Florida Dept. Of Law Enforcement Edits Racial Bias Training To Be Less Stupid After Journalists Start Asking Questions

Racism is a human problem. When that problem wears badges, carries guns, and has the power to deprive people of life and liberty, it's a much more serious problem.

Many US law enforcement agencies have racist roots, agencies formed for the purpose of catching escaped slaves to return them to their white owners. Not every cop is a racist, but modernizing police tactics hasn't managed to strip agencies of long-existing biases that continue to be displayed by officers. Instead, it has turned bigotry into something that mimics science - a combination of data and AI some people believe is free of human weaknesses. Instead, it's usually AI trained on biased data performing analysis of even more biased data to come to conclusions indistinguishable from the hunches of average racist cops: i.e., let's send more cops into neighborhoods containing poor minorities.

As law enforcement agencies seek to address the number of problems they're responsible for (like the destruction of the community's trust), they're making changes. Sometimes these changes are forced on them by consent decrees or lawsuit settlements. Sometimes it just seems like the right thing to do.

Bias training is one of the efforts. There are good ways to perform this training. And then there's the way the Florida Department of Law Enforcement has chosen to do it. Something that requires immersion and effort to reach a genuine understanding of implicit biases and the harm they cause has been reduced to slideshow and a short quiz that bypasses the difficult questions officers need to ask themselves and suggests there's no need for any agency in the state to detail the demographic info of people stopped by cops.

This report from the Tampa Bay Times details just some of the very questionable aspects of the state's will this do" anti-bias training.

The Florida Department of Law Enforcement slideshow told officers that traffic stops preceded nearly every serious race riot in the United States" but provided no details about the police brutality that accompanied the stops. It inaccurately described police interactions that led to riots in Miami and Los Angeles. It cited statistics from nearly 20 years ago that showed higher public confidence in police than is felt today.

And it took roughly 25 minutes to flip through the slides and complete a quiz that one expert called embarrassingly simple."

The description of the traffic stop leading the 1980 riots are glossed over completely.

The training simply said [Arthur] McDuffie eluded arrest and after an 8-minute chase, he died at the scene after a physical confrontation."

Followed by: This resulted in a riot that included buildings being burned."

What actually happened was McDuffie stopped voluntarily and gave up. At that point, up to a dozen officers began choking and beating him, using their batons and flashlights. One officer drove a squad car over McDuffie's bike to make it look like it had crashed. One officer testified against the other officers on the scene. All of the officers were acquitted by an all-white jury. None of those facts can be found in the bias training provided by the state.

That slide has since been removed. So have several others, a process that began after Tampa Bay Times journalists began requesting documents from the Department of Law Enforcement. Others have been edited to remove outdated data or questionable assertions.

The training included three slides titled, Real and Perceived Problems Faced by Minorities"- all of which were deleted from the course after the Times started asking about it.

One cited statistics from 2003 that showed 70% of white people and 41% of Black people had high confidence in police. The slide was updated this summer with a link to a lengthy Gallup poll on race relations that showed 80% of Black respondents felt they were treated less fairly than white people during traffic incidents. To see the recent data, officers would need to click the link.

Another potential source of misinformation was removed as well:

Before it was updated, the training included slides about Black and Latino communities having traffic death rates roughly triple those among white people. Experts questioned the accuracy of those numbers. They also said the slides, which were removed, appeared to try to justify the need to aggressively police communities of color.

Now, these edits will make the slide deck better than it was originally, but that's a really low bar to set. To call the training cursory" is to pay it a compliment it doesn't deserve. At best, the presentation - in its original form - let cops know being openly racist was problematic but that this was just something to be clicked through and checked off the training list.

In its altered form - and those alterations were prompted by journalists, not by any law enforcement professional who had reviewed it or participated in the training - it's not much better. It still gives the impression that fixing bias is something that can be accomplished by eliminating outward displays of bigotry, like the telling of racist jokes or use of bigoted terms.

That this exists at all is probably a positive sign. But what's observed here shows it's probably not the best idea to let cops write their own bias training. Nor is it a good idea to reduce something this important to a short slide show... not if you're actually interested in changing cop culture.