Is 'Reverse Racism' Among Police Real?

Criminologists have debated for decades whether police carry racial biases into their work—particularly the kind that leads them to kill African Americans at disproportionate rates. Much of the research in this arena suggests that yes, on balance, police officers of all races do tend to perceive African Americans as more threatening than whites. The much-revered University of California Berkeley criminology professor Paul Takagi wrote as early as 1974 that “the police have one trigger finger for whites and another for blacks,” in the Journal of Crime and Scholarly Justice.

However, a few recent studies upended the conventional wisdom on this by pointing to evidence that police might be more hesitant to use deadly force against black suspects, as opposed to white suspects. Such studies leveled up the stakes around the so-called “Ferguson Effect”: Not only were cops scaling back their policing to avoid potential public scrutiny, as this effect supposes, but they’re now being more racist towards white people, these new studies allege.