An innovative study published in the Journal of Experimental Criminology found that participants in realistic simulations felt more threatened by black suspects yet took longer to pull the trigger on black men than on white or Hispanic men.
“This behavioral ‘counter-bias’ might be rooted in people’s concerns about the social and legal consequences of shooting a member of a historically oppressed racial or ethnic group,” said the paper, which went practically unnoticed when it was published online on May 22, but took on new significance in the wake of a series of high-profile police-involved shootings involving black victims over the summer…
“Across these 300 interviews, I have multiple officers telling me that they didn’t shoot only because the suspect was black or the suspect was a woman, or something that would not be consistent with this narrative of cops out there running and gunning,” said Mr. Klinger, a former cop and author of “Into the Kill Zone: A Cop’s Eye View of Deadly Force” (2006).
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