F
ollowing George Floyd’s kill-
ing late last month, the news
that former police officer Derek
Chauvin had been arrested and recently
charged with second-degree murder was
no doubt a positive development. Many
prominent national figures, including
former presidential candidate Sen. Amy
Klobuchar, D-Minn., have seen it as a
sign of progress and a “first step towards
justice.” Even though many, including
Mr. Floyd’s family, believe the charges
to be too minor and instead favor first-
degree murder charges for the accused,
this is a major improvement from previ-
ous cases of police brutality. For exam-
ple, a grand jury refused to even indict
former police officer Darren Wilson for
murder in the infamous 2014 shooting of
Michael Brown.
However, even if Chauvin is convicted
of all counts and imprisoned for as long
as possible, which is currently 40 years,
there is no further indication that the
senseless police violence that claimed
the lives of not only Mr. Brown and Mr.
Floyd, but many others, will end. In
2017 alone, the police killed 19 unarmed
Black men. In 2015, they killed 36 human
beings. Delivering justice alone is not
enough. Protesting and looting in the
streets alone is not enough. For there to
be real change, America’s justice system
must enact institutional reforms, specifi-
cally reforms on how police departments
train officers on how to treat Black
Americans.
In 2015, after Freddie Gray died of
fatal spinal cord injuries that the media
attributed to a ‘rough ride’ in a police
van, the comedy talk show The Daily
Show with Trevor Noah released a seg-
ment entitled “Are All Cops Racist?”
where correspondents Jordan Klepper
and Roy Wood Jr. interviewed multiple
law enforcement officials and scholars
to inquire about the source of incessant
police violence against Black Ameri-
cans. One person they spoke to, Dr.
Phillip Goff, University of California at
Los Angeles Associate Professor and
criminal justice reform expert, stood
out in his assessment of the sources of
police brutality by attributing the vio-
lence to “implicit biases” held by police
officers. These implicit biases cause the
inability for police officers to distinguish
between Black Americans as victims,
perpetrators or bystanders at a potential
crime scene and the ubiquitous harmful
stereotypes suggesting that Black people
are more likely to engage in violence or
crime. In other words, police officers
are aware of the same stereotypes that,
according to Dr. Goff, “almost all people”
have, and may know that they are incor-
rect and morally wrong. However, being
active in high-stress settings exacerbates
these biases to the point where they
become an automatic, and often deadly,
assumption of aggression that overrides
better judgment.
Dr. Goff is not the only scholar to make
this argument. An earlier study at the
University of Colorado in 2002, where
participating undergraduate students
had to identify the object white and Black
people were holding in their hands and
then decide whether or not to shoot,
backed Dr. Goff’s statements. University
of Colorado researchers found that par-
ticipants shot armed Black people quicker
and took longer intervals of time to decide
not to shoot unarmed Black subjects. Sub-
sequent studies verified these results and
suggested that “bias crept in when offi-
cers were subject to mental stress.” Even
studies dating back to as early as 2001
found that both “police officers and civil-
ians are consistently more likely to associ-
ate black faces with criminality.”
5
Thursday, June 11, 2020
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
5
OP
OPINION
ON
Identifying and eliminating implicit bias
TUHIN CHAKRABORTY | COLUMNIST
Tuhin Chakraborty can be reached at
tchakra@umich.edu
RAY AJEMIAN | COLUMNIST
I
t seems that every time we see
another display of police brutal-
ity, people argue about what the
appropriate response to unprovoked
killing should be. One man is killed,
and a hundred people who never met
him are quick to tell you that an eye
for an eye makes the world go blind,
but it’s easy to say that when you’re not
the blind one to begin with. Riots are
easy to write off as ill-meaning chaos if
you don’t understand how or why they
happen, and in a country built by riots,
that should not be the case.
Many have made up their minds
about the “why” — anger and poor
morals. This reductive view of the
Minneapolis riots isn’t a new explana-
tion, but it’s widespread to the point
that even the mayor, Jacob Frey, claims
the protest is no longer about protest-
ing, but violence. Instead, critics focus
their arguments on “why not” to riot,
citing three major reasons I’ve seen
other than simple moral outrage: the
destruction of a community, increase
in crime and a lack of relevance to the
supposed subject of protest. Here’s
why they don’t make much sense.
The “destroying your own commu-
nity” argument is probably the most
common in the discussion about Min-
neapolis. Fortunately for the rioters, a
community is not a series of buildings.
It is a population of people. This report
showcases the economic impact of the
1960s race riots showing a decline in
Black-owned property values. This
loss in property value doesn’t account
for the leaps made in civil rights dur-
ing this decade that made life more
liveable for said property owners.
And, if we are to consider economic
destruction, what are we to make of
the white flight from cities to suburbs
that helped create the climate for those
riots? Certainly, the white families who
took commerce out of cities en masse
and left them destitute played a role in
harming their former communities.
The truth is that Minneapolis riot-
ers have no intention to destroy their
own community. The buildings being
looted are in the vein of AutoZone and
Target, massive chains that aren’t spe-
cific to the city at all, while small local
businesses remain intact — while they
may have suffered some residual dam-
age — were not directly targeted. And,
as it turns out, that particular Target
has a long history with the Minneapo-
lis police, the very subject of the riot.
Another reason this point falls apart
is that many rioters aren’t part of the
community. Minnesota Gov. Tim
Walz claims 80 percent of the riot-
ers aren’t from the area, though there
isn’t any way to verify the steep statis-
tic; with protests happening all over
the country right now, including here
in Ann Arbor, it seems unlikely that
people would need to travel far to find
one. More likely is the presence of agent
provocateurs, people who try to pro-
voke others to commit a crime so that
they can be punished. Police are known
to go undercover at protests and esca-
late things — at the 2008 Democratic
National Convention protest, undercov-
er detectives staged an altercation with
the police commander which resulted
in the liberal use of pepper spray by a
cop who wasn’t in the loop and who
thought the commander was being
attacked. A similar staged arrest led to
a fight between bystanders and police
in riot gear at the 2004 Republican
National Convention protest. Sure
enough, police have repeatedly incited
unprovoked violence at the recent pro-
tests, even against who they know to be
journalists rather than protesters.
Next, riots do not lead to more
crime. Long-term changes in crime
rates are more easily tied to changes in
police behavior, and those trends aren’t
in favor of the police. For example,
Baltimore police noticed fewer crimes
after one of their officers killed Fred-
die Gray and the number of shootings
spiked drastically within the area. This
could mean that, as the article puts it,
Baltimore police “stopped noticing”
crime after the murder by one of their
own, or it could mean that their mis-
conduct caused the increase in violent
crime; neither option is flattering. After
a string of events starting with the death
of Eric Garner, the New York Police
Department staged a strike, and rather
than seeing more crime, they saw less.
The authors of the report pointed not
to deterrence by police violence or a
drop in how many crimes were report-
ed, but that “aggressively enforcing
minor legal statutes incites more severe
criminal acts.” In other words, an over-
bearing police department created the
climate for violent crime — without
them, there were fewer instances of all
but the most severe offenses.
The final condemnation of riots
is that they are irrelevant to protests
because they’re either only about
opportunistic crime or they don’t
successfully prompt change. As the
National Review author I cited puts it,
“People don’t commit arson to make a
political statement. What does burn-
ing an AutoZone even communicate
if it could be translated into politics?”
However, there is no form of protest
more profound under a capitalist econ-
omy than the redistribution of goods,
especially when unemployment rates
are reaching close to 20 percent along-
side billionaires’ profits. Legitimate
protesters use looted supplies to sup-
port the cause and their communities,
like the Minneapolis protesters tak-
ing milk to help those who had been
tear-gassed (the subsequent theft of
expensive goods was carried out by
people unrelated to the movement).
On top of this, peaceful protestors are
also among those cleaning up after
demonstrations in their community.
Meanwhile, police officers have been
seen destroying the property of oth-
ers to impede protestors. The most
pressing issue today is how capitalism
interacts with and often jeopardizes
human rights — of the dying poor in a
nation with billionaires, of sweatshops
overseas, of the pollution produced
by mass production of goods. I can
think of nothing more emblematic of
the injustice at hand than juxtaposing
those outraged by a burning AutoZone
with those outraged by the murder of
their neighbors.
As for success, there is no univer-
sal outcome, but as a queer American,
I can promise you that riots against
police were the single most effec-
tive tool for LGBTQ+ people in this
country. If people hadn’t thrown
bricks at cops at Stonewall the move-
ment would never have taken off; San
Francisco drag queens who destroyed
police cars and broke windows in 1966
were finally granted social services
and dignity. Martin Luther King Jr.’s
March on Washington got laws passed
peacefully, but the majority of Ameri-
cans disapproved of him despite his
nonviolence, even if we like to believe
he was successful because he “won
hearts by conveying respectability,” as
one civil rights activist wrote. King was
assassinated regardless of his peaceful
tactics, just like Black men are shot
whether they’re unarmed, handcuffed
or running away. The clear message
is that protest of any kind will be met
with violence and death; to derogate
protesters for breaking windows bor-
ders on cruelty.
We in Michigan should be sym-
pathetic. The 1967 Detroit Riots were
some of the biggest in American histo-
ry, and yet we forget. White protesters
storm our capitol with guns to scream
in the face of police — in a time where
distance can save lives — and leave
untouched so the same stay-at-home
order protesters can call the unarmed
people of Minneapolis “violent and
unlawful” a month later. How would
you feel if it was your brother being
arrested on live television for doing
his job, or your father choking under
someone’s knee? Would you sign a
petition, or would you riot?
Why we riot
Ray Ajemian can be reached at
rajemian@umich.edu
CASEY RHEAULT | CONTACT CARTOONIST AT CRHEAULT@UMICH.EDU
Read more at MichiganDaily.com