Tag Archives: jurisdiction

Racial ‘Hierarchy of Bias’ Drives Decision to Shoot Armed, Unarmed Suspects, CU-Boulder Study Finds

Police officers and students exhibit an apparent “hierarchy of bias” in making a split-second decision whether to shoot suspects who appear to be wielding a gun or, alternatively, a benign object like a cell phone, research conducted by the University of Colorado Boulder and San Diego State University has found.

Both the police and student subjects were most likely to shoot at blacks, then Hispanics, then whites and finally, in a case of what might be called a positive bias, Asians, researchers found. (more…)

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Canadian Police Agencies Suppressing Data on Race, Says Criminology Study

*Data essential for creating fair policies*

While only 20 per cent of Canada’s police forces have an explicit policy against reporting the race of victims and accused persons, criminologists from the University of Toronto and Nipissing show that the majority of police departments do not report race in practice.

The study, by Akwasi Owusu-Bempah, a PhD candidate at the University of Toronto’s Centre for Criminology, and Paul Millar, an associate professor at Nipissing University’s School of Criminology and Criminal Justice,  is entitled Whitewashing Criminal Justice in Canada: Preventing Research through Data Suppression and appears in the current issue of the Canadian Journal of Law and Society. (more…)

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