Target Practice: Racism and Police Shootings Are No Game

Aveni, who's with the New Hampshire-based Police Policy Studies Council, has done research of his own using a more elaborate shooting simulator, which he says shows that the behavior of the suspect, rather than the suspect's race, has the biggest influence on an officer's decision to shoot. Aveni presented more than 300 officers with dozens of scenarios involving everything from robberies to muggings to burglaries; the suspects the officers encountered varied in age, race, gender and manner of dress. In half of the situations, the suspects were holding flashlights or cell phones. Aveni found that officers were more likely to shoot if the suspects were young rather than old, and wearing "punk clothes" rather than dressed up. But the most important factor was whether the subject acted in a way the officer found intimidating.

CUSP researchers have been careful to point out that their simplified task is in no way meant to simulate what officers experience in real-life situations. "But I do think that factors in the environment affect cognition and how people process information, including how easy it is for a person to process if another person is holding a gun or not," Park notes.

At its most basic level, Ito says, a stereotype is a natural human function that allows the brain to detect various threats. "We have primitive, quick-acting threat-detection systems — we call them visualence systems — that would be sensitive to a wide range of stimuli," she explains. "If you're walking through the forest and you feel something move next to you, it could be a snake, it could be a little critter trying to bite you. You'll orient to that, try to quickly figure out what it is."

So if it's a snake, you jump — but if it's a bunny?

"Your brain says it's fine," she says. But since the brain is pretty sensitive when it comes to false-positives, it's better to jump even though it's a stick than not to jump. "And there's a lot of biologically relevant stimuli that would trigger reactions from snakes, spiders, certain kinds of movement," she adds.

But while some of our responses are encoded by nature, other threat-detection stereotypes are social constructs that we've learned. "Through years and years of TV shows, for example, that have given your brain unconscious signals that one group is like this and another group is like that," Ito points out. "Well, then, maybe when you're walking down the street, you just unconsciously orient to those kinds of folks more."

In threatening environments, the brain is constantly on the lookout for danger. This same response is activated by the shoot/don't-shoot scenarios, where a brain might react faster to a black man as a threat (i.e., holding a gun) than a white man, resulting in the skewed results. But the brain also has a "conflict-monitoring" stage of decision-making where it tries to resolve two seemingly incongruent images (black guy without a gun) in order to make the correct choice.

Ito hasn't had a chance to do brain scans of the police officers who've done the simulations, but she says she suspects the results would show that through training, the officers have better developed the process of separating an actual threat from their initial bias. "The subtle influences that we have growing up are so powerful. We're talking about decades of influence," she explains. "And in the case of race, everything around us is giving us messages about the way different racial groups are, whether we realize it or not."

She points to the tiny voltage measurements that show where the participants' brains seemed to be separating black targets from white targets.

Is this what a stereotype looks like?

The trainers are in red shirts, standing behind four twenty-something police recruits in bulletproof vests.

"Shoot 'em six times, real quick," says one trainer. "Ready! Go!"

The recruits snatch the guns from their holsters and fire a quick volley of bullets into the paper targets about ten feet away. The blasts reverberate through the bunker-like firing range near Invesco Field that the DPD uses for training exercises.

"Again. Go!"

Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.

"Excellent. Okay, let's do it one-handed now. Go!"

Sergeant Marek "Ribs" Rybkowski stands behind the recruits, carefully watching to see whose hand dips and who has the best trigger control. He's going to show me the correct way to fire a gun using the department's shooting simulator, which is much more technologically advanced than the CUSP lab's simulator.