Reactions to L. Song Richardson, Systemic Triage: Implicit Racial Bias in the Criminal Courtroom
This collection is a response to L. Song Richardson’s Book Review in Issue 3 entitled Systemic Triage: Implicit Racial Bias in the Criminal Courtroom
Community Policing as a Counter to Bias in Policing: A Personal Perspective
Some forty years ago, I was a very young black man living in the Florida panhandle. My dream was to get into law enforcement, but I first needed to get into the state academy, which required the endorsement of a Florida police executive. The chief of the Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University Police Department—a black chief in an historically black college—turned me down. That left Leon County Sheriff Raymond Hamlin, a man whose looks and manner seemed to me to scream bigot. A self-styled “redneck,” he was locally famous for once proclaiming to a reporter, “I like my women the same way I like my coffee. White and hot.”
The Implicit Racial Bias in Sentencing: The Next Frontier
A prominent life scientist recently declared that the Higgs boson particle, the Internet, and implicit bias are the three most important discoveries of the past half-century. In President Obama’s commencement address at Howard University last year, Obama stated: “And we knew . . . that even the good cops with the best of intentions—including, by the way, African-American police officers—might have unconscious biases, as we all do.” Why has implicit racial bias worked its way into a presidential address? More importantly, after focusing so long on explicit biases, what do we need to know and do about the pervasive problem of implicit racial bias in the courtroom?
Systemic Implicit Bias
Legal discourse on implicit bias has changed the way scholars and citizens think about race in the justice system. Ever-growing scholarship, much of it empirical, has identified, confronted, and sought to address how implicit bias operates in nearly every criminal justice context— especially in policing, prosecuting, judging, and juror decision-making. This focus on racially fraught legal processes, and the subsequent search to mitigate or eliminate the operations of implicit bias within each of them, has been an illuminating force not only for those who seek to expose the reality of a biased system, but also for those who recognize that the fairness-driven ideals of the American legal system are not being realized. Thus, it is not surprising that efforts designed to “deal with” implicit bias in the criminal justice system—whether through judicial trainings, jury instructions, or structural safeguards—have become increasingly popular.