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

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