Category: Violence

Ferguson: One Year Later

Amy Novotney1 Comment

Sunday marked exactly one year since 18-year-old Michael Brown’s fatal shooting by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri. Brown’s death ignited protests and demonstrations in the St. Louis suburb, and launched a national conversation about racism and police brutality in the United States. Research conducted at the Center for Trauma Recovery at the University of Missouri-St. Louis (UMSL) has shown that members of the Ferguson community still have hope for change and progress.

Five months after Brown’s shooting, while many protests continued, the researchers collected questionnaires filled out by 287 residents of Ferguson and surrounding communities as well as 261 police officers involved in responding to the riots. UMSL psychologist Zoe Peterson shared the study’s initial results at a symposium Sunday on hope and growth in trauma recovery.

Overall, findings showed that both groups experienced significant distress from watching news coverage of the events. In addition, 25 percent of participants met DSM-5 criteria for post-traumatic stress disorder and 38 percent exceeded clinical cutoff levels for depression.

Despite the trauma, more than 80 percent of Ferguson community members were somewhat or extremely hopeful that change was possible, that the situation in their community would improve, and that these positive changes would be meaningful and enduring. Law enforcement officers, however, reported significantly less hope — only about 50 percent felt that positive change was possible and would endure. The team is now conducting additional follow-up with both groups to see how things fare a year after the event.

“What happens in the aftermath of trauma is really important to promoting growth,” said Richard Tedeschi, PhD, psychology professor at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and the symposium’s discussant. “Helping this community process this trauma and develop some kind of meaning from it is very much needed to ensure positive change endures.”

 

Psychologists Can Help Reduce Racial Profiling in Policing

Amy NovotneyLeave a comment

Psychologists know the statistic well: Although blacks constitute only 12 percent of America’s population, they represent 40 percent of the nation’s prison inmates. Stanford University social psychologist Jennifer Eberhardt, PhD, has been studying the consequences of the psychological association between race and crime for more than a decade. Her findings, which she shared Saturday during a plenary address on race and policing in America, reveal the startling ways that race influences us, even when we don’t think it does.

In one seminal study, for example, participants were subliminally primed with a series of black or white faces on a computer screen, and then watched as blurry pictures of guns and knives came into focus. Eberhardt found that participants — no matter their race — tended to recognize the weapons quicker when exposed to black faces in the primer versus white faces.

More recently, her research has shown that informing white people about the disproportionate incarceration rate of blacks makes them likely to support the expansion of harsh punitive policies, such as California’s Three Strikes Law and similar measures in other states.

Despite the pervasiveness of society’s association between blacks and crime, our behavior in response to those unconscious racial biases can be changed, Eberhardt said. Research has shown, for example, that more training — particularly in the use of firearms — can help police officers overcome racial biases.

She also pointed to the potential role of technology in addressing racial biases, noting that mandating police officer use of body cameras can help improve police relations with the public.

“We need to begin to think about this footage as data, not just as courtroom evidence,” she said. “We can look across the thousands of these videotapes to examine, in the aggregate, whether officers do indeed approach African-Americans in a different way than other groups — whether there’s a more negative tone or pitch to the voice, and whether that can predict whether the interaction is going to escalate. The footage can also be used to more fully appreciate the interactions where things go right and where officers have been able to skillfully de-escalate conflict.”

 

Psychologists Address Police Interactions with Boys and Men of Color

britneybrinkman1 Comment

Do you know that feeling when you hear something really meaningful? For me it often involves a pit in my stomach and the chills. It is not an entirely pleasant feeling, but it is a helpful reminder that something important is happening that I don’t want to miss.

Long exposure to capture the full array of police car lights. 12MP camera.

That’s the feeling I got at the beginning of the session “Working with Critical Gate Keepers to Ensure Safety and Justice for Boys and Men of Color.” I was moved right away by Dr. Christopher Liang’s passionate opening in which he described why he and Dr. Helen Neville decided to co-chair the symposium. He shared his reactions to the police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, (and other similar incidents) and called on psychologists to do more to address the epidemic of police violence against boys and men of color.

The speakers covered a range of important topics. Warren Spielberg, PhD, discussed the experiences of boys of color in school, including the fact that many are accused of cheating if they do well, are blamed for fights, and are generally described in negative ways. Many boys cope with this treatment through academic dis-identification, where they decide it is better not to care about school than to experience the emotional pain that could accompany these interactions.

Most of the panelists discussed the fact that psychologists can play a larger role in screening and training police officers to reduce bias against boys and men of color. They can work with community members to develop guidelines and use the research on prejudice reduction to train police officers. This work is often challenging and it may take years to develop relationships with police departments. Lorraine Greene, PhD, noted that “strong partnerships between police and males of color require trust and confidence to have legitimacy and justice.”

Nevertheless, the success stories shared during the symposium were inspirational and provided the audience with practical suggestions about how to do this work in our home communities. The symposium ended with a call to action—audience members were given notecards to write down our plans to put what we learned into practice in their own lives.

Change can start with us.