COMMENTARY

Implicit Racial Bias and Police Use of Lethal Force:Justifiable Homicide or Potential Discrimination?

James H. Price1 & Erica Payton2

Published online: 30 September 2017# Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2017

Abstract Implicit bias seems to be a universal primitive function of all brains. Policeofficers have been found to have near universal implicit bias against racial and ethnicminorities. This does not mean that discriminatory behavior (explicit bias) has toinevitably follow. Reports of police use of lethal force have found that AfricanAmericans are far more likely to be shot and killed than their numbers in the populationwould predict. The actual number of individuals killed by police is not certain since thereporting of lethal force by police departments is voluntary. Evidence suggests thatappropriate training of police can help reduce any tendency for police officers to exhibitdiscriminatory lethal violence against African Americans. We recommend the follow-ing changes: required reporting of all police shootings and the circumstances surround-ing the shootings, counter training for implicit bias for all police officers, organizationalpolicy and legislative reforms for law enforcement, and more diligent prosecution ofinappropriate use of lethal force by police officers.

Keywords Firearms . Lethal force . Police officers . Implicit bias . Discrimination

Introduction

The ubiquitous presence of telephone video evidence has captured the use and misuseof lethal force by police officers against African Americans and has severely threatenedthe communities’ faith in law enforcement officers. These recent high-profile shootingsof African Americans by police officers (Blegal intervention deaths^) in the USA havegarnered nationwide attention. It was out of the firearm violence and death of Trayvon

J Afr Am St (2017) 21:674–683DOI 10.1007/s12111-017-9383-3

* Erica PaytonEpayton@uncg.edu

1 Department of Public Health, University of Toledo, 2801W Bancroft St., Toledo, OH 43606, USA2 Department of Public Health Education, University of North Carolina at Greensboro, PO Box

26170, Greensboro, NC 27402, USA

Martin, an African American teenager, that the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movementwas born in 2013 (Garcia and Sharif 2015). Black Lives Matter became a nationallyrecognized movement in 2014 following street protests after the firearm deaths of twoAfrican American males, Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO, by a white police officerand the police use of fatal force (suffocation) of Eric Garner in New York City. Asexpected, more African Americans (65%) support the BLM movement than do whites(40%) (Pew Research Center 2016).

There are profound differences between African American and white adults regard-ing their views on racial discrimination. African American adults are more likely thanwhite adults to believe race relations are bad (61 vs. 34%, respectively) and less likelyto believe relations are good (34 vs. 46%, respectively). African Americans are alsomore likely than whites to believe that the police deal with them less fairly than theydeal with whites (84 vs. 50%, respectively) and that the courts also deal with them lessfairly (75 vs. 43%, respectively) (Pew Research Center 2016; Brunson 2007).

Police Use of Lethal Force: Size of the Problem

There is considerable uncertainty regarding the number of deaths from use of lethalforce by police officers. If you use the data available from the National Vital StatisticsSystem, Web-based Inquiry Statistics Query and Reporting System (WISQARS) fromthe Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), you would find that in 2014(the most recent year available), there were 7737 firearm deaths of African Americans(Fig. 1) (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention 2017). Approximately 1.5% of allthe firearm deaths that year were due to police officer shootings (legal intervention).

However, both WISQARS and the Supplemental Homicide Reports of the FederalBureau of Investigation (FBI) have been found to be grossly deficient in the number oflegal intervention death records (Loftin et al. 2003). There are a couple of reasons whylegal intervention deaths are underestimated in the two previous databases. First, theInternational Classification of Disease (ICD) codes used on death certificates do nothave a formal way to indicate that a homicide was due to legal intervention. Secondly,law enforcement agencies are strongly encouraged to report deaths due to policeshootings, but they are under a voluntary system of reporting such deaths (Crosbyand Lyons 2016). A report by Gabrielson et al. (2014) found that Florida policedepartments had failed to file reports on police shootings every year since 1997(Gabrielson et al. 2014). The problem with the aforementioned data sets is that themajority of the 17,000 to 18,000 police departments do not regularly file fatal policeshootings, and some departments only do so on a selective basis. Thus, Table 1 includesdeaths for African Americans and whites from legal interventions using data fromWISQARS for the years 2010 through 2014 (Centers for Disease Control andPrevention 2017). The table also includes the years 2015 and 2016 (partial year) fromdata obtained from the Washington Post newspaper. The large increase in the number ofdeaths for these two years is because of the way the data were obtained. WISQARSdata are from the death certificates filed in the various states’ vital statistics offices andincludes ICD code causes of death reported by attending physicians, medical exam-iners, and coroners who often do not have information on police use of lethal force.Due to the questionable data in the government databases, the Washington Post started

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their own database on January 1, 2015, of every fatal shooting in the USA by a policeofficer while on duty (Tate et al. 2015). They obtained their data by searching localnews reports, law enforcement websites, social media, and by monitoring independentdatabases such as BKilled by Police^ and BFatal Encounters^ (Killed by Police 2017;Fatal Encounters 2017). The grassroots databases are not censored by police depart-ments and have a more thorough description of police shootings and the circumstancesdirectly impacting the shootings. These databases also have police officer-specificinformation which can be used to help track police officers who are repeatedly involvedin shootings. Tracking of specific police officers can help detect rogue police officerswho were fired at one police department and then moved to another location andbecame a police officer there (Bgypsy cop^) (Amnesty International 2017).

Amnesty International (AI), independent of any political ideology, is a nongovern-mental organization with a focus on preventing abuses of human rights and demandingjustice and freedom from discrimination for all. AI reviewed U.S. state laws regardingthe use of lethal force and found the following: BAll 50 states and Washington, D.C. failto comply with international law and standards on the use of lethal force and lawenforcement officers. Nine states and Washington, D.C. have no laws on use of lethalforce by law enforcement officers…Only three states provide that officers should createno Bsubstantial risk^ to bystanders when using lethal force (Delaware, Hawaii and NewJersey)…Only two states provide by statute for training on the use of lethal force(Georgia and Tennessee)^… (Amnesty International 2017). Congress needs to takelegislative action that would ensure that all law enforcement agencies limit their use oflethal force to protect against the threat of death or serious injury. In addition, the

Homicides, 81%

Suicides, 15%

Uninten�onal, 2%

Legal Interven�on,1.50% Undetermined, 0.50%

Fig. 1 Firearm deaths of African Americans, 2014. n = 7737. Source: Centers for Disease Control andPrevention. WISQARS, 2016

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Department of Justice (DOJ) has failed to do its job to collect accurate, national data onpolice use of lethal force. The DOJ has been required to collect and publish nationwidestatistics on police use of lethal force since the passage of the Violent Crime Controland Enforcement Act of 1994. The fault for invalid data regarding legal interventiondeaths can be attributed to a variety of agencies at both the local and national levels.

Occupational Violence of Police Officers

There are about 750,000 to 800,000 full-time state and local police officers andabout 40,000 to 50,000 part-time police officers (Reaves 2008). Police officershave a challenging, difficult, and dangerous job maintaining order, ensuringpublic safety, and enforcing laws. Police have a legal mandate to use force, if itis essential, to obtain the aforementioned objectives. The ultimate use of force,deadly force, requires an Bobjectively reasonable^ imminent deadly threat to thelife of the officer or to other members of society. The perception of anobjectively reasonable threat of death requires a subjective interpretation ofthe circumstances. If a police officer has to draw and fire his or her firearm,the officer is taught to fire at the upper torso or head to damage the centralnervous system or other vital organs to terminate any suspected lethal threatfrom an individual (Gorman et al. 2014). Officers are taught that shooting asuspect in the arm or leg is not an acceptable use of lethal force, especially ifthe suspect can return fire and potentially kill the police officers or anothercitizen. Among all occupations, police officers have the fourth-highest homiciderate (Table 2) (Blair et al. 2016).

In 2015, 50,212 police officers were assaulted, almost 10% of all officers.Officers were more likely to be assaulted on a Friday or Saturday evening, inlarge cities (n = 250,000+), in the Western states, while on a disturbance call(32%) or attempting an arrest (16%), by males who were usually white (50%)or African American (40%) (Federal Bureau of Investigation, Uniform CrimeReport 2016).

Table 1 Firearm deaths from legal interventions by race, 2010–2016

Year African American, N (%) White, N (%) Total, N (%)

2016a 175 (24) 330 (46) 720

2015a 258 (26) 495 (50) 991

2014 108 (23) 334 (72) 464

2013 133 (28) 317 (68) 467

2012 123 (26) 326 (69) 471

2011 122 (27) 310 (68) 454

2010 79 (23) 250 (73) 344

Average % (25) (64)

a These 2 years are from the Washington Post (2016 is a partial year to the beginning of October 2016)

Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. WISQARS, 2016

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Using the National Violent Death Reporting System (NVDRS) for 2003–2013, it was found that police officers who were killed were usually males(94%), white (81 vs. 12% African American), and were killed with firearms(91%) (Blair et al. 2016). The officers were usually killed when responding toa crime in progress (57%), the officer was ambushed (22%), during a trafficstop or in a pursuit of a suspect (20%), or disturbance calls (16%). Mostsuspects were males (84%), average age of 34 years, and were white (39%)or African American (36%).

Police officers come from the general population, and all police officers,regardless of their race/ethnicity, have implicit biases. Yet, the vast majority ofAfrican American deaths due to legal intervention documented on camera and inthe media have involved white police officers. Some of the white police officersmay have been taught (informally and/or formally) that African Americans aremore likely to be violent and to more likely be involved in criminal activities(prejudice). As these individuals enter the police ranks, they may serve in largeurban areas, bringing some of these officers into closer contact with largerpopulations of economically disadvantaged African Americans. These officersmay find, based on sheer population size, they encounter a disproportionatenumber of African Americans involved in illegal activities. The police officersmay learn from peers that a plurality (37%) of all male prisoners are AfricanAmericans (in contrast, 32% are white and 22% are Hispanic) (Carson 2014).They may learn that a disproportionate share of the assailants that assault or killpolice officers are African American. There are also likely to be police officerswho are narcissistic, impulsive, with antisocial tendencies, prone to escalatestressful encounters, and prone to use excessive force (Logan 2016). Thus, for avariety of reasons (i.e., fear, prejudice, ignorance) some police officers may beprone to discriminate against African American males, expecting particular mo-tions by these males as reaching for a weapon. Reaction times by police officers toshoot or not shoot a potential assailant are measured in fractions of seconds. Alltoo often the result is likely to be an unarmed African American male who is shotand killed.

Table 2 Number of police officers killed in the line of duty

Year Number (n)a

2015 123

2014 122

2013 109

2012 131

2011 171

2010 161

Average 136

a n = all forms of death (i.e., shot, car accidents, drownings)

Source: National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund, 2016

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Racial Bias in Shootings by Police

In Table 1, it appears as though the proportion of deaths that are African American in2015 and 2016 are similar to those found in 2010–2014. Thus, the underreporting ofpolice officer shootings seems to be general underreporting and not specifically AfricanAmerican. However, the number of deaths for the only complete year (2015) of theWashington Post data indicates a potential underreporting of African American deathsby about 140% when compared to previous years. In other words, in Fig. 1, lethalinterventions would not be 1.5% but instead would be a little more than 3% of the totalfirearm deaths. Additionally, a new study using the National Violent Death ReportingSystem (NVDRS) which collects data on legal intervention deaths in 17 participatingstates found more than 100% underreporting of such deaths by the FBI SupplementalHomicide Reports and a 71% underreporting of the National Vital Statistics System(WISQARS) (Barber et al. 2016).

Racial Disparities in Homicide by Police Officers

A study of the long-term trends (1960–2010) of male deaths (ages 15–34) at the handsof police officers found that the total deaths during this time frame were 55% white and42% African American, a percentage for African Americans 3.5 times the U.S. AfricanAmerican populations for these years (Krieger et al. 2015). The rate ratio for AfricanAmerican men for death by police officers went from 10.1 in 1969 to 2.6 in 2001.Another analysis of the proportion of citizens killed by police who were AfricanAmerican found the proportion had decreased from 49% of all deaths in 1978 to35% of the deaths in 1998 (Miller 2015). Both of these analyses found favorabletrends, but still, an inordinate number of African American deaths occurred based ontheir numbers in the U.S. population.

Awidely used measure of assessment of implicit attitudes toward African Americansis the Implicit Association Test (IAT) (Greenwald and Krieger 2006). Respondents(police officers) practice distinguishing African American faces on a screen from whitefaces on the screen by pressing a button on the left of a computer key for one of theraces and another key on the right for the other race. Then in the second part of theassessment, faces are projected on the screen in a randomly determined order and thefaces are paired with either a firearm or an object that is not a weapon (i.e., phone,wallet, etc.). The police officers are instructed to shoot individuals who are a threat tothem (have a firearm) by pressing on one of the two computer keys that are labeledBshoot^ or Bdon’t shoot.^ The speed (in milliseconds) at which the police officersconsistently press one or the other keys is a measure of implicit bias. These laboratorystudies have found that both African American and white police officers are faster atshooting an armed African American than an armed white person, and they are morelikely to shoot an unarmed African American than an unarmed white person (Correllet al. 2007; Plant and Peruche 2005; Sadler et al. 2012). In contrast to the previousfindings, a more recent study found that police officers were slower to shoot armedAfrican Americans than armed white subjects (James et al. 2016). Additionally, theseofficers were three times less likely to shoot unarmed African American subjects thanthey were unarmed white subjects. The authors attributed these outcomes as due to

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concerns regarding social and legal consequences that would likely follow the shootingof an African American citizen. It should be noted that the police officers for this studywere from one police agency in Spokane, WA, a town where less than 3% of thepopulation is African American. Thus, the experiences of the police officers in thisstudy raise concerns regarding the external validity of the findings.

In contrast, a study of police shootings between 2003 and 2012 in St. Louis, MO (acommunity where 50% of the population is African American), found that 96% of thecitizens shot at by police officers were male, 93% were African Americans, and one-third of the police shooters were African Americans (Klinger et al. 2015). A total of 37citizens died from police gunfire, and 81% of them were African American. Multivar-iate analyses of the data found that a neighborhood’s socioeconomic status (morepoverty) and racial composition (more African Americans) were each independentlyassociated with its level of firearm violence. However, only the level of firearmviolence was found to have a direct effect on the number of police shootings in aneighborhood in St. Louis. In other words, serious crime led to the use of more deadlyforce by police officers.

In a study of 124 Denver, CO, police officers and a sample of 113 policeofficers from 14 states who volunteered to participate in an IAT type laboratorystudy found that almost 5% of the simulated shootings were incorrect (shot aperson who did not have a firearm or did not shoot someone who had afirearm). The police officers demonstrated a bias in favor of the Bshoot^response (Correll et al. 2007). Additionally, police officers who served indistricts that had a higher concentration of people, a higher rate of violentcrime, and a greater concentration of racial/ethnic minorities had increased biasin their reaction times (faster shoot times—implicit bias). The authors explainedtheir findings as the aforementioned environments possibly reinforcing existingracial stereotypes, causing the officers to see African Americans as more likelyto be violent individuals. However, police who had more extensive training insimulated building searches for suspects were better able to discriminate be-tween armed and unarmed citizens, regardless of the race of the citizen. Thus,these police officers were not significantly more likely to shoot African Amer-ican citizens than they were white citizens. Even though these police officersexhibited implicit racial bias (by the speeds of their shoot/don’t shoot re-sponses) their extensive training overcame that bias (focused more on thepresence or absence of a firearm rather than race of the subject) and did notresult in explicit bias (incorrectly shooting more African Americans thanwhites). It should be noted that an earlier study of 50 police officers fromFlorida found that their officers showed racial bias for the decision to shootAfrican Americans in similar simulated conditions, likely reflecting regionaldifferences in biases between Florida and other geographic areas of the USA(Plant and Peruche 2005).

Finally, a recent study of 17 states that comprise the National Violent DeathReporting System (NVDRS) for 2013 found that 39% of males killed by police officerswere African American, a rate three times their prevalence in society (Crosby andLyons 2016). An examination of these data as rates per 100,000 population indicatesthat the death rate for African Americans was six times the rate for white Americans(0.6/100,000 vs. 0.1/100,000, respectively).

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Conclusions

We offer several recommendations to addressing police violence. First, we recommendrequired universal data collection on police violence rates to a federal agency. Currentgovernment databases that include shootings by police officers are not valid. What isnoticeably absent from all of the data available is more valid data regarding thefollowing: How many people are shot by police officers and killed, injured, or notincluded (missed) in the data? How many people do the police shoot at or kill who areunarmed? What were the circumstances surrounding the various shootings? Untilpolice departments are required to collect and report this type of information to anational database, we will continue to lack adequate data to accurately answer thequestion: do more unarmed African Americans than white Americans get killed bypolice officers?

Second, we recommend that all police officer trainings include trainings specific toimplicit bias. The evidence is robust regarding the ubiquitous implicit bias that exists insociety and, more specifically, in police officers; however, implicit bias in policeofficers does not necessarily mean that they will respond to African Americans withexplicit bias. Addressing police violence requires appropriate training of police officersto help reduce any tendency for police officers to exhibit discriminatory lethal violenceagainst African Americans.

Third, more communities need to implement community review boards regardingpolice actions. These review boards need to be independent of any political party orindividual, diverse in composition, review all police shootings, make policy recom-mendations, and make their findings public (Gabrielson et al. 2014). The review boardsshould be easily available for citizens to report complaints. Review boards need to useand be educated about best police practices to establish criteria for their actions. It isalso paramount to provide a venue for dialogue between community members andpolice officers so that all perspectives are represented and can be used as a guide whendeveloping such policies and criteria.

Our fourth and last recommendation requires legislative and organizational policyreform in law enforcement. Currently, police officers are trained if they shoot it must bewith the intention to kill. Considering the role and responsibility of police officers, it isimportant to acknowledge that the nature of such work may result in justifiablehomicide. However, a lack of uniformity in laws and policies makes it difficult todifferentiate between justifiable legal homicide and homicide that merits criminalprosecution. For example, many states have a law which authorizes and permits apolice officer to use deadly force on any person suspected of a felony crime that fleesfrom apprehension by a police officer. This is commonly known as the Bfleeing felon^rule (Fyfe 1988). It is in these instances when a person has been shot, killed, yet foundto be unarmed that police have received the most public scrutiny. Giving police officersalternatives to deadly force may reduce the number of unarmed African Americanswho are killed by police. In August 2016, legislation was proposed by LouisianaCongressmen, Garret Graves (R. La) and Cedric Richmond (D. La.), to establish anOffice of Non-Lethal Technologies and Techniques within the Department of Justicewhich would provide grant funding to develop new non-lethal strategies (Lyon 2016).Similarly, in additional to legislation, organizational policy can have a major influenceon police behavior regarding the use of lethal force. Police departments with more

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restrictive lethal force policies are less likely to have police officers use lethal forcecompared to police officers that work in departments with more permissive policies(Terrill and Paoline 2016). Hence, in addition to legislative reform, we also recommendorganizational policy changes for police departments that include more restrictive lethalforce policies. Finally, policies and laws that are not enforced are meaningless. Thus, itis essential that prosecutors and courts become more diligent in punishing policeofficers who inappropriately use lethal force to subdue African Americans and otherracial/ethnic minority groups. We believe by adopting the aforementioned recommen-dations, researchers and policy makers will successfully be able to answer a questionthat currently has been left to debate by the public media: How often is the use of lethalforce by police against African Americans justifiable homicide or unjustified murderpredicated by racial/ethnic discrimination?

Funding Information No funding was provided.

Compliance with Ethical Standards

Conflict of Interest The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Ethical Approval This article does not contain any studies with human participants or animals performedby any of the authors.

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