should that be? it was fascinating because we had no answer. my favorite was arrest all of the white people and our aclu partners were not thrilled about that position. more important, the more realistic position was a moratorium on covert stings in the cases that were being filed and prosecuted. the problem with that was that our partners in communities of color were really not enthusiastic about this. by and large, they were not supportive and there were many exceptions of this and they were by and large not supportive of a decriminalization paradigm because of a sense of not wanting to abandon the individuals and their families and the individuals out selling drugs on the streetcorners and communities and they did not want this, though. there was a sense of, if this is sch a great approach to this problem, why isn't it being done

to the white kid, right? and so, what we try to engineer with lead is a recognition that for the time being the police will be asked to deal with these issues and problems and to a significant extent their deployment will be racialized and this is a bigger problem and more longstanding pattern than we can take on with a single policy change. however? could we reduce the harm with the patterns of deployment by making it show that when the police responds what happens? it's the incredibly harmful action that destroys an individual's life and it puts greater resource at their disposal to map out a realistic drug plan that will sell drugs on the street corner to pay their rent. there are all kind of implementation challenges. this model is a very partial solution because it accepts things like raeshlized

deployment and the police contact is to inject resources into communities and populations because we don't care to do that in a more comprehensive public policy approach that is not predicated on the criminal justice system and that's problematic. >> professor richardson, if the police want to build trust in minority communities and they want to be responsive to the concerns that they have been raised by minority communities in seattle are there psychological mechanisms that have to do with people, including police officers that think about race that need to be taking into account. >> yes. we'll take lisa's, but i will expand. first, i want to quickly thank rachel and anthony barko and the nyu center on the administration of criminal law for inviting me to participate in this conversation. what i wanted to -- in response to david's question talk about is the ways in which race is

disgust. so often when this conversation or when this topic was raised and we tend to focus on issues of character. so are the police rational or are they racist when they stop african-americans or other non-whites at much higher rates than whites and is george zimmerman a big on the or is he a concerned citizen? is trayvon martin a victim or a thug in training? these are ways in which we typically discuss race and what i want to suggest is our focus race and character and conscious racial bias. we mask the ways in which we can still achieve racially disproportionate consequences and so the reason for this, in my view is something called suspicion cascades. these are the systematic and predictable errors in decision

making that occur because of the way that we all think. so i just want to talk about that very briefly. the way that our minds work, we tend to make associations between concepts in order to process information quickly. so you can imagine and i want to figure out how to use this pen every time i came across this pen. so our minds make the automatic associations and if you see the word doctor, your mind thinks hospital and other related concepts will become activated, and unfortunately, the same things occur when we think about race. so these non-conscious stereotypes affect all of us and there's research, for example, that demonstrates that police officers who think about crime automatically trigger non-conscious stereotypes of blacks and as a result of that

they pay more attention to black citizens than they do to white citizens and this can happen even if an officer is attempting not to be affected by race and if in, fact, if you tell an officer do not use race in your judgments, that will cause the association to come to the forefront of his memory and affect his behaviors even more. it's just like if i told all of you right now don't think of a white elephant. first thing you do is think about the white elephant to try to avoid thinking about it. so simply thinking about the concept of crime trigger these non-conscious biases of blacks and the reason i only speak of blacks is because the social cog mission research upon which my research is based focuses primarily on the black-white relationship. i want to share just one quick study before i end which is particularly -- and relevant to police judgments of criminality

and it's a sted study and it's a famous one where researchers wanted to test whether or not stereotypes would affect the interpretation of ambiguous behaviors and they had subject, watch two men who were on a video engaged in a discussion that grew increasingly heated and eventually one of the individuals -- excuse me, cammy, shoves the other and the subject his option of reading this context as horsing around, dramatic, aggressive or violent and the researchers manipulated the race of the pusher or the pushee to see if it would affect the interpretations of this ambiguous behavior and they found that it did. so when both individuals on this video were white -- only 13% thought that this shove was aggressive. -- let me start all over again.

when the two individuals were white, only 13% found that to be aggressive, but when both individuals were black the number went up from 13% to 69%. in the interracial pairings, the statistics are the findings are even starker, so when the white individual was the pusher. only 17% found that to be aggressive, but when the black individual was the one who pushed that number went out from 17% to 75% who viewed this interaction as aggressive. so you can imagine an officer who is on the street thinking about crime who triggers the non-conscious stereotypes and his attention will be drawn to non-whites first regardless of his conscious racial attitudes and when he's attempting to determine whether or not and he's more likely to view that conduct as suspicious if the

individuals involved are non-light and let me demonstrate that this is likely to happen. the final thing i want to add is stereotype threat because we don't focus on the victims of stereotypes and yet psychologicals demonstrate that people are stereo typed negatively have the reactions to control and lack of eye contact, fidgeting sort of movements and sweating and increased heart rate and this is because of the fear of being judged or confirming a negative racial stereotype about your group, so you imagine when an officer approaches you and you're aware of the stereotype you will uncontrollably act in ways that the police are trained to view as suspicious. so you can understand now, how implicit or non-conscious thoughts or non-conscious stereotypes can explain the

racially disproportion of thoughts even in the absence of conscious bias. in order to deal with the effects of race and policing we should engage more with the social psychology of contemporary bias and also spend time like lisa and others on this panel have done collaborating with police departments to figure out ways to deal with the effects, the non-conscious effects of stereotypes. >> so, thank you. >> let me ask you. they can leave you well-meaning officers and lead to harmful ways and lead numbers to minority communities and we end up wind up thinking are suspicious and is that something that a police department can and should address?

and we'll relate to you my experience and the past 18 years of the city of camden and my city is 77,000 and the population and it's 95% minority and 50% for hispanic. the government, in the past decade with the national rankings with the violent cities and they've never ranked lower than five. we've been number one three times and we are one of the nation's most poorest cities and we rank at the lowest in the state with regards to the graduation rate. and although we may be an anomaly and the challenges are in some terms and even that much more exasperating with what we're dealing with. and the issue of race in extremely and especially in the urban environment and it's at the forefront and it's not -- if it's not something that is part

of the daily conscious of an organization and it's officers out in the field and you are prime for a watershed moment at any point in time whether it betray von martin and some type of civil unrest. and whether it's the legitimacy and with regards to the enforcement aspect. and it's absolutely dead-on accurate and one of the things that we do find and again our most challenged communities, number one, the mass incarceration does not work and the 80s and 90s and the year 2000 with regards to whether it's the low-level bus stop operations and the corner sweep operations and not going to have a positive impact on either changing the mental calculous,

or changing the criminal pattern that started taking place. the fact of the matter is when you're looking at a street-level drug operation, probably the most expendable component of that is the street-level dealer, but at the same time we're dealing with the challenge of addressing the concerns of the community and the community doesn't want the open-air drug market existing there because it's negatively defining their lives and it's not so much the drug dealing itself, but it's all of the issues that end up coming and ending up in violent crime. in dealing with these aspects when we're dealing with race in an urban city in a setting such as mine. the fact of the matter is we constantly see what we're dealing with as the flip side of the racial disparity and the

application of policing when you have a densely populated minority community and you're seeing tremendous amount of caucasian individuals and high-end vehicles in a very poor environment driving throughout the city. the community is saying they don't belong here and go stop them. see the white guy over there? go stop them and they're making that deduction. that doesn't make it right in the application in either way, but we can't be naive to think, number one, that we don't have an implicit bias and it's something we don't have to address. furthermore, i do wholeheartedly believe that there cannot be an overreliance upon social control, formal social control to have the profound impact with the communities that we want to have. the reality is that i believe that police should act as a facilitator and a convener to get the collective efficacy that research has shown us has been

productive and we've seen it work in smaller segments of our city and it's trying to get that in transition into the much rarjrarj larger application and all of the while realizing that the solutions to a challenged community do not lie in a pistol or handcuffs. >> professor, we've been hearing a lot about building trust and operating in fair ways. is there a role for law and for legal institutions in ensuring that the police do move forward in these ways? >> yes. and i do have more of the common theme. i just have one from lonny gwinear and she basically says like the minors canary alerts

miners to dangerous conditions in the mine, racial minority alert our society to broader issues and so i think this is true with policing, right? so there are some broader issues that we need address with policing. we have a broader problem here. so if we can fix a broken system, and i'm confident to make improvements and so to that end, i'd advocate a swiss army knife approach, right? this takes everyone. it takes the federal government, state and local government and communities working together to address this. i have a little less faith, i think, in the role of courts because when we're talking about -- when we're talking about the exclusionary rules and

the other judicial remedies. these remedies can only help adjudicated conduct. so much of what happens on the ground is adjudicated. if it doesn't get to a point of law. we need to have a multifaceted approach and we need more transparence ney police departments and that will go a long way to solving some of the problems that the communities have with trust and legitimacy. so i want to talk about the united states department of justice and their pattern of practice authority. the united states department of justice has the authority to sue and seek injunctive relief against police departments that are engaging in patterns of unconstitutional behavior of which racial profiling is one of many things that police

departments could be doing and so one of these and doj has used this authority in washington, d.c., pittsburgh, los angeles and a lot of the reforms that have been gained through this were the forms that the department is seeking to gain an early warning tracking system. so if there is one thing that we know about police agencies is that when there's a problem there's generally a problem with the small number of officers who have repeated instances of misconduct. so if we can implement an early warning tracking system and identify these officers for retraining or retraining discipline that might help our department. we can see how that would also, by making those officers accountable might also engender some trust or legitimacy among

the community. other reforms with a complaint process and that makes sense if citizens have complaints about their police department, they should know the proper procedures in order to make a complaint and they should feel some confidence that those complaints are going to be acted upon in a fair manner and then there are other reforms specifically for racial profiling as well. all of these reforms are really in an attempt to gather information so that we can -- so that we can have additional remedies. so the federal government, you can't do it alone, obviously, and the special litigation section of doj, and they may have, and i'm not sure the number of attorneys and say it's 20 or even 50 attorneys. they can't be in every police

department that may have a problem. so state and local govern ams are going to have to step up here and make some changes, and also there has to be a buy-in from the local community. and as mr. thompson, and they know they have the problems in their communities in identifying those problems and developing solutions that are tailored to their local needs. again, the federal government and they're all here because you can incentivize those states with local governments and there are millions of grant dollars that are made available each year and i would have the radical view that if you have a police department that has these problems and they should withhold that money and see if they can't be brought into line

or maybe we can do competitive grant programs and give money to a police department that has come up that have experimented that have developed programs that are working. so again, i just think that we need a multi-faceted approach that's aimed at changing the broader culture of police departments and if we can fix some of the broader issues then certainly we will fix some of the issues related to racial minorities. >> so if i can just push back a little bit on this idea that is a multi-faceted approach that we need to take account of fairness or that there's all kinds of different ways that we need to be thinking about this. >> the police should not be making decisions based on race and then to put in place structure so that we can find out whether that's happening. so this morning the senate

judiciary committee is having hearings not just on the general problem of racial profiling, but on a bill introduced by senator ben calvin of maryland last fall to end racial profiling act and this act bans racial profiling by federal law enforcement and by local law enforcement and enforces that band through suits that the department of justice is authorized to bring and private individuals are authorized to bring and there are attorneys fees to plaintiffs and it enforces the band by cutting off any funding for state or local law enforcement agents that don't comply with the mandate to end racial profiling and the commands all law enforcement agencies to keep statistics to gather data so that we can tell whether they're, in fact, making decisions that are based on race for conscious or unconscious reasons.

isn't that the way forward? >> that's -- so, there have been -- this bill has been introduced many times and it has not yet passed maybe 2012 will be a charm here, but there are a lot of states and local governments that already collect this information about 21 states are under statutory mandates to collect the information and about 25 states are voluntarily collecting this informational ready, but i think a federal law is a good way to ensure that we have more uniform collection. the problem is once we collect this information what are we going to do with it and how are we going develop programs or remedies to end -- because there are a lot of states that are collecting it and have found, for example, missouri collects information and found that 70 --

that motorists, black motorists were 70% more likely than white drivers and twice as likely as hispanic motorive s are stoppe by law enforcement officers in 2009. we can look at new jersey. we can look at maryland and we know a lot of this information and there are a lot of limits, i think, to simply collecting the data, and i'd be interested to hear what the chief says, as well, but the burden on officers and how do we how do we determine a person's race? that's another thing that could be difficult for officers to do in the field, and also just developing benchmarks and what groups are we -- is it that we stop motorists in this area and these are mostly

african-american areas and so we stopped more african-american areas and there are challenges there. i think it's a good start. i think it's always great to have more information that challenges what are we going to do. wou wou . >> would it be a good idea to keep statistics of race and to check whether they've done it? >> i believe that things that get measured are the things that get performed, and if we are going to have a meaningful step and direction of trying to address this issue, i am for this. in 2005 in the state of new jersey our attorney general had issued a directive to the law enforcement in the state banning racial profiling and race cannot factor in to an officer's decision or his discretion

unless it falls under one of two components. it's specifically giving and what we call being on the lookout of being that the crime has just occurred and the crimes are reported and follow-up investigations, but race cannot factor into the discretion of an officer on whether they'll initiate a stop or not. furthermore, race cannot factor into the determination of how the stop is handled once it is stopped. and the litmus test, as tom said earlier is really how would this stop be handled if it was a person of a different race. that gets to be very difficult to manage that. what's key to that is we don't have that directive operating in a vacuum, but we have that directive coupled with systems such as early warning systems.

so i look at it from my perspective within the jurisdiction that it was charged with. if i look at the statistics of my officers and they'll be stopped primarily with minority folks. that's the jurisdiction where we were. however, i do believe it is key with the early warning system when we do start to get complaints of demeanor. we do start to get complaints of excessive force and the improper search and the like that now it does become a key variable in our analysis of what's going off with the individual officer so that we can have some type of intervention and either cease the activity and remove that officer from this line of work or provide the training that they may need to get them around the curve, but to answer your question, again, i'm a proponent to the axiom of the things that get measured and things get

performed and i think it's important to get statistics. it's easier to measure the rates at which it is stopped and the ways in which they're treated. so from your standpoint working on this problem in seattle, whichbigger problem? is it disparities? is it how they're treated and would a mandate to collect stattestics and to stop discriminating be helpful, do you think? >> i think that it is -- it is all about who gets stopped, much more about who gets stopped because the stop itself, regardless of courtesy, regardless of procedural fairness after the stop has done somebody something to the individual stopped that they are a subject of interest, that they are suspicious, that they are someone who law enforcement looks at in a particular way. so it's not that it's irrelevant what happens after that, but the

fact that young, black people, young, black men grow up knowing that they'll encounter law enforcement and young white people know they won't when they're driving at an incredibly high arrest speed and that's an enormous problem in and of itself, and i think there are a number of limitations and the first is the problem of benchmarking. collecting data on what law enforcement does has very limited value unless it passes the any idiot test to any leader. like, everyone knows that these figures are just crazy and usually it's not so obvious and unless we know the rate of actual offense. to law enforcement this doesn't prove anything because the background facts may match their operational reality and you may enter in force. in seattle when our project started the seattle police department were impounding the cars of people driving with suspended driver's licenses. when that law came into effect we got the seattle city council

to regrd that data be elected not only on the race of people being charged with having the license suspended. shockingly, it turned out that 50% of the people whose cars were being taken were african-american, but so you might think that passed the any idiot test in the city where 8% of the population was black. it didn't, though, because 55% of the people being charged with driving while license were suspended and not paying your ticket is correlated with poverty which is correlated to race. so the instance of driving with the license suspended was -- and they were not driven by african-americans to a marginal extent. the point is that if you looked at that initial statistic, you would totally misunderstand the problem and the problem was the