Police officers are trained to build these kinds of preferences in more situations than civilians, particularly in dangerous, life-threatening ones. However, they are also making decisions based on those racially biased messages. In a 2014 empirical review for Social and Personality Psychology Compass , scientists at the University of Colorado Boulder and California State University Northridge looked at 10 years’ worth of data and found “police officers use greater force (both lethal and non-lethal) when the suspect is black rather than white” and those officers “were faster to shoot armed targets when they were black (rather than white), and they were faster to choose a don’t-shoot response if an unarmed target was white (rather than black).” They were displaying an implicit bias — because their surroundings reinforced a primitive learned preference.
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