Randall Evans

ENG 123
Prof. Alzen
Fall 2016
Research Proposal
Research Proposal
Racial profiling is an epidemic in America, and it has seeped into other issues that are
formative in shaping how minorities are treated in this country. I believe that racial profiling
incidents and occurrences can be avoided with implicit bias training, to ensure that police
officers do not operate with these prejudices. According to an article written in the National
Initiative for Building Community Trust and Justice, In the context of criminal justice and
community safety, implicit bias has been shown to have significant influence in the outcomes of
interactions between police and citizens This is very important and lays the foundational work
of the reformation that is needed in the criminal justice system, the most important thing to
ponder is how significant are theses incidents that seem to be occurring with great frequency.
This year 914 people have been killed by law enforcement which is only 21 fewer than the year
2015, which a was mind boggling 991 people who were killed by law enforcement.
Experts are working together to find better tests that may lead to answers about why this is
occurring to minorities more than other races that are not minorities.

A team of Stanford graduate researchers by the names of Camelia Simiolu, Sam CorbettDavis and assistant professor of management science and engineering Sharad Goel, developed a
third entirely new measurement called the threshold test. The researchers show that this new
measure offers a statistically rigorous way to quantify how suspicious officers initiate a search.
For example, officers did conducts searchers when there was a 15 percent probability of findings
drugs and weapons or drugs, or was a 5 percent inkling enough? They correlated these threshold
assessments to the race or ethnicity of the subjects across the dataset of 4.5 million vehicle
stops. Our threshold test suggests that officers apply a double standard when deciding whom to
search, with black and Hispanic drivers searched on the basis of less evidence than whites and
Asians said Simiolu, adding We consistently observe this this pattern of behavior across the
largest 100 police departments in the state While looking at empirical data such as this you can
draw the conclusion the that things such as the threshold and implicit bias tests are necessary in
order identify the continued unethical practice of law enforcement. This is simply unacceptable
the numbers and statistics are revealing of the state of law enforcement, and the criminal justice
system in America.
According the Joscha Legewie, an assistant sociology professor at Yale University he
outlines the issues of racial profiling, and race relations in America in his article, Racial Profiling
and the Use of Force in Police Stops: How Local Events Trigger Periods of Increased
Discrimination. Racial profiling and the disproportionate use of police force are controversial
political issues. I design a quasi experiment using data from 3.9 million time and geocoded
pedestrian stops in New York City the findings show that two fatal shootings of police officers
by black suspects increased the use of police force against blacks substantially in the days after

the shootings. Aside from the importance for the debate on racial profiling and police use of the
force, this research reveals a general set of processes where events create intergroup conflict,
foreground stereotypes, and trigger discriminatory responses. (379)
Racial discrimination and racial profiling is an problem that arose centuries ago, and
shaped how law enforcement is practiced. There is legislation as well that was passed as a result
and was the direct causation of this problem, their are many court cases that made racial
discrimination and profiling from law enforcement easier to justify. These cases include Terry v.
Ohio (1968) which was the Supreme Courts first step to sanction racial profiling it was this
decision that developed the reasonable suspicion standard which is also considered the stopand-frisk rule. The Court, held that the Fourth Amendments prohibition on unreasonable
searches and seizures is not violated when a police officer has reasonable suspicion. The
United States v. Brignoni-Ponce (1975) might seem on the surface to be an anti-racist decision, a
good step in Fourth Amendment law. The Court ruled against law enforcement on the grounds
that it violated the Fourth Amendment for stopping a vehicle solely on the basis that the driver
looked Mexican.
Laws of this magnitude had major implications, and helped shape the way police searches are
conducted. The last important Supreme Court decision is Whren v. United States (1996) which
unanimously sanctioned racial profiling by allowing police officers to make pretext stops
wherein an officer pulls over a motorist for a traffic violation with the specific intention of
hunting for drugs.

The more I researched the more I realized the overwhelming need for more adequate and
reasonable solutions to be purposed. There has been moves made and legislation proposed by
President Obama to combat this problem, according to Meg Stalcup professor at the University
of Ottawa and Charles Hahn of the University of Washington they stated in their article 3In
December 2014, President Obama proposed $263 million for police training and body cameras,
through a partnership program in which states would match what they received in public
funding. The actual congressional appropriations budget for FY2016 whittled this down to $25
million for the cameras, but states were already working on their own funding, and the number of
pilot programs skyrocketed at agencies around the country. Larger law enforcement agencies
could and could and did move faster than smaller ones, so that in 2016 95 percent of major cities
and countries reported that they were using body cameras or planned to. They hoped that videos
would resolve discrepancies between witnesses, give lie to false claims, and protect officers from
spurious accusations. This was a huge step by the Obama administration, to combat the violence
and unrest this issue has caused.
The article also said this As these cycles of crisis illustrate, violent incidents between
members of the public are not new. What changed in the first decade of the 21st century is the
the cameras and social media became prevalent enough among cell phone-wielding citizens and
in official use by police departments, other parts of government, and businesses, to generate
ambient surveillance and thereby a greatly intensified mediated visibility. A loosely
coordinated camera infrastructure, turned policing into a highly visibility occupation. (486)
This observation made by Professor Stalcup and Professor Hahn is an interesting one, as social
media and technological advances have been made they are comparing this rise to prominence in

the way we survey and monitor things around us. This is an startling fact that due to the killings
that have occurred the last few years by the police in cases like Tamara Rice, Eric Garner , and
Mike Brown in Missouri to name a few; more than often the court of opinion has been very
critical of the practices and ethics that law enforcement agencies across the country seem to
operate with.
Another proposed method in order to initiate reformation in the criminal justice system is
implicit bias training for law enforcement as described by Destiny Peery in an article written for
Northwestern University states Implicit bias training, the new favorite reform effort, is one of
the least investigated of those proposals. The goal of these trainings is simple: to make police
officers aware of their automatic, nonconscious stereotypes, such as the stereotype that all young
Black men are criminals, in order to overcome these biases, improving community relations and
policing efficacy. Implicit bias trainings, which seem to focus on raising awareness of
nonconscious or implicit biases, often do so without situating those biases alongside explicit
biases, systemic or institutional biases, and other issues that are likely to swamp any effects of
implicit bias awareness-raising. In other words, if were not confronting the ways the police
culture or the criminal justice system or media representations are biased against certain groups,
awareness of implicit biases will do little to prevent racial bias in policing or society more
broadly. Many researchers who study implicitly biases for a living, including the creators of
the primary implicit bias measure, the Implicit Association Test (IAT), caution against seeing
implicit bias as the newest one-size-fits-all approach to solving issues of bias and diversity.
These researchers argue that implicit bias is helpful to the extent that it adds to our toolkit of
understanding how bias operates, but research has not progressed to the point of suggesting

concrete long-term ways to eradicate these biases. The IAT test and the implicit bias training in
the article that Ms. Peery speaks of is promising but inconclusive and ultimately, the
implementation is simply not enough to measure in order to conclude whether this implicit bias
is effective in its administration.
But aside from the academic and scholarly approach to this argument, to my research the
more I researched the more I felt that this issue was about such much more than color of your
skin justifying the treatment that is received by law enforcement it is and always will be about
the humanity we show for another. The Trayvon Martin case is the perfect example, of this Mr.
Zimmerman felt threatened he was uneasy and felt unsafe and instead of looking into the
situation and allowing himself clarity of what what he had thought he saw, he allowed his fear to
justify the murder of Trayvon Martin. In the distinctive moment, his fear and unwillingness to
deal with the situation in a reasonable outweighed the importance of my human life. The moment
one life is more important another is the moment we are lost and are capable of what we did not
even know was possible, it is the empathy that we show one another that keeps us from crossing
that line that keeps us making the monumental decision that changes another persons lives for
better Christ was the shinning example of that for us in the way he lived is life. Jesus was the son
of man lived a life without sin, knew no sin and yet he died so we can for another, he died so we
might become the righteousness of God.
Jesus lived modestly he did not live constantly proclaiming he was better than anyone
else because he was the son of Man, he came and walked humbly among of us. I aspire to that
level of selflessness , that I valued someone's life as much as own that I value them as God views

us and that I would treat them like that you want to be treated. Jeremiah 17:9 9: The heart is
deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked, Who can know it?. 10: I, The Lord search the
heart, test the mind Even give every man according to his ways According to the fruit of his
doings. That is the key no man is good no not one we are weak, prone to make mistakes prone
to live for ourselves only he can give us that desire to be better than ourselves. So what? In
conclusion racial profiling is complex and their many reasons why minorities are discriminated
against than people who arent, but the reality is all you can do is hope in the promise of implicit
bias training, hope that cops do not need body cameras to accompany them on arrests and lastly,
that African Americans and minorities are not dehumanized as criminals but seen as humans, but
starts with valuing one anothers life as we do our own.