'An excuse to racially profile': How Florida trains police on bias

[teach1st]

‘An excuse to racially profile’: How Florida trains police on bias
Tampa Bay Times, 9/8/2022

Thousands of police officers across Florida have taken state training to educate them about discrimination, such as racial profiling, during traffic stops.

But eight experts who reviewed the online training for the Tampa Bay Times found that it failed to teach officers to understand bias, shifted blame for disparate ticketing from police onto people of color and encouraged conduct that could lead to discriminatory policing.

The Florida Department of Law Enforcement slideshow told officers that traffic stops preceded “nearly every serious race riot in the United States” but provided no details about the police brutality that accompanied the stops. It inaccurately described police interactions that led to riots in Miami and Los Angeles. It cited statistics from nearly 20 years ago that showed higher public confidence in police than is felt today.

And it took roughly 25 minutes to flip through the slides and complete a quiz that one expert called “embarrassingly simple.”

https://www.tampabay.com/investigations/2022/09/08/an-excuse-to-racially-profile-how-florida-trains-police-on-bias/

No paywall: https://archive.ph/o7Dtg

[multigraincracker]

1. Training course for

gang members.

[orthoclad]

2. "Training" won't stop

Klansmen and ilk.

Police forces should be required to use something like a lie-detector test, to observe reactions to images of minorities mixed into other images. Flag the people who react negatively. Psychologists know how to design these tests.

People of good will, like myself, can be trained to recognize their implicit bias. I still catch myslef doing it, but I WANT to learn. Bigots will just check off the answers on a quiz that they know will let them through. They'll teach each other how to game the system. They do it now.

We have to be really careful about the people we empower to exercise violence.