Black Lives Matter Resources

Using a simple videogame, the effect of ethnicity on shoot/don’t shoot decisions was examined. African American or White targets, holding guns or other objects, appeared in complex backgrounds. Participants
were told to “shoot” armed targets and to “not shoot” unarmed targets. In Study 1, White participants made the correct decision to shoot an armed target more quickly if the target was African American than if he was White, but decided to “not shoot” an unarmed target more quickly if he was White. Study 2 used a shorter time window, forcing this effect into error rates. Study 3 replicated Study 1’s effects and showed that the magnitude of bias varied with perceptions of the cultural stereotype and with levels of contact, but not with personal racial prejudice. Study 4 revealed equivalent levels of bias among both African American and White participants in a community sample. Implications and potential underlying mechanisms are discussed

This essay seeks to clarify conceptually the common structure uniting many of the incidents in the recent crescendo of police killings of people of color, going beyond their shared racist framework. In tandem with the "new Jim Crow" that Michelle Alexander describes, these killings pertain to the role of the police as the selection mechanism enforcing a new color line. The author focuses on the killings of Oscar Grant, Alan Blueford, Trayvon Martin, and Troy Davis. When connected by their common threads, these killings reveal aspects of the cultural structure of racialization in the United States. The essay concludes by looking at the politicolegal goal of this epidemic of killings.

What, if any, changes have occurred in the nation’s police departments 21 years after the
Rodney King beating? To answer this question, this study examined findings provided by the
National Police Misconduct Statistics and Reporting Project (NPMSRP). An additional goal of
this study was to examine how the public generally perceive police and how race and racism
shape this discourse. To answer this secondary question, we examined narratives provided by 36
contributors to the NPMSRP site. The following two questions were foundational to this study:
(1) What do findings from the National Police Misconduct Statistics and Reporting Project
(NPMSRP) suggest about the rate of police brutality in America? (2) How do individuals
perceive the police department, and what implications do these perceptions hold for Black men
in America? In general, fatalities at the hands of police are higher than they are for the general
public. Grounded theory analysis of the data revealed individuals perceive members of law
enforcement in the following ways: (a) Contempt for Law Enforcement; (b) Suspicion of Law
Enforcement; (c) Law Enforcement as Agents of Brutality; and (d) Respect for Law
Enforcement. Supporting qualitative data are presented in connection with each of the
aforementioned themes.

This paper considers how the politics of security and order are also a politics of aesthetics encompassing practical struggles over the authority and regulation of ways of looking and knowing. To do this, the paper considers the visual economies of police power in the United States by engaging what has been called the “war on cameras”, or the police crackdown on citizen photographers who “shoot back” or “stare down” police. Despite US law generally endorsing the right for citizens to film or photograph on-duty public police officers, in recent years hundreds of cases have been documented where police have confiscated or smashed cameras, deleted film, or intimidated and threatened those wielding an unauthorized camera. For us, this crackdown on the unauthorized stare is a theoretically and politically insightful case study—a diagnostic moment—for engaging more openly and starkly the assumptions underpinning police power more generally, particularly the ways police power aims to actively fabricate social order by eradicating anything it deems a threat in the name of security. Ultimately, we argue that the violence holstered, literally and figuratively, on the hip of modern policing is inseparable from an attendant politics of staring and visuality that further extends and perpetuates state power’s aim of pacification.