Is it possible to rid police officers of bias?

The killing of George Floyd by police officers in Minneapolis three months ago and the shooting of Jacob Blake by police in Wisconsin have led the US to a period of reckoning. As thousands have marched in the streets to protest against racial inequality, many others have also been forced to ask some difficult questions about their levels of prejudice.

While some people mistake racism as being only overt prejudice, there is another crucial component that affects our decisions and actions towards others: implicit bias. An implicit bias is any prejudice that has formed unintentionally and without our direct knowledge – and it can often contradict our explicit beliefs and behaviours. Usually, it reflects a mixture of personal experience, attitudes around us as we have grown up, and our wider exposure to society and culture – including the books we read, television we watch and news we follow.

Many police departments in the US have pointed to schemes aimed at tackling implicit bias as evidence of their attempts to root out racism from their ranks. It is an appealing approach – police forces face many challenges when it comes to tackling racism among their officers. Powerful unions and state laws can protect police officers from investigations into misconduct, while officers who have been fired or have resigned in the past are often rehired by other forces that may be unaware of their career history. Dealing with these systemic issues often requires major structural and institutional change, while training individuals to recognise their own unconscious biases can seem relatively easy to implement by comparison.