monitor to map out a reform plan. The most recent update from the monitor, dated February 2016, reports that the NYPD recognizes the value of implicit bias training and has retained Tracey Meares, a professor at Yale Law School, and Phillip Atiba Goff, an associate professor of social psychology at UCLA, to help devise the training.

The NYPD did not respond when asked to confirm the consultants had been retained. But Commissioner William Bratton recently said the department will begin going through a new three-day training cycle this September that focuses on de-escalation techniques and racial bias issues, including one day on implicit bias.

Some social psychologists have questioned the efficacy of implicit bias training, but in New York organizations that have been through such training, including the state court system, the Legal Aid Society and the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office, universally offered praise for the program. However, they acknowledged that police reform advocates are right in saying training alone cannot curtail improper behavior motivated by bias or ameliorate tensions between communities of color and cops.

For years, the Judicial State Institute, which handles education and training for the court system, has brought in professors from across the country to lead implicit bias training, according to the institute’s dean, Juanita Bing Newton. She said the education has taken the form of lectures, setting up hypothetical scenarios (for example, would trainees award the same amount of money to a poor, minority litigant in a civil case as they would to a wealthy person?) and offering digital exams that use faces and positive and negative adjectives in an attempt to gauge a preference for any particular demographic. Newton, a middle-aged African-American woman, said she her results showed she had a slight preference for white men, a discovery she noted had hallmarks of what was found during the landmark Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education.

“Dr. Clark’s test on African-American children showed that little black girls had a preference for blonde, white dolls, and that’s a message that they've probably been taught,” she said. “It’s important for us to all work through it in an attempt to better realize the notion of justice for all without regard to race, creed, color, etc.”

Back when the debate about whether the NYPD’s use of stop-and-frisk was discriminatory was simmering, newly elected Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. had the Vera Institute of Justice, a nonprofit criminal justice group, examine his offices’ practices. The institute’s ensuing report found differences in how his staff handled matters based on the defendant’s race. In response, Vance’s office underwent implicit bias training and is now working with consultants to evaluate the offices’ practices and devise ways to mitigate bias at points where it may pop up.

Vance said that, initially, some personnel viewed the training as an indication supervisors thought they were prejudiced. But, after the training, he said that even those skeptics gave positive feedback about the initiative.

“We all have implicit bias, and implicit bias does not equal racism, and that’s where, sometimes, I think people get caught up,” Audrey Moore, chief of the Special Victims Bureau and chief diversity officer in Vance’s office. “We need to be aware of these points where it could be influencing our decision-making.”

Vance said that the training was worth serious consideration from other agencies as well. “The way through the challenges we have in America today with race and criminal justice is to move at them and to work through them, rather to avoid them,” he said. “If you avoid them, ultimately it will be perceived that you either don’t care or you don’t want to know the answer.”

Indeed, when de Blasio began discussing the upcoming training, his comments were criticized by Sergeants Benevolent Association President Ed Mullins, who contended the de Blasio administration was always taking the approach that the police are biased. SBA did not return calls for comment, and and a spokesman for the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, which represents NYPD officers, declined to comment.

But Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams, a former NYPD captain and the founder of 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement Who Care, said that as an officer, he had to remind himself not to view people based on their ethnicity or the area he was patrolling. He said it was important that the NYPD was ready to acknowledge the existence of implicit biases and had abandoned a slogan popular during his NYPD days, “We don’t see color; we see crime.” After the training, Adams said the NYPD should ensure the message resonates by trying to work it into the department’s culture of using a reward system built on promotions and work assignments.

“These recent actions and activities have compelled the city to understand we have to stop living in this mythical universe where people don’t see color,” Adams said. “This training is a final acknowledgement that because you become a police officer does not mean you’ve left the human race and the biases that are associated with being human. … Not only the training is important, but how do we continue to reinforce what is being taught once these police officers hit the street, where the informal training kicks in?”

Research, however, has shown that implicit bias training has its limits, Peery explained. Peery said she’s had a hard time finding out many specifics about the practices used in implicit bias trainings, but that most seem to be relatively brief, one-time sessions focused on making individuals aware that they – and their peers – contend with biases they’re unaware of. She said the only research shown to reduce biases came after participants spent eight weeks with researchers focusing on breaking underlying stereotypes day-in and day-out.

“I have no idea what they’re doing because in 30-plus years of research on this in social psychology, there are not any kind of interventions that have been developed that would allow us to say that we know how to get rid of implicit bias in any kind of individualized way,” Peery said. “The interventions that we do know work, based on research, are things that have more to do with processes and procedures and the way that an institution or system runs.”

For instance, Peery said, having officers fill out reports that prompt them to describe why they stop people would help them notice when they may not be stopping people due to a reasonable suspicion, but based on a bias. She said implicit bias trainings can help propel people over “quite a big hurdle” in understanding they have biases, which can function as a “tiny piece” in a much bigger puzzle of improving policing through several strategies.

Still, the mayor’s tendency to tout the training initiative has some criminal justice advocates, such as Police Reform Organizing Project Director Robert Gangi, worried de Blasio is expecting too much from it.

“The issue isn’t implicit bias, the issue is institutional racism. Broken windows, in the way it’s applied in New York City, is de facto racist,” Gangi said. “The most dramatic example of that is Daniel Pantaleo, who the video for the Eric Garner incident demonstrated applied a chokehold to Eric Garner that led to his death. … Every one of those officers who engaged in that incident – reckless, excessive use of force, ignoring a man’s pleas when he says he can’t breath – they’re all on the police force. And people in the community know that.”