Justice Project Part 1

Humanities
11/6/19
Payton Vaughn

Step 1: Pick an issue of injustice you’re passionate about:

Police/Shootings
Step 2: Research Questions
● Come up with 4-5 research questions about this topic to help
you understand important historical context and how this
issue is at play today.
○ Questions:
■ What’s the most ethical way but safe for the police
to deal with a threat
■ Do Police have a major racial bias in dangerous
situations?
■ What are Police taught to do when presented with
a threat?
■ What is the psychological reaction when someone
feels threatened? What chemicals and emotions
do they feel?
● Research answers to those questions using a min of 3
QUALITY sources
○ Take notes and be sure to KEEP TRACK of the sources
(for example, pick a different color for each source and
highlight notes from that source in that color)
○ At least one source has to be from an ACADEMIC-
SOURCE (see below)
Question 1:
❏ What’s the most ethical way but safe for the police to deal with a
dangerous situation
❏ People need to be more descriptive when relaying possible problems
this article states
❏ Its crucial for dispatch to relay the correct and full information to
officers
❏ “American police officers are among the best-trained in the world, but
what they’re trained to do is part of the problem.”
❏ “first rule of law enforcement”: An officer’s overriding goal every day is
to go home at the end of their shift. But cops live in a hostile world.
They learn that every encounter, every individual is a potential threat.
❏ “But what about the consequences of a mistake? After all, that dark
object in the suspect’s hands could be a wallet, not a gun. [...] But for all
of its risks, policing is safer now than it has ever been.”
❏ “Training also needs to compensate for the unconscious racial biases
that lead officers to perceive a greater threat from black men than from
others. Officers are not unique in that regard; implicit racial animus is
depressingly common in society.”
❏ “Use-of-force training should also emphasize de-escalation and flexible
tactics in a way that minimizes the need to rely on force, particularly
lethal force.”
❏ Law enforcement agencies strive to recruit, hire, and train only those
who demonstrate strong moral values before they enter the academy.
Yet, even departments’ best efforts will not prevent instances of police
misconduct from garnering attention.”
❏ “Like the Socrates quote, Aristotle’s philosophy teaches that as conduct
reflects officers’ character and, thus, the various ways that they respond
to moral dilemmas, this illustrates fundamental differences in their
personal values.”
❏ “At the simplest level of reasoning, the preconventional, external
consequences guide individuals’ sense of right and wrong—
punishment in stage one and self-interest in stage two. At this point,
they possess no internalized values or rules to guide behavior.”
 ❏ Looking at all these points I can tell there’s large buffer of what seems
ethical of what to do in these situations. Now de-escalation seems to be
a large point of what they need to be doing.
❏ because an officer has many options of de-escalation, some are
unethical but very easy while others are more dangerous but more
ethical. Their issued firearms vs tasers as an example.

Question 2:
❏ Do Police have a major racial bias in dangerous situations?
❏ “evidence for racial disparities is growing. Most of those data focus on
the treatment of black civilians by white officers.”
❏ “ The probability of being black, unarmed and shot by police is about 3.5
times the probability of being white, unarmed and shot by police, he
found.”
❏ “Many factors can account for the differences in treatment at the hands
of police. In some jurisdictions, explicit prejudice still occurs, says John
Dovidio, PhD, a social psychologist at Yale University who studies both
implicit and explicit prejudice.”
❏ “The researchers found that participants shoot armed targets more
often and more quickly if they're black rather than white, and refrain
from shooting more often when the target is white. The most common
mistakes are shooting an unarmed black target and failing to shoot an
armed white target.”
❏ “Race continues to influence how people of African descent in the
United States are treated by law enforcement.”
❏ “African Americans across this nation are aware and concerned about
the ongoing existence of race-based profiling of this segment of the
population by members of some police departments.”
❏ “The high rates at which non-Whites are stopped, questioned, cited,
arrested, or injured by the police present some of the most salient
criminal justice policy phenomena in the United States”
❏ “Police officers have often been the enforcement arm of both explicitly
racist and tacitly discriminatory norms and laws.”
❏ “Racial disparities refer to objective differences that exist in the real
world. The report uses the term racial disparity to denote outcomes
that differ by race or ethnicity.”
 ❏ “Racially biased behaviors may arise from racial animus, statistical
prediction, or features of situations that facilitate differential treatment
based on group membership.”

Question 3:
❏ What are Police taught to do when presented with a
dangerous situation?
❏ “There is no single, universally agreed-upon definition of use of force.
The International Association of Chiefs of Police has described use of
force as the "amount of effort required by police to compel compliance
by an unwilling subject.”
❏ “Law enforcement officers should use only the amount of force
necessary to mitigate an incident, make an arrest, or protect
themselves or others from harm. The levels, or continuum, of force
police use include basic verbal and physical restraint, less-lethal force,
and lethal force.”
❏ “There is no national database of officer-involved shootings or incidents
in which police use excessive force. Most agencies keep such records,
but no mechanism exists to produce a national estimate.”
❏ “[...] a common argument is that some of the training overestimates the
danger of interacting with black suspects relative to other groups.”
❏ “Many states do not require a satisfactory number of hours in
fundamental (e.g., scenario-based, on the ground) tactical training. [...]
departments should implement training policies that have explicit
standards for oversight throughout the entire chain of command, to
help build a culture of accountability.”
❏ “what we’re going to do is, we’re gonna teach you how to do it right
and we’re gonna hold you accountable, up and down the chain of
command.”
❏ “A key function of the police is upholding law and order. Police
members have a right and obligation to defend themselves and protect
others, exercising force only where necessary, in a reasonable manner
and in proportion to the perceived threat. The law demands that police
personnel be accountable for their actions when using force in a
 democratic society: This unit will deal with the psychological and
technical aspects of defending oneself and others.”
❏ ‘Law enforcement is normally achieved without any danger to police
personnel or other citizens. However, the police occasionally encounter
persons who will use violence in order to evade detection and
prosecution. In some cases, police members are killed or wounded by
offenders who take and use a firearm. Therefore, armed police staff
must know basic techniques for weapon use and handling, and how to
regain control of a firearm that was taken from them. This unit deals
mainly with the technical ways of handling weapons, but cannot and
should not be separated from the psychological aspects of weapon
use.”

Question 4:
❏ What is the psychological reaction when someone feels
threatened? What chemicals and emotions do they feel?
❏ “When an individual encounters a potential threat, the body
engages in a series of automatic physiological processes in
response to the threat. During a physiological stress
response, the sympathetic nervous system (SNS) is activated,
and the parasympathetic nervous system (PNS), responsible
for calming and stabilizing the body, is withdrawn.”
❏ “During fight or flight, perceptual distortions in sensory
information can occur. Sensory distortions include changes
in vision, sense of time, and a narrowing of auditory
information. Vision is compromised in three ways: reduced
peripheral vision, distance-only eyesight, and forced
binocular vision. Reduced peripheral vision, also known as
“tunnel vision,” is caused by restricted blood flow to the eyes
and eye muscle contractions.”
❏ ‘Even trained officers are at risk of having a fight or flight
response and experiencing the associated perceptual
distortions.”
❏ “We all react to trauma in different ways, experiencing a wide
range of physical and emotional reactions. There is no “right”
or “wrong” way to think, feel, or respond, so don’t judge your
own reactions or those of other people. Your responses are
NORMAL reactions to ABNORMAL events.”
❏ You can have many ways to react to stress and trauma they
include: replaying in memory, nightmares, flashbacks, anger,
sadness, guilt, numbness, difficulty trusting, being on edge,
feeling weak or inadequate, difficulty sleeping, and loss in
sexual desire.
❏ Fight or flight is the most common way people respond to
dangerous situations, although police may act to defend
people and assess the threat police still react like human and
it takes extreme willpower to override this function in your
brain.
❏ “Social defense theory suggests that we ought to
acknowledge the effects of other people around us on our
responses to threats and on our ability to prevail dicey
challenges. Specifically, SDT proposes that some people are
more perceptive of threat-related cues and tend to detect
threats quicker and more accurately than others.”
❏ “For example, secure individuals endorse greater prosocial
and task-oriented leadership motivations and lower self-
enhancing and self-reliance motivations than their more
insecure counterparts.”
Bibliography:

Friedersdorf, Conor. “A Police Department's Secret Formula for

Judging Danger.” The Atlantic, Atlantic Media Company, 20
Jan. 2016, www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/01/a-
police-departments-secret-formula-for-judging-
danger/423642/.

Anonymous. “An Overview of Police Academy Training .” Study.com, Study.com, 13

Sept. 2019,
study.com/articles/Police_Officer_An_Overview_of_Police_Academy_Training.html.

“Focus on Ethics: Rethinking Ethics in Law Enforcement.” FBI, FBI, 1 Oct. 2011,
leb.fbi.gov/articles/focus/focus-on-ethics-rethinking-ethics-in-law-enforcement.

Friedersdorf, Conor. “A Police Department's Secret Formula for Judging Danger.” The
Atlantic, Atlantic Media Company, 20 Jan. 2016,
www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/01/a-police-departments-secret-formula-for-
judging-danger/423642/.

“Read ‘Proactive Policing: Effects on Crime and Communities’ at NAP.edu.” National

Academies Press: OpenBook, www.nap.edu/read/24928/chapter/9.

Stoughton, Seth. “How Police Training Contributes to Avoidable Deaths.” The Atlantic,
Atlantic Media Company, 12 Dec. 2014,
www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/12/police-gun-shooting-training-
ferguson/383681/.

Weir, Kirsten. “Policing in Black and White .” Monitor on Psychology, American

Psychological Association, 2016, www.apa.org/monitor/2016/12/cover-policing.
https://nij.ojp.gov/topics/articles/overview-police-use-force

https://www.usccr.gov/pubs/2018/11-15-Police-Force.pdf

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/2158244016638708