Implicit Bias – Training Law Enforcement to Be Less Racist

Since the early 90’s when books by Dinesh D’Souza and Jared Taylor hit conservative bookshelves, racism, and the pseudo science behind it have gone mainstream in the conservative world. Fox News picked up and found serial racism was profitable. It is safe to say than anyone you meet who watches Faux more than an hour a day…

Is a racist.

Faux News talking heads like Sean Hannity have built their entire careers around defending, encouraging, and promoting racism though implicit bias.

I think back a few weeks to the brother who murdered 5 Cops in Dallas. Stupid, stupid, stupid. First off, there was no evidence that any of the victims were either “bad cops” or criminal in any way. Killing the symptom, not the cause. If the brother was going to do some good in eradicating some of the racism in america – including the murder by cop of unarmed, innocent black men – he needed to shoot the hand behind the hand holding the gun. He needed to go to 1211 Avenue of the Americas in New York City, and shoot the first 5 talking heads emerging out of limousines.

Especially if 2 or 3 of those were the incessant purveyors of implicit racism.

It simply isn’t going to stop until the purveyors of racist trash know there is a cost to it. All the nice training courses discussed below won’t do a damn thing.

It is sort of like alcohol addiction. Alcohol is one of the, if not the hardest drug to kick. The reason? I would say in most cities it would be hard to walk a block though a commercial section without seeing a bar, a restaurant that serves alcohol, signs promoting alcoholic beverages. Turn on the TV – happy people consuming alcohol. Go to ball game – signs for alcohol everywhere, and dozens of places selling beer on draft (heck – there are even guys who will bring beer to your seat). Alcohol consumption is part of our social fabric. We are bombarded with messages hundreds of times a day promoting alcohol consumption.

Faux News and other conservative outlets do the same thing for racism. A good portion of their programming is devoted to promoting and advancing racism in the form of implicit bias.

So if you want to kill the implicit bias beast – you need to a lot better than a 2 hour slide show.

Implicit bias training seeks to counter hidden prejudice in law enforcement

When the Justice Department released its report on the Baltimore Police Department last week, examples of racial bias were clear:

The police:

— employs “enforcement strategies on African Americans, leading to severe and unjustified racial disparities”

— “disproportionately searches African-Americans during stops,” yet illegal items were found twice as often on white individuals during vehicle stops and 50 percent more during pedestrian stops

— arrests black people five times more than others for drug possession, yet black drug use is about the same or only slightly higher.

What is not so clear is the unseen, but not unfelt, implicit bias that provides the foundation for racism.

Most people carry some implicit bias, which Justice defines as “the unconscious or subtle associations that individuals make between groups of people and stereotypes about those groups.”

Justice and Baltimore agreed to reach a consent decree setting out needed reforms, including improved implicit bias training. At the same time, the Justice Department is launching a major effort for its own crew. All Justice law enforcement officers and prosecutors will undergo implicit bias training under a directive issued by Deputy Attorney General Sally Q. Yates and backed by her boss, Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch.

“We have been requiring implicit bias training in a lot of our consent decrees for local jurisdictions,” Lynch said in a brief interview following her appearance before a joint conference of the National Association of Black Journalists (disclosure: I am a member) and the National Association of Hispanic Journalists. “We really felt that if we were going to make that a prescription for local law enforcement, we should also be part of it.”

That means the department’s 23,000 law enforcement agents in four agencies and 5,800 lawyers are being trained in how to recognize implicit bias in their daily work.

Perhaps anticipating push back, Yate’s memo to staffers said “I know that your time is valuable, and that you already devote many hours to various training requirements, but I would not have asked you to take on this additional responsibility unless I and other Department leaders were convinced of its value.”

While the training will be geared to different elements in the department, all of it will begin with the science behind implicit bias, Yates said by telephone. “As you might expect, people can naturally start out a little defensive when they come into this kind of training.”

Yates, who has taken some training, said it’s important for employees to understand that implicit bias is distinct from explicit bias “and that it is something we all carry around unconsciously in one form or another.”

After the science, the training includes scenarios where implicit bias might kick in and strategies to counter it.

Strategies can include providing factual information to counter stereotypes. The Justice Department’s finding that contraband is found much more often among white folks, yet black people are stopped and searched at a higher rate is an example.

That information, perhaps, could have an impact on those who assume higher arrest rates mean black people are more criminally inclined. Studies have shown that black people are treated more harshly by the criminal justice system than white people for similar offenses at every step of the process.

“What the science also shows is that the most important aspect of countering implicit bias is being aware that you have it to begin with,” Yates said. “Most people don’t really recognize that they are carrying around the bias, particularly people who believe themselves to be fair-thinking, non-prejudice folks.”

I wonder if that fits Hans von Spakovsky, a senior legal fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation and a former Justice Department lawyer.

He thinks the department is going “to spend a lot of taxpayer money on training for a nonexistent problem.” Despite science to the contrary, von Spakovsky said, unconvincingly, “these claims are based on very dubious, questionable studies…the bias I saw there when I worked in the (DOJ’s) Civil Rights Division was towards whites.”

Perhaps he should talk with Lenese Herbert, a Howard University law professor.

Implicit bias training “represents cutting-edge research,” she said, “that may be enlisted to eradicate the internationally embarrassing and domestically destabilizing scourge of officers killing unarmed Black people in extraordinarily disproportionate numbers and in the face of shockingly nonviolent resistance.”

 

 

Academic Steering and Black Students

The median pay for a person in my business with (and sometimes without) a Bachelors in Computer Science or Information Technology and with a Manufacturer certification such as a JCIE/CCIE, or a cyber-security cert such as a CISSP is $120,000- $140,000 a year. No PhD required.

So WTF are you taking a degree track in basket weaving?

That same sort of math applies across several STEM based fields, including the Medical Technology industry, Chemical Engineering, some Aerospace, and other Hi-Tech areas. And yes – you have to work your ass off to get there unless you are one of those natural-born geniuses.

So tell me again, why are you enrolled in a under-graduate program where the salary average is 1/3 of that. Despite the “Diversity problems” on the left coast, there are literally tens of thousands of other jobs in the rest of the country.

About 10 percent of black computer science professors and Ph.D. students nationwide are at Clemson, thanks in large part to the work of one professor. Click pic to link.

 

How US academia steers black students out of science

When the late Justice Antonin Scalia pointed out last year that “it does not benefit African-Americans to get them into the University of Texas [Austin] where they do not do well, as opposed to having them go to a less-advanced school, a less — a slower-track school where they do well,” he was roundly criticized by the left as a racist.

He was alluding, of course, to the “mismatch” problem that occurs when black students who are less qualified are admitted to more selective schools but do not graduate or do well at them as a result. Two recent studies, though, suggest that his words are truer now than ever.

The first comes from the Georgetown Center on Education and the Workforce, which found that black students are less likely to pursue lucrative majors than their white peers. According to the report, “African Americans account for only 8 percent of general engineering majors, 7 percent of mathematics majors, and only 5 percent of computer engineering majors.”

But they’re overrepresented in fields that don’t have high salaries: “21 percent in health and medical administrative services, compared to only 6 percent in the higher-earning detailed major of pharmacy, pharmaceutical sciences, and administration.”

Finally, it noted, “They are also highly represented in . . . [the low-paying fields of] human services and community organization (20%) and social work (19%).”

“There’s a huge inadequacy here in counseling,” Anthony Carnevale, director of the center and the lead author of the report, told the Atlantic.

This seems pretty unlikely. Who doesn’t realize computer engineers get paid well? The real problem is that too many black students are getting a hopelessly inadequate K-12 education and by the time they get to college, their best bet is to major in a subject whose exams have no wrong answers and whose professors engage in rampant grade inflation.

Carnevale also argues that’s because blacks are concentrated in open-access schools that have fewer choices of majors. But this, too, is questionable. Plenty of open-access universities offer courses and majors in STEM fields.

The implication is that black students at lower-tier universities are actually less likely to graduate in STEM majors than those at higher-tier ones. Which is patently false. Indeed, the historically black colleges and universities, many of which aren’t selective at all, tend to have among the highest rates of graduating STEM majors.

And if you want to get a job in a lucrative STEM field, your chances of completing your degree are much better at a lower-tier school. But here’s the real kicker: A recent survey by the Wall Street Journal found that in “fields like science, technology, engineering and math, it largely doesn’t matter whether students go to a prestigious, expensive school or a low-priced one — expected earnings turn out the same.”

For instance, if you go to Manhattan College, where the average SAT score is around 1620, and major in engineering, your mid-career median pay will be $140,000. If you go to Rice, where the average SAT score is 2180, and major in engineering, your pay will be $145,000.

In other words, there’s not much upside financially to going to the more elite schools. But there is a huge downside: Your chances of graduating with a degree in that major fall dramatically.

If you want to know why there’s still a big salary difference for kids majoring in humanities and social sciences between elite and non-elite schools, it probably has something to do with the substance of the major.

Since most employers have no idea what you learned in your sociology classes, they’ll just assume the kids who went to Harvard are smarter.

But they’ll know exactly what you learned in your math and science classes and so they’ll compensate you well if you did reasonably well no matter where you took them.

If liberal elites really were concerned about increasing the graduation rates and career earnings of minority students, they would realize that the Ivy League is not the answer.

And forget Scalia’s racism about elite schools (UT Austin ain’t an “elite school” on the level of MIT, Stanford, or Cal Tech – although it is a good school). Nobody gives a good damn about your GPA 3 years after you graduate – they care about “what can you do for me”. While graduation from an elite school gets you a higher starting salary, which really doesn’t disappear until late career (HR in many companies never corrects that fact, leading to higher turnover of top performers from “lesser schools” and can’t figure out why their best programmer Jimmy with a degree from Downstate U quit to take a new job, while Wilberforce form Big-Name U, an average performer, stays ) – you are still making money putting you in the top 2-3% of wage earners in the US. The folks that failed at that math are generally working in HR at less than half that – and all too often don’t have a clue.

 

Why White Cops Shoot Black Men

Interesting analysis. Not sure it goes deep enough though. Like, why exactly has this seemingly reached epidemic proportions? Is there a relationship to he media? In view that the number of violent interactions between the police and the general public seem to have gone up – what are the implications and impact o the methodologies now commonly used?

Walter Scott Murder

The neuroscience behind why white cops kill black men

If you’ve paid any attention at all to the news during the past year, or simply are on social media, then chances are you’ve seen real life videos of white cops shooting and killing black males when the situation did not warrant it. The most recent video to have surfaced captured the shooting of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald by Chicago police officer Jason Van Dyke, for which he has been charged with first-degree murder. Earlier this year, a similar video was released of a white South Carolina cop shooting a 50-year-old unarmed black man in the back as he was running away. Although in these cases it was clear that the officers were not presented with any lethal threat while they fired their weapons multiple times, there are also countless cases where police officers have discharged their firearms when the level of threat was more ambiguous.

A classic example of this occurred in 2014 when another South Carolina policeman shot an unarmed African American who he had stopped in a parking lot for a seatbelt violation. The cop asked for an ID from the young man, who subsequently reached under the seat for his wallet, but was shot in the leg before he could even take it out. Upon inspection of the body-cam video, it becomes evident that the jumpy, trigger-happy cop probably did fear for his life. At the same time, it is also clear that he shouldn’t have, as the behavior of the driver involved nothing out of the ordinary. One could reasonably argue, and many did, that if the driver had been white, the cop wouldn’t have reacted the way he did.

Does this mean that the officer was a racist, and that he fired his gun purely out of hate? Without actually being inside the cop’s mind, there is no way to know for sure, but we can know for certain that many similar situations have transpired where white officers acted on gut instinct, and not out of animosity towards African Americans.

What needs to be understood by the prosecutors of such cases, and by the public at large, is the distinction between explicit and implicit racism. Where explicit racism is intentional and conscious, implicit racism involves a subconscious bias that causes one to treat members of other races unequally. Implicit racism likely plays a significant role in many of the cases involving white cops shooting black males, and it is also likely that these cops genuinely believe they hold no prejudice at all. In other words, white police officers may perceive black males to be a threat for behaving in ways that wouldn’t seem suspicious for white males. In fact, an overwhelming number of studies from the fields of neuroscience and psychology provide evidence to support this notion.

For example, studies have shown that while some white individuals answer survey questions with responses that reflect positive attitudes toward blacks, their behavioral responses on certain psychological tests reveal a different story. In one particular type of classic experiment, white participants are asked to quickly categorize words that pop up on a computer screen as either positive (like “happy”) or negative (like “fear”). However, just before each word is displayed, either a black or a white face quickly appears on the screen. What scientists have found time and time again, is that on average, white individuals categorize negative words much faster when they follow black faces, and positive words faster when they follow white faces. What these studies show is that many of us, despite what we believe about ourselves, have split-second negative reactions towards members of certain other races. And unfortunately, these subconscious racist tendencies may affect behavior in the real world, especially when police officers need to make blink-of-an-eye decisions about how to respond to a perceived threat.

Another type of experiment has provided further evidence that white individuals tend to subconsciously perceive black males as threatening.  All individuals, regardless of race, show something that scientists call an “attention bias” for threat. For example, hundreds of studies have shown that humans tend to move their attention more quickly towards threatening aspects of the environment. In something called a “visual search task,” participants are instructed to locate one specific object in a clutter of objects on a computer screen while their eye movements are tracked. The data has shown that people are able to locate threatening objects, like spiders, or angry faces, much faster than they can find non-threatening ones, like ladybugs or happy faces. This makes sense in terms of evolution. Being able to rapidly locate threats in the environment allowed our ancestors to survive in an unpredictable and dangerous natural world. Interestingly, scientists have also found that white individuals have a similar attention bias for black faces, even when those faces have non-threatening expressions. Specifically, white participants tend to orient their attention towards black faces more quickly than same-race faces. These findings clearly show that on average, whites tend to subconsciously perceive blacks as threats, no matter how opposed to stereotypes or racial discrimination they may be.

Although these studies reveal subconscious racist behaviors that may be beyond one’s immediate control, they also offer solutions to the problem of white officers’ tendency to overreact in situations involving black suspects. First of all, all of us, including police officers and other figures of authority, must realize that these racial biases are real and prevalent. If we are aware of our innate predispositions then we can make a conscious effort to regulate our behavior. For instance, if a police officer is in a situation where his life is not being immediately threatened, he should go through the effort of assessing the situation logically before acting to ensure that he is not overreacting or using excessive force. Additionally, perhaps psychological and behavioral measures, such as surveys and visual computer tasks that test for implicit racial biases should be implemented as screening measures for police. If an officer does in fact exhibit these biases, he could be subjected to more in-depth training that can help mitigate these effects. Psychologists also have attention training tasks that can help dissolve cognitive biases, which can be provided to those at risk through computer apps.

Finally, we all must realize that in some situations the use excessive force by police officers might not be intentional. Although that is by no means an excuse, it may help us to better understand why the outcome occurred, and how we can possibly prevent it from occurring in the future. And if police departments recognize that these implicit racial biases are in-fact driving some of their behavior, it would show the world that they are willing to admit there is a problem that they plan to address and correct.

 

Prison Inmate Debate Team Whups Harvard

So much for only the stupid go to prison…Further evidence that America’s system of mass incarceration is also a complete waste of intellectual resources…

 

This Is How A Prison’s Debate Team Beat Harvard

Three men currently incarcerated at the Eastern New York Correctional Facility in Ulster County beat Harvard University in a recent debate.

How they did it, though, is as inspiring as it is heartbreaking. Almost everywhere in the United States, time spent in prison is at best wasted, at worst spent in a swirl of violence and humiliation. But prisoners fortunate enough to be situated near Bard College have a chance to participate in a program founded on a radical insight: Prison need not be only about punishment, but can also be a place where people grow and blossom into the educated, responsible citizens they will need to be when they’re released.

The men who stomped Harvard were part of the Bard Prison Initiative. “The most important thing that our students’ success symbolizes is how much better we can do in education in the U.S. for all people,” BPI founder Max Kenner told The Huffington Post. “Our program is successful because we operate on a genuinely human level.”

Beating Harvard wasn’t the first time the Bard team had tasted success. Their first debate victory came last year, when they defeated the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y.

The program aims to rehabilitate inmates and help them return to their communities productive members of society — among the formerly incarcerated Bard students, less than 2percent have returned to prison.

Studies show that prisoners who enroll in educational programs behind bars are much less likely to return to prison than those who don’t.

In 1999, when Kenner was a Bard College student he encouraged the small, liberal arts school to provide education for prisoners. In 2001, BPI graduated from being a student organization to become a legitimate extension of the college. Today, inmates who are part of the program have the opportunity to earn a Bard College degree.

The BPI is the largest prison education program in the U.S. Almost 300 incarcerated men and women are currently pursuing degrees in six prisons across New York State. Yet, gaining admission to the program is no small feat. Applicants are required to write an essay and go through a rigorous interview process.

“It’s a very difficult, very grueling process,” Kenner noted. “But it’s one that rewards student initiative. And something that we take very, very seriously.”

In July, BPI was awarded a $1 million grant from the Ford Foundation to help support its work for higher education in prisons and innovations in criminal justice reform.

The successes, however, don’t end after inmates are released from prison. Graduates of the BPI program go on to work in various fields, ranging from human service organizations to private business, and many take up managerial positions.

Some graduates decided to further their education by working towards other academic and professional degrees, Kenner said. He pointed out that leaders in education need to be “more optimistic, more courageous and more curious.”…

 

Moss Hollow – STEM Summer Camp for Girls

 

‘Bout time. As the father of a daughter who is degreeing in the Bio-Tech field, I am aware of the shortage of women in these fields…

And the shortage of Americans in the STEM fields nation wide.

Maybe the coming generation of girls can save us from becoming a Third Rate, Third world nation.

At Moss Hollow, a tasty start to a space race

The way Darrian Loganexplained it to the 20 or so 7- to 11-year-old girls seated around four tables in a summer camp dining hall, the future of American space travel rested on their little shoulders.

“NASA gave us a little project to do,” Darrian said. “In a few years, they need people like you ladies to build rockets for them.”

Then he and his fellow Camp Moss Hollow staffer Evan Simmons put a bowl of marshmallows and a pile of uncooked spaghetti at each table.

The link to rockets may not have been obvious, but this was part of a new class at Moss Hollow. It’s part of an effort by NASA’s education office to teach STEM concepts — science, technology, engineering and math — in interesting ways. Earlier this year, representatives from the space agency taught the curriculum to camp staffers. Other lessons include making paper airplanes and building tiny cardboard cars propelled by balloons.

This afternoon’s assignment: the Leaning Tower of Pasta. The girls of the Boxwood cabins had to work in teams to design and construct spaghetti-marshmallow towers capable of holding a Ping-Pong ball. If the Ping-Pong ball was safely cradled, a highlighter and then a pair of scissors would be added to see if the towers could stand the strain.

“And, yes, you can eat the marshmallows,” Darrian said. “At the end of the exercise.”

I don’t know what motivates NASA engineers, but marshmallows seem to work with 7-year-old girls.

“Let’s make a castle,” one camper shouted.

“Who wants to make a rectangle?” asked another.

“How many corners does a rectangle have?” asked counselor Rani Lewinson.

The girls from her cabin — Boxwood 3 — decided that a rectangle has four sides and proceeded to sketch out their design on construction paper. It was a basic cube, with a marshmallow at each corner and spaghetti struts in between.

The girls of Boxwood 1 went for something more pyramidal in shape. The girls from Boxwood 4 had an organic shape, semi-pentagonal. It looked a bit like a model of a newly discovered molecule: marshmallonium, perhaps.

Boxwood 2 started out with a wall — tall and narrowly horizontal — until the girls realized it wouldn’t stand up on its own and disassembled it to make something a little more sturdy.

Marshmallows were precious — there was a finite supply — but the spaghetti seemed endless. A lot of measure-once-and-cut-twice was going on as lengths of pasta were snapped in half or quartered, only to discover that they were now too small.

The girls had 12 minutes to construct their towers. When they were done, they admired their sticky handiwork. None of the creations were particularly soaring. Saturn V’s they were not. But they didn’t have to be graceful. They only had to work…

 

 

Army Drill Sergeant Sues Army Over Discrimination

The Army’s first woman drill sargeant is suing the Army over racial and sexual discrimination by her two superiors…

Command Sgt. Maj. Teresa King

Army drill sergeant boss Teresa King takes legal action to get job back, alleges racism, sexism

The first woman to command the Army’s drill sergeant training took legal action Monday to reclaim her job, alleging she was improperly suspended last year because of sexism and racism and demanding that two of her superiors be investigated for abuse of their authority.

Command Sgt. Maj. Teresa King still does not know what exactly her superiors were investigating when they suspended her Nov. 29, according to her attorney, James Smith. He said the Army has declined to say specifically what it was looking into, beyond a general statement that it involved her conduct.

Smith on Monday filed a legal complaint with the Army against two of King’s superiors, and wants to have King reinstated to her position. Smith is also asking South Carolina’s two senior members of Congress, Sen. Lindsey Graham and Rep. James Clyburn, for a congressional probe of King’s treatment.

Army officials said they wanted to study the complaint first before commenting.

King, who is black, made headlines in 2009 when the Army named her as the first woman to head the Drill Sergeant School at Fort Jackson, the Army’s largest training installation.

Smith has statements from King’s deputy at the school and an Army colonel who worked with King contending she is a victim of sexism and racism on the part of soldiers who resented her promotion and the national attention it drew.

“It’s abundantly clear that there was nothing to warrant her removal. The Army should reinstate her and restore her honorable name,” Smith said in an interview with The Associated Press.

The attorney said King, 50, has declined to comment on the actions, saying the complaint stands on its own. But in a rebuttal to the Army, King wrote her superiors, “My instincts tell me that if I were a male, that none of this would have happened.”

Smith said he believes the Army is delaying its investigation in order to force King to take retirement when she becomes eligible later this year.

Smith, who has handled military legal cases as an executive officer in the National Guard, said Army regulations require that investigations must be handled “expeditiously” and the one against King has gone on far too long.

After she took charge of the training program, reporters and TV crews descended on King, making much of her background as the daughter of a North Carolina sharecropper who dispensed stern discipline to his 12 children. She was featured on national TV, on newspaper front pages and in women’s magazines, sometimes with photos of her car sporting “noslack” vanity plates. (more)