Study: Why Unarmed Black People Get Shot By Police

We all know that studies have consistently shown Black people are stopped, searched, harassed, arrested, shot and brutalized by police disproportionately compared to other racial groups in the U.S., especially white people. Even as fewer Americans in general are experiencing contact with police officers (according to data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics), racial disparities in arrests, use-of-force incidents and police misconduct still persist. One statistic that even the most white conservatives can’t wrap their bigoted “but, but, but, Black-on-Black crime” brains around is the fact that Black people are more than three times more likely to be shot by a police officer while unarmed than our Caucasian counterparts.

Well, a recent study offers a possible explanation for why even Black people who aren’t carrying weapons are vulnerable to extrajudicial execution:

Apparently, anti-Black stereotypes have white people and cops imagining things that aren’t there.

From Andre Hill to Stephon Clark to Kilyn Lewis to Rekia Boyd to Donovan Lewis — countless Black people have been killed because police officers mistook a cellphone or pen for a firearm, or at least that’s the excuse they give.

Well, a new brain-imaging study from researchers at Columbia University suggests that at least part of the problem is that racist stereotypes can infiltrate the brain’s visual system, causing cops and people who call cops to see guns where guns don’t exist when a Black suspect is involved.

From Medical X Press:

These stereotypes transiently distort how the brain quite literally sees a harmless object. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and cutting-edge neural decoding techniques, the researchers found that when participants saw everyday graspable objects like a wrench or drill after briefly viewing a Black man’s face, object-processing regions in the brain shifted their neural representation to more closely resemble that of a weapon.

Participants were also asked to sort images, identifying them as either weapons or tools. They consistently showed milliseconds of delay in categorizing tools as tools rather than as weapons when the image was immediately followed by a Black man’s face, indicating an initial unconscious tendency to perceive them as weapons.

The researchers then specifically linked this weapon identification bias to the shifts in the brain’s visual system they observed: The more that test subjects’ brains shifted toward a weapon reaction when they saw a tool followed by a Black man’s face, the longer the delay they experienced before successfully resolving the tool as a tool, not a weapon.

In some cases, particularly when responding very quickly, subjects made full-blown errors such that tool images followed by a Black man’s face were misidentified as weapons altogether.

“Our findings demonstrate that the stereotypes we hold can alter the brain’s visual representation of an object, distorting what we see to fit our biased expectations,”  said Jon Freeman, an associate professor of psychology at Columbia who led the study and published it in the journal Nature Communications.

It should be noted that all racism is likely a result of mental programming, so a person isn’t less racist just because negative stereotypes have infiltrated their brains through no fault of their own. (Actually, it’s probably their fault for suddenly believing everything they see in the media when it comes to negative images of Black people.) Still, researchers in this study believe their findings could lead to positive change by reprogramming the brain’s processing of visual perceptions, particularly in split-second timeframes. In fact, the researchers for this study are planning to explore such rewiring strategies in future studies.

More from Medical X Press:

For instance, repeatedly pairing images of Black men with everyday tools rather than weapons could retrain the visual system, weakening the automatic bias to see a weapon where none exists.

Counterintuitively, the opposite may also be true: much like how the eyes adjust after staring into bright light, prolonged exposure to Black-weapon pairings might fatigue the bias itself, allowing neutral objects to be perceived more accurately. The team is planning to explore which possible remedies yield the greatest success.

“We’re eager to build on this research by exploring new interventions that might recalibrate biased visual perceptions,” Freeman said, noting that traditional bias-reduction strategies have fallen short.

“Our findings suggest a new direction: targeting not just the stereotypes people hold, but also the visual processes that shape how we see others. If we can change split-second perceptual distortions, we may be able to mitigate these kinds of consequential misjudgments in high-stakes situations under stress and uncertainty.”

Hey, any research that might result in fewer unarmed Black people being shot dead by fearful, racist and trigger-happy police officers is welcome — especially at a time when a certain sitting president is hellbent on weaponizing the military to police predominantly Black cities.

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