Target Practice: Racism and Police Shootings Are No Game

There are two versions to this game — a fast one and a super-fast one. I'm on the super-fast one, which calls for quicker decisions and has a greater likelihood of revealing racial bias. I'm given a practice round, and the game flips through a series of background images showing locations in Denver: a light-rail shelter behind Union Station, a sidewalk in Civic Center Park, an alleyway near downtown, a spot on Capitol Hill. The first man who pops up is a white guy crouching with a gun. I press "shoot." As the game continues, the images come faster. I find myself accidentally shooting white men with Coke cans, black guys with cell phones. But if I wait too long on an image, I lose my chance and points. So I choose "don't shoot" prematurely a few times and get shot, losing still more points.

When I start the real game, I make correct choices on the first three images but bungle the next two. There's no gunfire; the only sound is the periodic clack of the button as I try to decide on my course of action as quickly as possible. When I shoot another black guy with a cell phone, I wonder if I've just revealed some hidden racial bias. So when I see the image of another black male, I overcompensate by hitting the red button too quickly — and end up getting shot myself.

After about two minutes, the game is over. While I'm not confident of my accuracy score, I think I'm pretty safe from scoring as a racist, since I probably shot as many unarmed white males as blacks. The truth of the simulation, however, is not necessarily measured by the overall score, but in milliseconds. How long did it take me to decide if I viewed a person as a threat — and with which race was I most often correct?

The results of my test are determined by this formula: f(1,361)+239.37,p

In the field, cops are dealing with chaotic and hazardous situations, when mere milliseconds separate the momentary flash of a potential weapon and when they have to decide whether to pull the trigger. How can training — even the best training — overcome the entrenched factors of cultural bias?

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Though Denver was spared the brutal race riots that shook cities like Chicago, Los Angeles and New York in the '60s and '70s, race relations here have an uneasy history, stretching from Denver's earliest days through its stint in the 1920s as a KKK stronghold. "Another Black Man Killed," a pamphlet distributed around the city in 1961, denounced the shooting of Eugene "Skijump" Cook by two officers. "How long are these white men going to be allowed to walk our streets and kill us off and walk again?" its anonymous author raged.

Minority Views of the Police, a book based on numerous interviews with Denver residents and police officers, published by the University of Denver in 1969, concluded that the most important factor influencing residents' view of the police was ethnicity: "Negros and Spanish-named persons share among themselves views of the police that are less favorable than those of the rest of the community and which are not materially affected by the success they achieve in life in terms of social and economic position." At the time, the percentage of black and Latino officers in the Denver Police Department was about 5 percent. At the end of 2006, approximately 32 percent of Denver officers were minority — below the city's non-white population of about 50 percent, but a close match with the ethnic makeup of the metro-area recruiting pool.

But those changing realities, as well as studies like CUSP's, don't deter the DPD's critics. African-American activist Shareef Aleem, who's read the "Thin Blue Line" report, says it has little to do with real-life scenarios. "I don't deal with video games when I'm out on the street. I'm dealing with real cops with attitudes," he notes. "With the Denver and Aurora police departments, if you're black or Latino, the police are more aggressive towards you, insofar as shooting you or beating you down." The only reason the DPD would feel compelled to participate in such a study, he adds, is because it has such a checkered past with racially biased shootings: "I'm looking at what's the motivation of the study and what's the political message they're trying to get out. If they're trying to show that this is some kind of magic pill, that they don't discriminate, that's bullshit. If you've got to do all this to prove you're not racist, you're definitely racist."

But Joseph Sandoval, a professor of criminal justice at Metro State College, thinks the study suggests that the DPD is becoming more open to changing a culture that once permitted and even encouraged the use of deadly force. "In the '60s and '70s, if an [officer] didn't pull out a gun and shoot immediately, they were branded as cowards," says Sandoval, who helped create the Public Safety Review Commission and the Citizens' Oversight Board.