The consequences of race for police officers’ responses to criminal suspects

ABSTRACT—The current work examined police officers’ decisions to shoot Black and White criminal suspects in a computer simulation. Responses to the simulation re-vealed that upon initial exposure to the program, the of-ficers were more likely to mistakenly shoot unarmed Black compared with unarmed White suspects. However, after extensive training with the program, in which the race of the suspect was unrelated to the presence of a weapon, the officers were able to eliminate this bias. These findings are discussed in terms of their implications for the elimination of racial biases and the training of police officers. When in the field, police officers face difficult split-second decisions in which they must determine whether criminal sus-pects are armed and constitute an imminent threat. Tragic events, such as the shooting of Marquise Hudspeth by police officers who mistook the cellular phone that the young Black man was carrying for a weapon, have led people to question whether officers ’ split-second decisions to shoot may be influ-enced by the suspects ’ race. Consider that the stereotype of Black people includes characteristics such as aggressive and criminal (Brigham, 1971; Devine & Elliot, 1995). This stereo-type may create expectations that Black people, and particu-larly Black men, are more likely thanWhite people to be violent criminals, which may lead to racially biased interpretations of suspects ’ behavior. If police officers possess such expectations, then their split-second decisions about whether or not to shoot at a suspect may be biased and result in more antagonistic re-sponses to Black than White suspects. Recent research has examined whether race influences people’s decisions to shoot criminal suspects (e.g., Correll