Over the weekend I happened to catch a snippet of Ira Glass' show Cops See It Differently. The bit that I caught was about an implicit bias training class conducted by the Las Vegas Police Department.
This is near and dear to my heart because I've done this in the corporate world. The class I taught was called Microinequities. It's very similar.
It isn't hard to teach in the corporate world though you do initially receive eye rolls and many people don't feel like they need to be there. I can imagine it being more difficult teaching to police officers.
Let me introduce you to Training Officer Marla Stevens. Her comments on how she does this are some of the best I've seen.
1. Use statistics
According to This American Life, and I encourage you to listen to the interview or at least Act Two: Comey Don't Play That, here is how Officer Stevens begins her class:
I talk about how we got to this place. And I tell them, you know, this started with the officer-involved shootings that we had in 2011. The fact is, did we shoot more unarmed black men than we did white? Absolutely, we did. And we put those numbers up there and show them to our officers and say, these are the stats. You can't argue with those numbers.
Statistics. She starts with statistics. Statistics are impartial. They are non-accusatory. They simply illustrate a problem.
Officer Stevens used specific statistics from the 2011 Las Vegas police department. You want to use statistics as close to the people you are talking to as you can get. If there isn't a specific challenge you're dealing with you might want to talk about the number of people in prison, or the unemployment rate difference between Caucasians and African-Americans, or the likelihood that an employer would interview someone based on their name sounding Caucasian.
Michelle Alexander's book "The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Color-Blindedness" compiles some of the best statistics I've seen on incarceration.
Again, the point in using statistics is, as Officer Stevens says: "You can't argue with those numbers." (And yes, I know some people will and do. If you approach people in the right manner, however, you can usually win them over.)
2. Start with a non-inflammatory bias
Officer Stevens says her classes are usually filled with truck-loving men. So she talks about what divides them: Ford vs. Chevy.
It's not hard to get people into a discussion about whether one thing or another is better. Sports is another great topic. Or you could use anything your audience is passionate about. I would stay away from politics or religion, however. Start with something innocuous.
Ford vs. Chevy is perfect for a mostly male audience of police officers.
3. Acknowledge your own biases
Next, she starts talking about more personal biases, acknowledging her own.
You want to be on the same side fighting against bias. What you don't want is to be in a head-to-head argument with someone that looks like "You're biased!"
The way to do this is by starting with you and acknowledging some of your own biases.
When I taught the class, I spoke about how I used to be more dismissive of suggestions made by women colleagues. I didn't even realize I was doing it until a friend of mine called me on it after he thought I'd shot down a really good idea far too early. "You should have at least given her a chance to flesh it out more," he said. Later, when I took my first class like this, I thought back to how I'd acted.
I have also talked about my own response to my implicit bias test results that showed I have a strong bias towards Caucasians. I didn't like the results. But it was hard to disagree with them.
I'm not the only one.
70% of people who take the test show some implicit bias towards white people. This is even true for some African-Americans.
Does this mean I'm racist? No. It means I have an unconscious bias that I need to consciously work to overcome. You can learn to overcome unconscious biases with your conscious mind. But first you have to be aware of them.
I strongly encourage people to take the implicit bias test because it tends to open some eyes to a slightly different way of thinking about racism. Or any -ism for that matter.
4. Spend the majority of your time establishing the idea of implicit bias before talking about race (or gender or sexual orientation for that matter)
Officer Stevens:
And if you can't be honest enough with yourself to say, why am I really stopping this guy? Am I stopping this guy because I just watched him jaywalk and there's something not right here? Or are you stopping him because he's a black guy in a white neighborhood? Be honest with yourself. Ask yourself those questions. And if you have that bias, you need to recognize it. That's the first thing, is recognizing that you have it.
Robyn Semien, from
This American Life, pipes in and suggests these are hard questions she's asking cops to face.
Officer Stevens:
And if you can't fix it, then maybe you're not in the right line of work. You know, maybe this isn't for you. I'm not afraid to say that to somebody, either. Look, I'm at an age now, I just don't care. I mean, what's right is right, and what's wrong is wrong. And if you want to sit around and say, oh, this is all [BLEEP], well, maybe this isn't the place for you.
Officer Stevens can say these things at a later point in the class because 1) she's established implicit bias, 2) she's established that we all have it, and 3) she's a cop able to talk to cops.
5. The other thing that helps is that Officer Stevens is a cop
She's third-generation police and has been on the force for 15 years. She knows how to talk to cops. She knows their language.
She can also point out how the public has implicit biases against police officers:
Do they have stereotypes about us? They most certainly do. Which, you know, it's aggravating, too, so turn that around. You know, if you don't like that being thrown on you by people that don't know you, how do you think that people on the street feel when you prejudge them and you don't like them either? It's the same thing. And it's like beating your head against the wall, trying to get both sides to understand this concept. You know? It really is.
If you're not comfortable having conversations with people about implicit bias, you might want to think about whether you should be having them. If you're calling people racists, you might want to ask yourself if this is helping solve things and raise awareness or is it simply polarizing someone against you.
If you are more concerned with being right about your pop-psychiatry diagnosis of racism in somebody else than in helping people consciously overcome implicit bias, you might want to consider your own motivations and biases.
If it helps, find someone who is better able to talk to the people you wish to reach.
If I were asked to teach implicit bias to police officers, I would ask for a partner from the police force who could speak from his own experience and raise the credibility of the class in the eyes of the force. I would not compromise on this request. In order to succeed, I would insist on someone with credibility in the eyes of police officers in that class as critical for success.
If you're willing to think a little differently though, you can have conversations like this with people you know. But you have to keep in mind your relationship first. Think about introducing the concept of implicit bias gradually, as Officer Stevens does. Back off if you feel you've pushed a little too hard and let things sink in. And ask yourself the question, do you want to be right or do you want someone on your side?
Kudos to the Las Vegas Police Department for putting together such a good program with the right people, like Officer Stevens.
6. Believe it or not, police, because of their training are probably less likely to make mistakes based on implicit biases than average people
Psychologist Josh Correll has conducted some of the key research on implicit racial biases in police shootings.
He's found that police officers are more likely to see images of black men as threatening yet they usually make the correct decision whether to shoot or not shoot. The average person is more likely to shoot a black man with a wallet and less likely to shoot a white man with a gun.
7. A few other tips
The comments that I've received after teaching classes like Microinequities tend to look like this:
I didn't want to come to this class. I thought it would be a waste of time. Instead, I learned how my biases might be affecting people on my team.
Not everyone sees it this way of course. But if you do it right, scores and comments on the class are generally quite positive. Especially because people tend to come in with such different expectations. They tend to come in thinking you're going to lecture them about racism. They don't expect to talk about implicit bias.
A few other tips:
- This is a personal strategy, not a media strategy. Media strategies take a different approach. Both are needed. It's important to recognize, however, that what may work in media, may not work well at a personal level.
- A small win is a win. Change takes time.
- If you're not comfortable having conversations like Officer Stevens, you may want to think about your motivation and whether you would be doing more harm than good.
- Being able to talk about your own biases goes a long way. In this way, you are not accusing. You are saying: "We all have biases."
- Getting people more information is not going to help. You have to guide people.
- This is not easy to do. It took me a year to learn. And years more to get better. This is why I share tips and seek to learn from others who do it well (like Officer Stevens) whenever possible.
- This is not an academic argument. You want to both be on the same side fighting for conscious recognition of implicit biases
If you can show people a different way to look at things, it's easier to bring about change.
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David Akadjian is the author of The Little Book of Revolution: A Distributive Strategy for Democracy.