Criminal Justice System
In the recent years, racial biases in the criminal justice system of United States have become a controversial and visible issue to the public. The issue bares potential negative effects on the policing procedures. Although biased views can be manifested in several forms such as gender and religion, race has remained to be the most powerful and widespread bias. For instance, conducted studies on the effects of racial disparities in the United States police departments report that the black race is a victim to the policing injustices caused by biased police officers. Bias refers to the subconscious or unconscious attitudes and beliefs cause by experiences and which influences how one behaves. Therefore, everyone is biased but the impact of each bias depends on the role one is placed to play in a society. A police officer being bias with the special role entrusted to them places the society at risk. However, biasness is not a law enforcement issue but an individual issue and that means the only way for the police department to deal with the racial bias views among police officers is by making them aware of their unconscious prejudices and teaching them how to act on the behavior.
Public trust in the criminal justice system facilitates a nation’s safety and acts as a pillar of the rule of law. People tend to obey the law based on how fairly the enforcement is administered and not because of fear of being punished of by viewing it morally right. Laws enforcement based on biased views may result to the public failing to cooperate and leading to insecure communities. Existence of injustices leaning on the minority races has constructed tension and distrust between the public and the police which has resulted to the public losing their trust and confidence in the criminal justice system (Spencer et al 2016). Therefore, to eliminate the racial biases in the police departments, the supervisors should require officers to take an assessment based on bias views based on different races because research indicates that most of police officers are racists.
In the United States, racial bias is present in each point of processing criminal justice from the law enforcement officers to the correlational officers. People may be explicitly biased where they behave in certain way knowingly due to stereotypes they believe in or implicitly biased where they judge certain things and people unintentionally. Although both types of bias exist in the police department the implicit bias has been difficult to deal with because it needs the changing of consciousness tinted thoughts of an individual. For instance, the initial encounter with police in activities like “stop and frisk” (where the officers have discretion power of deciding who to arrest)has been reported to be conducted using prejudices about certain communities where officers pick who to stop and frisk based on their perspectives about the race of that individual. A research carried by the Task Force in 2015 included witnesses confessing directly at the task force examination sessions that the culture in which police officers perform their work needed to be changed since they testified that the officers rely on race in the practices of stop and frisk (Fryer 2016). The Task Force research recommended that for the criminal justice system to achieve legitimacy, the law enforcement training programs should include taking of assessment based on implicit racial bias to reveal what the law officers think and feel about all the communities they are supposed to enforce laws on.
Another aspect which demonstrates biasness in the criminal justices field is the use of force on black offenders by law enforcement officers. According to a study by Lorie Fridell and Hyeyoung Kim, police reports indicated that police officers likely use electronic devices and low-level control measures on Blacks but not on Whites despite committing the same crime Fridell & Lim 2016). Also, Kirwan institute carried out a study on race and ethnicity where they focused on examining several judge’s plea hearings and sentencing and discovered that blacks and Latinos were imprisoned disproportionately. Through the researchers’ questioning the judges realized and admitted their sentencing decision was influence by their implicit biases which they could not notice until the study revealed the bias to them (Clair & Winte 2016). The judges’ realization proves that the most effective way to address the issue of biased views among law enforcement authorities is to make them become aware of the biases and encourage them through tools like couching and regularly test assessments.
Implicit bias can be measured using an Implicit Association Test (IAT) which analyzes the extent to which one mentally associates two different concepts like weapon and race. In doing the IAT participants are presented with stimulus images or words and asked to categorize them using computer keys. The implicit bias trait is indicated by the time the participant takes to categorize the provided stimuli because it one will take longer to finish the pairing tasks if the provided pairs are not cognitively compatible. The IAT assessment takes advantage of the fact that all humans have cognitive processes in their unconscious mind. Implicit Association Test can be used to measure how certain people strongly pair specific attributes to particular social groups ( for example; smokers, homosexuality, and blacks). Hence, using the Implicit Association Tests, police officers’ biased views concerning particular racial groups can be determined and the right action enacted to avoid the biased views from impacting the policing procedures a police is supposed to perform. Implicit bias can be eradicated using external factors such as social interactions ( Dasgupta 2013). For example, in a case where a police officer has stereotypes about blacks being associated with high crime rate, then they move to a black neighborhood with low crime rate and interact with legally disciplined individuals then they will have a different experience and their beliefs and stereotypes will change altering their implicit bias.
Addressing racial bias among police officers is challenging but essential to undertake. Biased police pose a negative view of the police department community and ineffectively perform their work which cost the criminal justice system public cooperation. The central part which can make the elimination of biasness effective is the training center where the officers are molded and instilled beliefs about their role (Devine et al 2012). The training should focus on educating the officers how implicit biases operate and the adverse impacts they can cause to their line of work. The training program assessments need to focus on determining the officer’s goals and what motivates them to become law enforcements to ensure that the intentions are not bias driven. The training institutions need to teach the police officers the skills they can use to manage their biased views to ensure that their work is not influenced by beliefs which are not directly associated with their work. Using the assessments to detect racial biased officers cannot be dependent on as a sole way of stopping racism in police departments. The assessments results need should be followed by behaving altering mechanisms for the ones recognized with implicit bias views. The theoretical part of training police officers to be aware of their unconscious stereotypes of associating certain races with specific crimes can be enforced by practically learning how to change the biased thoughts.
Given the fact that implicit bias views can be influenced and changed, police supervisors should take in to considerations mixing of races in different police departments. Police departments should make an effort of making each race feel included in the criminal justice sector and give the officers the chance to learn issues about diverse races. Through working with people from different races the officers can learn new positive views about races they associated criminal trait with and through that their unconscious beliefs can be altered to comprise unbiased views. Also, the recommended assessment should indicate the factors contributing to the biased view of the officers to make it easy to know the appropriate ways to use to change the mentality of the racists officers. Therefore, this study suggests that police departments should include as main pairs of the cognitive processes as possible including personal experiences, mental state, emotions and other stressor. Unlimited assessment will ensure reliability and validity of the test results and also ensure that the suitable solution to eradicating racism is established and the criminal justice system rescued from the professional ineffectiveness caused by racial bias.
In conclusion, racial biases in the criminal justice system of United States have become a controversial and visible issue to the public and the issue bares potential negative effects on the policing procedures. Public trust in the criminal justice system facilitates a nation’s safety and acts as a pillar of the rule of law. People tend to obey the law based on how fairly the enforcement is administered and not because of fear of being punished of by viewing it morally right. Existence of injustices leaning on the minority races has constructed tension and distrust between the public and the police which has resulted to the public losing their trust and confidence in the criminal justice system. In the United States, racial bias is present in each point of processing criminal justice from the law enforcement officers to the correlational officers. The Task Force research recommended that for the criminal justice system to achieve legitimacy, the law enforcement training programs should include taking of assessment based on implicit racial bias to reveal what the law officers think and feel about all the communities they are supposed to enforce laws on. Another aspect which demonstrates biasness in the criminal justices field is the use of force on black offenders by law enforcement officers. Implicit bias can be measured using an Implicit Association Test (IAT) which analyzes the extent to which one mentally associates two different concepts like weapon and race. Addressing racial bias among police officers is challenging but essential to undertake. . The training should focus on educating the officers how implicit biases operate and the adverse impacts they can cause to their line of work. Given the fact that implicit bias views can be influenced and changed, police supervisors should take in to considerations mixing of races in different police departments.
References
Clair, M., & Winter, A. S. (2016). How judges think about racial disparities: Situational decision‐making in the criminal justice system. Criminology, 54(2), 332-359.
Dasgupta, N. (2013). Implicit attitudes and beliefs adapt to situations: A decade of research on the malleability of implicit prejudice, stereotypes, and the self-concept. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 47, 233–279.
Devine, P. G., Forscher, P. S., Austin, A. J., & Cox, W. T. (2012). Long-term reduction in implicit race bias: A prejudice habit-breaking intervention. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 48(6), 1267-1278.
Fridell, L., & Lim, H. (2016). Assessing the racial aspects of police force using the implicit- and counter-bias perspectives. Journal of Criminal Justice, 44, 36–48.
Fryer, R. G., Jr. (2016). An empirical analysis of racial differences in police use of force. NBER Working Paper Series. Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research.
Spencer, K. B., Charbonneau, A. K., & Glaser, J. (2016). Implicit bias and policing. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 10(1), 50-63.