WHEN SHEEP BECOME DEADLY
COMPILATION AND OPINION BY LUCY M WARNER
WWW.VOX.COM
JULY 21, 2016


“The remaining 70 percent could go either way depending on whom they are working with.” Group Think in hierarchical settings would be would be a good subject to look at in this context, as only 15% “do the right thing in all cases and 15% will abuse their authority at every opportunity.” We need to give all police recruits extensive psychological examination before hiring them. If they show the sheep/wolf pack tendencies, they should not be hired for psychiatric reasons. The NYC police officers on September 29, 2013, who joined a rampaging group of motorcyclists in threatening innocent drivers on a highway were displaying the “wolf” characteristics. I just had to cheer for the Asian man who responded in his fear by running one of them down with his car. He was not charged, and some 20 or so of the cyclists were. The authorities did the right thing in that case. I was horrified by the cops being in that group. As policemen they should have been too good, too intelligent, too well individuated and too honest to have done that. For the whole story, go to the following site: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_Stuntz_gang_assault.

Okay. I acknowledge that groupthink is the glue that binds humans together in all causes requiring strong cooperation, and that it’s a basic part of human psychology. Upper level wolves in a pack abusing those on the lower levels simply because they can, sheep and other herd animals all running when the sound of a coyote is heard, chickens pecking one of their group to death, those hideous things enhance the group unity; all illustrate the survival value and therefore the dominance of such a trait, but when it is clearly unfair or otherwise harmful, we – not being lower animals – can train ourselves to refrain from doing that. We can THINK.

That’s where the word evil comes from. It’s not merely a word for sin, it’s the result of certain types of behavior. Whether or not there is heaven or hell, I believe there is evil. It is the result of psychological weakness and instability. The lack of compassion, the tendency to get involved in groupthink to the point of mob violence rather than being able to shout, “Stop!” – those emotional/mental deficits produce evil. I don’t believe those people are “possessed by the devil.” In fact, I think the whole “devil” concept is really the cause of so many people failing to take personal responsibility for what they do in such situations. If we want to pray, we should perhaps pray for wisdom and courage to withstand destructive peer pressure.

Societal characteristics, educational achievement, family dynamics, individuation, native intelligence, empathy, courage, violence or the lack of it, exposure to peaceful philosophies, the willingness to get involved to help a victim, group hysteria, the tendency to think rather than blindly believe, a healthy resistance to group pressure etc. will determine which type we will become. You get the idea. We need more people who are cooperative enough to join a group when action is needed, but individualistic enough to speak up when the group has gone rogue, for instance Jesus when he said to the mob of his fellow Jews, “He who is without sin throw the first stone.” That kind of thing is what I love about Jesus. He was smart, philosophically gentle, committed to goodness and courageous.

The human creature is, at his best, a hero and at his worst no better than a group of hyenas chasing down an unfortunate antelope – no more thought and no more compunction. Physical or psychological differences from the particular group and relative weakness or timidity define who will be the victim. Good leaders can prevent the abuses and criminality that too often ensue. That obvious fact has a number of times led me to state that, in my opinion, given the extreme lack of true Christianity in our society, every small, introverted or slow witted child should be taught a strong self-defense technique that will allow him or her to prevent abuse by aggressive individuals or groups. That is what the Army and Marine Corps are doing when they “build men.”

Modern technology, which includes cell phone cameras and Internet access, are swiftly changing the balance of power between those police who do not happen to be in the virtuous 15% and the unarmed black and brown people who are walking to the local 7-11 to buy Skittles and a cup of tea. Many police aren’t liking that one bit, but others are in favor of the changes. To stipulate to an obvious point of argument, George Zimmerman was not actually a police officer but a “wannabe cop.” He was deeply into the group-synch, however, and responded the way too many officers do when they think they can get away with it. Interestingly he has several times been arrested since that time, once for wife abuse. He’s not a “good guy.”

All this is the backdrop for police brutality and killings, especially of minorities. The groups who fall victim to patrolling police officers are not merely composed of racial minorities, but those with gender/sexual preference differences, intellectual and psychiatric disabilities, and homeless and religious groups as well. It’s been a long time since the Stonewall incident in NYC, but it is etched into the memory of the Liberals and LGBT community in this country. Now Donald Trump is actively stirring up hatred for Muslim people and Hispanic groups, as Hitler did against the Jews. If our police force backs up a radical political agenda, we have a terrible situation which I never thought I would see in this country. I thought our citizenry was simply of a caliber sufficiently high to prevent it. How could we have departed so far from the noble goals which I was taught by the society at large in the 1950s? The KKK was around in the 50s, but not dominant. I’m afraid that now they are beginning to be.

Police departments across the nation and our military are the defense establishment against violence, and should not be the perpetrators of it. How can we select, train, and culturally sensitize our police to protect unloved minorities as well as the majority white/Christian groups? Our Constitution is set up in large part to protect such people from societal abuse, and the police are the front line in that action. When the police fail, the ACLU, citizens’ groups such as BLM, and the DOJ step in. We find ourselves at that point today.

I believe we are actually improving rapidly as a society because we have been "put on notice" by those who work to protect the citizens,; and, I think, time is proving the wisdom and strength of the Bill of Rights. If police who are personally untrainable in the distinction between serving and abusing, can be weeded out of the force entirely that will be good. At this point they are still barely even being disciplined when caught red handed, so the positive forces have to continue to pressurize PDs and city governments around the country to effect fair and equitable changes in police operations.

Let’s start with proper hiring and much better training. I was watching my documentary video collection and saw a city police force being examined on use of force training. A supervisory level officer was being interviewed. He said that they do train officers to “shoot to kill” rather than to stop a suspect from running. Remember how in the old days Roy Rogers would rope his villain around the shoulders and police in chase would shoot the gun out of a perp’s hand? My favorite is when they shot the tires of a fleeing vehicle rather than aiming for the driver. Maybe those things are not always possible, but for an officer to make no attempt to bring about a safer solution to the problem should be sanctioned in some way. At this point that too rarely happens.

As I mentioned above, I do believe in psychiatric testing for all officers, and not the one-page list of questions which on officer stated he was given. I also believe in discussion groups during training, sensitivity training, and at least three or four social services/psychology courses from an accredited college. Police Academy should include psychology, law, hand to hand fighting, and especially personal interaction techniques aimed at lowering the heat on the burner rather than escalating a situation. This business of pumping over a hundred bullets into a car and turning the humans inside into hamburger is pointless and downright cruel. I want the US to improve culturally rather than degenerating. See the several articles below, and the website www.vox.com for more.




http://www.vox.com/2015/5/28/8661977/race-police-officer?utm_campaign=vox&utm_content=feature%3Afixed&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook

I'm a black ex-cop, and this is the real truth about race and policing
by Redditt Hudson on July 7, 2016

Photograph -- A protest in Cleveland, Ohio, after police officer Michael Brelo was acquitted for the shooting deaths of Timothy Russell and Malissa Williams. | Ricky Rhodes, Getty Images
Photograph -- Andrew Burton/Getty Images, A man gestures the shape of a heart in front of police in Baltimore.

Related:
How systemic racism entangles all police officers — even black cops
Why do police so often see unarmed black men as threats?
When is it legal for a cop to kill you?


On any given day, in any police department in the nation, 15 percent of officers will do the right thing no matter what is happening. Fifteen percent of officers will abuse their authority at every opportunity. The remaining 70 percent could go either way depending on whom they are working with.

More on police brutality

That's a theory from my friend K.L. Williams, who has trained thousands of officers around the country in use of force. Based on what I experienced as a black man serving in the St. Louis Police Department for five years, I agree with him. I worked with men and women who became cops for all the right reasons — they really wanted to help make their communities better. And I worked with people like the president of my police academy class, who sent out an email after President Obama won the 2008 election that included the statement, "I can't believe I live in a country full of ni**er lovers!!!!!!!!" He patrolled the streets in St. Louis in a number of black communities with the authority to act under the color of law.

That remaining 70 percent of officers are highly susceptible to the culture in a given department. In the absence of any real effort to challenge department cultures, they become part of the problem. If their command ranks are racist or allow institutional racism to persist, or if a number of officers in their department are racist, they may end up doing terrible things.

It is not only white officers who abuse their authority. The effect of institutional racism is such that no matter what color the officer abusing the citizen is, in the vast majority of those cases of abuse that citizen will be black or brown. That is what is allowed.

And no matter what an officer has done to a black person, that officer can always cover himself in the running narrative of heroism, risk, and sacrifice that is available to a uniformed police officer by virtue of simply reporting for duty. Cleveland police officer Michael Brelo was acquitted of all charges against him in the shooting deaths of Timothy Russell and Malissa Williams, both black and unarmed. Thirteen Cleveland police officers fired 137 shots at them. Brelo, having reloaded at some point during the shooting, fired 49 of the 137 shots. He took his final 15 shots at them after all the other officers stopped firing (122 shots at that point) and, "fearing for his life," he jumped onto the hood of the car and shot 15 times through the windshield.

About that 15 percent of officers who regularly abuse their power: they exert an outsize influence

Not only was this excessive, it was tactically asinine if Brelo believed they were armed and firing. But they weren't armed, and they weren't firing. Judge John O'Donnell acquitted Brelo under the rationale that because he couldn't determine which shots actually killed Russell and Williams, no one is guilty. Let's be clear: this is part of what the Department of Justice means when it describes a "pattern of unconstitutional policing and excessive force."

Nevertheless, many Americans believe that police officers are generally good, noble heroes. A Gallup poll from 2014 asked Americans to rate the honesty and ethical standards of people in various fields: police officers ranked in the top five, just above members of the clergy. The profession — the endeavor — is noble. But this myth about the general goodness of cops obscures the truth of what needs to be done to fix the system. It makes it look like all we need to do is hire good people, rather than fix the entire system. Institutional racism runs throughout our criminal justice system. Its presence in police culture, though often flatly denied by the many police apologists that appear in the media now, has been central to the breakdown in police-community relationships for decades in spite of good people doing police work.

Here's what I wish Americans understood about the men and women who serve in their police departments — and what needs to be done to make the system better for everyone.

1) There are officers who willfully violate the human rights of the people in the communities they serve

As a new officer with the St. Louis in the mid-1990s, I responded to a call for an "officer in need of aid." I was partnered that day with a white female officer. When we got to the scene, it turned out that the officer was fine, and the aid call was canceled. He'd been in a foot pursuit chasing a suspect in an armed robbery and lost him.

The officer I was with asked him if he'd seen where the suspect went. The officer picked a house on the block we were on, and we went to it and knocked on the door. A young man about 18 years old answered the door, partially opening it and peering out at my partner and me. He was standing on crutches. My partner accused him of harboring a suspect. He denied it. He said that this was his family's home and he was home alone.

My partner then forced the door the rest of the way open, grabbed him by his throat, and snatched him out of the house onto the front porch. She took him to the ledge of the porch and, still holding him by the throat, punched him hard in the face and then in the groin. My partner that day snatched an 18-year-old kid off crutches and assaulted him, simply for stating the fact that he was home alone.

I got the officer off of him. But because an aid call had gone out, several other officers had arrived on the scene. One of those officers, who was black, ascended the stairs and asked what was going on. My partner pointed to the young man, still lying on the porch, and said, "That son of a bitch just assaulted me." The black officer then went up to the young man and told him to "get the fuck up, I'm taking you in for assaulting an officer." The young man looked up at the officer and said, "Man ... you see I can't go." His crutches lay not far from him.

The officer picked him up, cuffed him, and slammed him into the house, where he was able to prop himself up by leaning against it. The officer then told him again to get moving to the police car on the street because he was under arrest. The young man told him one last time, in a pleading tone that was somehow angry at the same time, "You see I can't go!" The officer reached down and grabbed both the young man's ankles and yanked up. This caused the young man to strike his head on the porch. The officer then dragged him to the police car. We then searched the house. No one was in it.

These kinds of scenes play themselves out everyday all over our country in black and brown communities. Beyond the many unarmed blacks killed by police, including recently Freddie Gray in Baltimore, other police abuses that don't result in death foment resentment, distrust, and malice toward police in black and brown communities all over the country. Long before Darren Wilson shot and killed unarmed Michael Brown last August, there was a poisonous relationship between the Ferguson, Missouri, department and the community it claimed to serve. For example, in 2009 Henry Davis was stopped unlawfully in Ferguson, taken to the police station, and brutally beaten while in handcuffs. He was then charged for bleeding on the officers' uniforms after they beat him.


2) The bad officers corrupt the departments they work for

About that 15 percent of officers who regularly abuse their power: a major problem is they exert an outsize influence on department culture and find support for their actions from ranking officers and police unions. Chicago is a prime example of this: the city has created a reparations fund for the hundreds of victims who were tortured by former Chicago Police Commander Jon Burge and officers under his command from the 1970s to the early ‘90s.

The victims were electrically shocked, suffocated, and beaten into false confessions that resulted in many of them being convicted and serving time for crimes they didn't commit. One man, Darrell Cannon, spent 24 years in prison for a crime he confessed to but didn't commit. He confessed when officers repeatedly appeared to load a shotgun and after doing so each time put it in his mouth and pulled the trigger. Other men received electric shocks until they confessed.

The torture was systematic, and the culture that allowed for it is systemic. I call your attention to the words "and officers under his command." Police departments are generally a functioning closed community where people know who is doing what. How many officers "under the command" of Commander Burge do you think didn't know what was being done to these men? How many do you think were uncomfortable with the knowledge? Ultimately, though, they were okay with it. And Burge got four years in prison, and now receives his full taxpayer-funded pension.

3) The mainstream media helps sustain the narrative of heroism that even corrupt officers take refuge in

This is critical to understanding why police-community relations in black and brown communities across the country are as bad as they are. In this interview with Fox News, former New York City Police Commissioner Howard Safir never acknowledges the lived experience of thousands and thousands of blacks in New York, Baltimore, Ferguson, or anywhere in the country. In fact, he seems to be completely unaware of it. This allows him to leave viewers with the impression that the recent protests against police brutality are baseless, and that allegations of racism are "totally wrong — just not true." The reality of police abuse is not limited to a number of "very small incidents" that have impacted black people nationwide, but generations of experienced and witnessed abuse.

The media is complicit in this myth-making: notice that the interviewer does not challenge Safir. She doesn't point out, for example, the over $1 billion in settlements the NYPD has paid out over the last decade and a half for the misconduct of its officers. She doesn't reference the numerous accounts of actual black or Hispanic NYPD officers who have been profiled and even assaulted without cause when they were out of uniform by white NYPD officers.

No matter what an officer has done to a black person, that officer can always cover himself in the running narrative of heroism

Instead she leads him with her questions to reference the heroism, selflessness, risk, and sacrifice that are a part of the endeavor that is law enforcement, but very clearly not always characteristic of police work in black and brown communities. The staging for this interview — US flag waving, somber-faced officers — is wash, rinse, and repeat with our national media.

When you take a job as a police officer, you do so voluntarily. You understand the risks associated with the work. But because you signed on to do a dangerous job does not mean you are then allowed to violate the human rights, civil rights, and civil liberties of the people you serve. It's the opposite. You should protect those rights, and when you don't you should be held accountable. That simple statement will be received by police apologists as "anti-cop." It is not.


4) Cameras provide the most objective record of police-citizen encounters available

When Walter Scott was killed by officer Michael Slager in South Carolina last year, the initial police report put Scott in the wrong. It stated that Scott had gone for Slager's Taser, and Slager was in fear for his life. If not for the video recording that later surfaced, the report would have likely been taken by many at face value. Instead we see that Slager shot Scott repeatedly and planted the Taser next to his body after the fact.


Every officer in the country should be wearing a body camera that remains activated throughout any interaction they have with the public while on duty. There is no reasonable expectation of privacy for officers when they are on duty and in service to the public. Citizens must also have the right to record police officers as they carry out their public service, provided that they are at a safe distance, based on the circumstances, and not interfering. Witnessing an interaction does not by itself constitute interference.

5) There are officers around the country who want to address institutional racism

The National Coalition of Law Enforcement Officers for Justice, Reform and Accountability is a new coalition of current and former law enforcement officers from around the nation. Its mission is to fight institutional racism in our criminal justice system and police culture, and to push for accountability for police officers that abuse their power.

Many of its members are already well-established advocates for criminal justice reform in their communities. It's people like former Sergeant De Lacy Davis of New Jersey, who has worked to change police culture for years. It's people like former LAPD Captain John Mutz, who is white, and who is committed to working to build a system where everyone is equally valued. His colleagues from the LAPD —former Sergeant Cheryl Dorsey, now a frequent CNN contributor (providing some much-needed perspective), and former officer Alex Salazar, who worked LAPD's Rampart unit — are a part of this effort. Several NYPD officers, many of whom are founding members of 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement Who Care, the gold standard for black municipal police organizations, are a part of this group. Vernon Wells, Noel Leader, Julian Harper, and Cliff Hollingsworth, to name a few, are serious men with a serious record of standing up for their communities against police abuse. There's also Rochelle Bilal, a former sergeant out of Philadelphia, Sam Costales out of New Mexico, former Federal Marshal Matthew Fogg, and many others.

These men and women are ready to reach out to the thousands of officers around the country who have been looking for a national law enforcement organization that works to remake police culture. The first priority is accountability — punishment — for officers who willfully abuse the rights and bodies of those they are sworn to serve. Training means absolutely nothing if officers don't adhere to it and are not held accountable when they don't. It is key to any meaningful reform.

Police abuse in black and brown communities is generations old. It is nothing new.
Racism is woven into the fabric of our nation. At no time in our history has there been a national consensus that everyone should be equally valued in all areas of life. We are rooted in racism in spite of the better efforts of Americans of all races to change that.

Because of this legacy of racism, police abuse in black and brown communities is generations old. It is nothing new. It has become more visible to mainstream America largely because of the proliferation of personal recording devices, cellphone cameras, video recorders — they're everywhere. We need police officers. We also need them to be held accountable to the communities they serve.




http://www.vox.com/2015/5/7/8562077/police-racism-implicit-bias

How systemic racism entangles all police officers — even black cops
Updated by German Lopez on May 7, 2015, 9:30 a.m. ET @germanrlopez german.lopez@vox.com

Related -- Understanding the racial bias you didn't know you had
Photographs -- Scott Olson/Getty Images, Police detain a black man in Ferguson, Missouri.
Photograph -- Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images, A woman faces off with police officers during the Baltimore riots.


Neill Franklin is a black man. But he'll admit that after decades of working at the Baltimore Police Department and Maryland State Police, he harbored a strong bias against young black men.

Franklin, now executive director of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, which opposes the war on drugs, explained, "When I'd see a young black male in a particular neighborhood, or his pants were sagging a little bit, or he walked a certain way … my first thoughts were, 'Oh, I wonder if he's selling drugs.'"

As the media has increased its scrutiny of police killings of black men, some of the cases have involved black police officers. In the case of Freddie Gray in Baltimore, for example, three of the six police officers charged for Gray's death are black. This has led to some questions about whether racial bias is really at play — can a black cop be racist against his own racial group?

But social psychologists and criminal justice experts say this question fundamentally misunderstands how institutional racism affects everyone, regardless of race. Racial bias isn't necessarily about how a person views himself in terms of race, but how he views others in terms of race, particularly in different roles throughout his everyday life. And systemic racism, which has been part of the US since its founding, can corrupt anyone's view of minorities in America.

In the case of police, all cops are dealing with enormous cultural and systemic forces that build racial bias against minority groups. Even if a black cop doesn't view himself as racist, the way policing is done in the US is racially skewed — by, for example, targeting high-crime neighborhoods that are predominantly black. And these policing tactics can actually create and accentuate personal, subconscious bias by increasing the likelihood that officers will relate blackness with criminality or danger — leading to what psychologists call "implicit bias" against black Americans. Combined, this means the system as a whole as well as individual officers, even black ones, by and large act in ways that are deeply racially skewed.

"The culture of policing is one that's so strong that it can overwhelm individual racial differences," L. Song Richardson, a law professor at the University of California, Irvine, School of Law, said. "People are cops first, and they're their race second."

Police enforce the law in a racially skewed manner

A lot of US police work is inherently racially biased. Cops are told to patrol predominantly poor, crime-ridden neighborhoods that are so segregated that most of the residents are black. And since police are mostly present in these neighborhoods, most of the arrests and actions they take end up impacting a disproportionate numbers of black people.

"When departments concentrate enforcement efforts, for example, in high-crime areas, those areas are likely to be areas with disproportionate numbers of minority residents," David Sklansky, a law professor at Stanford Law School, said. "That means minority residents of the community are getting policed more intensely than people that live in other neighborhoods that have smaller proportion of minority residents and lower crime rates."

The problem is police aren't just deployed in predominantly black neighborhoods; they're also encouraged to arrest and ticket as many people as possible while on the job. Until 2014, a federal grant program financially incentivized local police departments to make as many arrests as possible for drug crimes. Many police departments also use number of arrests as a measure for evaluating individual police officers for raises and promotions. Coupled with deployment in certain areas, these incentives effectively encourage cops to arrest minority residents in large numbers.

"Our criminal justice system and different aspects of our criminal justice system are racist in application," Franklin, the retired police major, said. "Even if there was no intent in the design for racism, we've gotten to a place where it's the result of our policies."

Take, for instance, policing in Chicago. This map from Project Know, a drug addiction resource center, shows drug arrests were concentrated in the Windy City's low-income neighborhoods, which are mostly black, between January and October 2014:

Drugs and Poverty In Chicago

Project Know

The disproportionate enforcement in black neighborhoods helps explain broader disparities across the US justice system. For example, black Americans are much more likely to be arrested for drug crimes, even though they're not significantly more likely to use or sell drugs.

Franklin, echoing findings from a Sentencing Project report from earlier this year, said the reason for higher drug arrests among black people is linked to how people in poorer, urban areas use and sell drugs, which makes it easier for police officers to catch them in the act. "Drug selling and use among whites tends to be more indoors, among friends, word of mouth, and there's generally no violence associated," Franklin said. "But overall, the drug selling and dealing in black communities tends to be in outdoor areas, because of the urban design and the [economic] competition that's involved in a community with blight, poverty, and a lack of jobs."

Drug Use and Arrests

Joe Posner/Vox

Dennis Parker, director of the American Civil Liberties Union's Racial Justice Program, said this type of racially disparate enforcement is what caused so many problems in Ferguson, Missouri, where a scathing Justice Department investigation uncovered a pattern of racial bias in the local police force following the police shooting of Michael Brown.

In Ferguson, cops were pressured by the city government to raise as much revenue as possible by ticketing residents. Since they were most active in neighborhoods that are predominantly black, these residents were targeted at hugely disproportionate rates: Ferguson is about 67 percent African-American, but from 2012 to 2014, 85 percent of people stopped, 90 percent of people who received a citation, and 93 percent of people arrested were black.

"It's not necessarily what's happening with one police officer," Parker said. "There are structural reasons for this happening."

What's worse, Sklansky said this type of disproportionate enforcement can create "a vicious cycle" in which black residents are fearful of police, making them more likely to display discomfort around cops, which in turn makes officers more likely to perceive black residents as suspicious. "Part of the way police patrol is to look for people who look like they're acting suspicious," Sklansky said. "So even a police officer who tries not to be racist can wind up giving more of his attention and having more of his suspicion directed to members of minority groups than to white citizens."

Individual cops are conditioned to discriminate against black people

Of course, racism can and often does show up at the individual level. Some of this may be explicit — like in North Miami Beach, Florida, where police officers used mug shots of black people as target practice. But very often, this type of racism culminates at the implicit level, where people's subconscious biases guide their choices even when they're not fully aware of it.

Over time, police officers are effectively conditioned toward implicit bias. When cops are thrown into situations every day in which black people are viewed as criminal suspects, they begin to identify people's race as an indicator for crime and danger.

"Just by virtue of watching the news every night you learn the unconscious bias, because you will always see young black men being connected to criminality," Richardson of the UC Irvine School of Law said. "Police officers are engaging in proactive policing in urban neighborhoods that may be majority nonwhite. And as a result, they're constantly practicing the association of nonwhite with crime."

But it can get even more complicated, Richardson said, because stops of innocent people can still reinforce implicit bias. "If [a cop] were to frisk someone and find no evidence of criminal activity, what he's likely to say to himself is, 'Oh, well, this guy's guilty, he just got away with it this time,' thereby strengthening the association and affecting his memory of the event later," she said. "In that messed-up way, he actually strengthens his unconscious bias."

"IN MANY WAYS THE COLOR BLUE BECOMES MORE IMPORTANT THAN BLACK AND WHITE"

A review of the research on implicit bias, conducted by researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder and California State University Northridge, found police officers possess this type of subconscious bias, although it's less pronounced than the general public's bias in use-of-force simulations.

Josh Correll, a psychology professor at the University of Colorado Boulder, tested these biases through a video game simulation in which people were tasked with quickly identifying whether virtual suspects possessed a weapon and should, as a result, be shot. The results: subjects of all races were quicker to shoot black suspects compared with white ones.

Correll explained to Vox's Jenée Desmond-Harris, "We think this represents an awareness of a cultural stereotype — not that our participants believe necessarily that black men are more dangerous than white men, but by virtue of movies they watch, music they listen to, etc., they're getting the idea that black male goes with violent. The group and the idea are linked together in their minds whether they agree with that stereotype or not."

It's also possible that being a police officer and integrating into the culture of the job could make a cop, even a black one, racist. Adam Waytz, a social psychologist at Northwestern University's Kellogg of School of Management, pointed to the concept of "de-individuation," which says that people lose their sense of self-awareness while in groups. This changes the self-identity of all police officers, regardless of race. So black cops may think of themselves as members of the police department rather than members of a certain race while on duty, making it easier for them to act in ways that discriminate against members of their own race.

"When you're talking about police interactions, in many ways the color blue becomes more important than black and white," Parker of the ACLU said. "People identify more with their role as a police officer and all of the cultural things that entails more than their race."

There are no perfect solutions to institutional racism

Given how deeply ingrained racism has been in America throughout history, none of these problems will likely go away in the foreseeable future. But there are things police departments can do to diminish the effects of racial biases.

Awareness can go a long way by forcing police officers to consider and try to control their own biases. Waytz pointed to research that found National Basketball Association referees became less racially biased once their propensity to call more fouls on black players were exposed by previous studies and widespread media coverage. This indicates, Waytz said, that racial bias can be diminished through awareness.

But awareness can also backfire. Richardson of the UC Irvine School of Law pointed to what's called "stereotype threat," which can lead people to act out in dangerous ways if they're nervous about reinforcing stereotypes attributed to a group they belong to. Preliminary results from unpublished studies, she said, have found that if a cop is aware of the stereotype that cops are racist, he may get nervous about reinforcing that stereotype during encounters with black suspects — and that increased anxiety may make him more likely to use force.

AWARENESS CAN FORCE COPS TO CONSIDER AND CONTROL THEIR OWN BIASES

As another step, Richardson suggested that police officers may be able to diminish their own implicit biases by taking greater steps to engage and interact with the community in ways that aren't inherently confrontational. If police are exposed to the daily lives of black residents in a very personal way, they may come to realize — particularly at a subconscious level — that they shouldn't associate blackness with crime or danger.

Training could also help diminish some racial biases. But Richardson emphasizes that this training shouldn't just focus on split-second decisions about whether to use force, but rather more slow-taking decisions about whether a police officer should make a stop that could lead to a use-of-force scenario. For example, in the case of Michael Brown in Ferguson, better training may have pushed former police officer Darren Wilson to not stop Brown for a petty crime like jaywalking — and, as a result, avoid the escalating circumstances that led Wilson to shoot Brown to death.

"The time frame that I want to look at is how that interaction began in the first place," Richardson explained. "So if they're about to stop and frisk someone, maybe they should slow down first and ask themselves, 'Would I find this behavior suspicious if the person were a young white man instead of a young black man?'"

"NOTHING SOLVES RACISM COMPLETELY"

Creating more diverse police forces can also help police departments build trust, according to Sklansky of Stanford University. "There's less likely to be an us-and-them attitude between police and the community," he said. "A diverse department can still have problems keeping the trust or even gaining in the first place the trust of minority communities, but it's likely to have fewer problems than a department that's monolithically white or doesn't reflect the demographics of the community."

More broadly, new policies and reforms could help address the problems that lead to systemically skewed enforcement. Policies could be reformed to put less emphasis on arrests for petty crimes, which could help diminish some of the day-to-day harassment black communities experience at the hands of police. And businesses and lawmakers could do more to invest in impoverished neighborhoods to address the socioeconomic issues that make certain places more prone to crime.

But while all of these ideas could all lead to improvements, they most likely won't eliminate all racial biases in police departments.

"Nothing solves racism completely," Sklansky said. "Racism in general is a deeply entrenched problem in all societies, including America's. We've made enormous strides in the United States in confronting that problem in some ways but not in others."

At the center of the Baltimore protests: racial disparities in the criminal justice system

The protests over Freddie Gray's death in Baltimore were part of the "Black Lives Matter" movement that has become prominent since the police shooting of Michael Brown, an unarmed black 18-year-old, in Ferguson, Missouri. Since Brown's death, the rallying call of Black Lives Matter has been pushed in protests over several other police killings — of Eric Garner in New York City, Tamir Rice in Cleveland, and Walter Scott in North Charleston, South Carolina. These deaths and others have fed into the idea in black communities that their own — even their own sons — could be the next victims of police brutality.

An analysis of the available FBI data by Vox's Dara Lind found that US police kill black people at disproportionate rates: black people accounted for 31 percent of police killing victims in 2012, even though they made up just 13 percent of the US population. Although the data is incomplete because it's based on voluntary reports from police agencies around the country, it highlights the vast disparities in how police use force.

Some researchers have suggested that subconscious racial biases are behind the disparities. Studies show officers are quicker to shoot black suspects in video game simulations. Josh Correll, a University of Colorado Boulder psychology professor, who conducted the research, said it's possible the bias could lead to more skewed outcomes in the field. "In the very situation in which [officers] most need their training," he said, "we have some reason to believe that their training will be most likely to fail them."

The racial disparities in the criminal justice system go beyond police use of force. Black people are much more likely to be arrested for drugs, even though they're not more likely to use drugs or sell them. And black inmates make up a disproportionate amount of the prison population.

The disparities have driven many in minority communities to distrust and fear law enforcement — out of concern that they or their sons could be the next victims. For them, the only way to speak out against these perceived injustices is protest — and, for those who feel truly desperate, violence.

Police officers are rarely tried and convicted for use of force

The criminal charges against the police officers involved in Freddie Gray's death are surprising because police are very rarely prosecuted for using deadly force — and not just because the law allows them wide latitude to use force on the job. Sometimes investigations are conducted by the same police department the officer is from — as is the case in Gray's death — which creates a major conflict of interest. Other times, the best evidence comes from eyewitnesses, who can be notoriously unreliable and may be viewed as less trustworthy in the public eye than a police officer.

"There is a tendency to believe an officer over a civilian," David Rudovsky, a civil rights lawyer who co-wrote Prosecuting Misconduct: Law and Litigation, told Vox's Amanda Taub. "And when an officer is on trial, reasonable doubt has a lot of bite. A prosecutor needs a very strong case before a jury will say that somebody who we generally trust to protect us has so seriously crossed the line as to be subject to a conviction."

An analysis from the American Civil Liberties Union of Maryland found that police were charged in less than 2 percent of police-involved killings between 2010 and 2014. In these killings, 69 percent of the victims were black, even though they make up 29 percent of Maryland's population. About 41 percent of the victims were unarmed.

If police are charged, they're very rarely convicted. The National Police Misconduct Reporting Project analyzed 3,238 criminal cases against police officers from April 2009 through December 2010. They found that only 33 percent were convicted, and only 36 percent of officers who were convicted ended up serving prison sentences. Both of those are about half the rate at which members of the public are convicted or incarcerated.

To protesters, holding police accountable with charges and convictions is important not just to punish some officers for wrongdoing — but to send a message to all police departments that brutality and excessive use of force won't be legally tolerated.

But the numbers suggest that it would be a truly rare situation if the officers involved in Gray's arrest were convicted of a crime. And without a conviction, it's likely tensions will remain high and protests will continue.