Driving While Black: Racial Profiling Lands Maryland Police a Hefty Fine

Maryland State Police agreed to a $400,000 settlement on Wednesday in the conclusion of a decade-long case brought on by ACLU civil rights attorneys. The suit was filed on behalf of fourteen Black motorists who were unreasonably harassed by Maryland State Highway Patrol on I-95 in a claim of racial profiling. The six remaining plaintiffs who will be compensated by the settlement all were pulled over without an explanation for such action and subsequently coerced into a warrantless search of their vehicles. Plaintiffs in the case said that the profiling was psychologically damaging because it made them feel powerless and inferior, and that they had no rights. This case is just the most recent in a long history of legal action against law enforcement agencies for alleged racial profiling. And in a time when civil liberties are being placed on hold by the Patriot Act in the racial and ethnic profiling of suspected terrorists, the psychology behind profiling is a much needed subject of study and therefore is the topic of this week's post.

There is an ongoing and heated debate over racial profiling; proponents claim it is a time-tested tool for narrowing down large pools of suspects and critics discredit the practice as unjust. In a highly publicized case, New Jersey police officers claimed that racial profiling was their attempt at efficient crime detection, citing U.S. Department of Justice statistics which show that the incarceration rate for Blacks is six times that of Whites in the United States, and therefore pulling over mostly Black motorists was just playing the odds. While the forensic psychologist's practice of profiling is actually a very useful tool in narrowing down large pools of suspects in certain more uncommon crimes like serial murder, the suggestion that simply because Blacks have a higher arrest rate, police are profiling based on the efficiency and probability is entirely unjust and an irrational. Experts of criminology and sociologists propose many explanations for the disparity in the incarceration data, however, many analyses agree that "the role of race in the criminal justice system is critical", meaning that racial profiling itself is a main reason why Blacks are disproportionately arrested (see chart) in the first place. Therefore the New Jersey officers were not playing the odds, but creating the odds.

In almost all situations, racial profiling can lead to problems and injustice, but profiling in a more general sense, is natural to social beings. Therefore, to understand what racial profiling actually entails, there must be a distinction that is made between overt and conscious discrimination like that uncovered in the previously mentioned Maryland police case and the subconscious gut reactions that affect situations like that of Amadou Diallo, an unarmed Black immigrant who was mistakenly shot at 41 times and killed by four officers after he reached into his jacket for a wallet. Social psychologist Joshua Correll, inspired by news coverage of the Diallo's death, has done some groundbreaking research highly relevant to the instinctive judgments that police officers must make in ambiguous situations. He wanted to see if police officers are any more prejudiced in this manner than the common public so he designed a simple video game in which research participants had the split-second choice of shooting or not shooting the person in multiple pictures (example below) that were flashed on screen for fractions of a second. The pictures included a Black man holding a gun, a White man holding a gun, a Black man holding an innocuous object (such as a wallet or cell phone), or a White man holding a similarly innocuous object. After each picture was flashed on the screen, participants had to press (within 850 milliseconds) either one key to shoot the individual or another key to leave him unharmed but risk being shot themselves. The video game experiment was administered to police officers along with civilians and the results showed a general trend for all that participated. People generally shot more unarmed Blacks than unarmed Whites, and they failed to shoot more Whites than Blacks who actually were holding weapons. Correll explained that, “in the case of African American targets, participants simply set a lower threshold for the decision to shoot.”

It is very disturbing to realize that our society associates Black people with violence or danger more than White people, but sixty years of social psychology involving similarly designed experiments documents this stereotype (Allport & Postman, 1947; Correll, Park, Judd, & Wittenbrink, 2002; Devine, 1989; Duncan, 1976; Greenwald, Oakes, & Hoffman, 2003; Payne, 2001; Sagar & Schofield, 1980). But poor performance on the game does not necessarily mean that a participant is racist, it does however demonstrate the presence of cognitive schema, the psychological term used to describe the mental organization of general rules that influence very quick decisions. These schema are not a function of active prejudice, but are the result of ambient social stereotypes. This is to say that the reactions in the game are too quick to reflect "what you personally believe or want to believe," says Correll, but do reflect "long-standing associations drilled into our heads every time we go to the movies or pick up a newspaper or hear a joke.” Interestingly, data from the game revealed that being familiar with stereotypes of Black males and violence led to more errors than actual belief that Black males are in fact dangerous. Accordingly, while we may not believe in stereotypes, our awareness of them influences how we act and react at an unconscious level.

But to get back to the subject of police profiling, the results are not the same between civilians and police participants. Officers from fourteen states played the video game and constantly reacted quicker and with more accuracy than ordinary citizens. Correll says that police officers tend to "make very few mistakes...which is reassuring." And while this finding reassures the public that police are in fact well trained, persistent allegations of racial profiling by police such as the Maryland highway patrol case discussed earlier may be the result of conscious and intended prejudice (since their subconscious gut-reactions that the video game tests seems exemplary). The only answer to this kind of discriminatory racial profiling is better screening processes for police officers, an area that needs more attention and research.