Tag: Racial Bias

Detroit Area Police Department Used Images of Black Men for Shooting Target Practice

If the police still use those targets there should have been an explanation about the targets and its purpose or how there are used. Those targets have been in use for as long as I can remember. This could mean for 30 years. I would like to know the origin on how they were designed and why many police departments used them. They may have been free through the federal or state government. There was a dog, female hostage, and a white male with a chain or a knife

My PD adapted the targets by covering the weapon with other objects like a phone, wallet, other weapon, or non-weapon object. This way when the target would present you never new if it was a threat. The officer would have to scan to see if the target had a weapon. This made officers constantly disregard any stereotypes and focus on hands and if the target was armed with a weapon. This improved training. This should have been explained to the boy scout group.

Boy Scouts discovered the targets, some of them pierced with bullet holes, while touring a police department headquarters just outside Detroit.
— Read on www.vice.com/en/article/4axdp9/detroit-police-black-men-shooting-range-targets

Racist Policing And Inappropriate Use Of Force: Aurora Police, Fire Rescue Routinely Violate State And Federal Law, AG Finds | Colorado Public Radio

Colorado will require both agencies to overhaul rules around use of force, ketamine and hiring practices.

— Read on www.cpr.org/2021/09/15/racist-policing-and-inappropriate-use-of-force-aurora-police-fire-rescue-routinely-violate-state-and-federal-law-ag-finds/

There is a link to the AG’s report available for download.

Center for Policing Equity National Justice Database Digital Report

The problem is there isn’t a report released. You can go to HERE to see the report, but it is a confusing webpage filled with charts claiming racial bias. Nothing is explained how the data was collected or analyzed. It doesn’t show the number so the calculations can be verified. None of the results indicate whether or not they are statistically significant.

So what currently exits is a report where there is a claim of biases that gets reported in the news and there is no evidence or documentation to support the supposed results of the study. Why was the official report shelved?

“A long-awaited analysis of San Diego Police Department data, conducted by an outside think tank, was released Thursday and offers a familiar picture of the disparities that people of color face when encountering law enforcement. But the police chief and the report’s authors have said they don’t believe it’s appropriate to attribute such disparities to officer bias.

SDPD has pushed back against previous studies of this nature, contending that the researchers were either politically motivated or didn’t consider the full picture. The new report doesn’t just compare police stops, searches and use of force against local population demographics, it took internal and external factors into consideration, including crime rates, poverty rates, the behavior of community members and individual officers.”