On Friday, 28 August, BBC.com posted an article in the Future section with the intriguing title “Can Police Bias Be Eliminated?” For those who are familiar with the structure of the BBC website, it will become clear that this is another “research by British scientists”, which is unlikely to lead to any changes, but this is not the point now. The topic is really relevant – the States are still protesting. The only question is: will these protests lead to anything and is someone really trying to defend the notorious “democracy” in the United States?
We will not separate demagoguery here at the expense of the depth and relevance of the research of British scientists, but we will go through the facts that were set out in the above article.
The murder of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis three months ago and the shooting of Jacob Blake by police in Wisconsin brought the US into a period of reckoning. [Really!]
As thousands of people took to the streets to protest racial inequality, many people were forced to ask themselves questions about the depth of their prejudice.
Some people only mistake racism for blatant bias, but there is another important component that influences our decisions and actions in relation to others: latent bias. That is, it is any bias that is formed unintentionally and on an unconscious level, and it can often contradict our explicit beliefs and behavior. [From the point of view of psychology – yes, this is also true!]
Many police departments in the United States point to schemes aimed at combating hidden bias as evidence of their efforts to eradicate racism from their ranks. This is an attractive approach – the police force faces many challenges when it comes to tackling racism among its employees.
Police departments aren’t the only ones hoping that tackling unconscious bias can lead to change. Multinational corporations such as Starbucks have introduced mandatory training on implicit bias in response to racist incidents involving their employees, and the BBC has made it mandatory for staff to take a course in unconscious bias.
We will not evaluate actions, but, as usual, we will ask a reasonable question: Why not, if you stand for BLM rights so much, not start treating them as equals at the legal and social level and thereby equalize all people, regardless of skin color , instead of again dividing people into “tolerant” and “intolerant”? Isn’t this another division of society on the basis of the next characteristic?