• Reaction time. Her findings reveal that officers took “significantly longer” before they shot black suspects than white suspects. Civilians and soldiers in the study also took longer to shoot blacks, but the hesitation by officers was roughly twice as long as that of the civilians. The delay before shooting was particularly noticeable in the most complex scenarios.
In contrast, there was “no significant difference in reaction time between shooting Hispanic suspects and White suspects,” James reports. “Our primary finding that participants were more hesitant to shoot Black suspects than White or Hispanic suspects is in direct contrast to prior experimental findings that participants are significantly quicker to shoot Black suspects,” she writes.
• Decision errors. Where officers made errors in James’s study, they were “less likely to shoot unarmed Black suspects than unarmed White suspects,” she writes. Indeed, “we calculated that participants were 25 times less likely to shoot unarmed Black suspects than they were to shoot unarmed White suspects.” Again, this was a significantly greater multiple than was recorded for other groups in the study.
Unarmed suspects were most likely to be shot in journeyman scenarios (the most difficult), and there was “no significant difference between the likelihood of shooting unarmed Hispanic suspects and unarmed White suspects,” the researchers found.
Moreover, the officers did not fail to shoot armed white suspects any more frequently than they failed to shoot threatening suspects who were black or Hispanic. “These findings are also in direct contrast to [earlier researchers] who found that participants were more likely to shoot unarmed Black suspects and fail to shoot armed White suspects,” James noted.
These results revealed that racial bias did exist in the officers’ reactions to the scenarios, James writes — ”but in the opposite direction that would be expected from prior experimental studies.” Her tests “showed significant evidence of bias favoring Black suspects, rather than discriminating against them.”
A “potential explanation,” she speculates, may be a “behavioral ‘counter-bias’ “ or “administrative effect”; that is, an extra caution by officers against impulsive reactions to black suspects because of “real-world concern over discipline, liability, or public disapproval.”
