![]() For reasons he can’t entirely explain, he has an abiding interest in police relations with minority communities. “And to say that we can change that in 12 weeks, it’s tough.”Īs a white, retired police officer who spent 20 years on the force of a small, but diverse, Illinois town, Schlosser is an outlier in the police-training world. And even though that’s young, that’s a lot of life experiences which have created your thought process, your social identity and what you think of life in general,” Schlosser said. “A typical police recruit is between 22 and 26 years old. The free, optional training available at the PTI adds 10 hours to the police recruits’ 12-week training. Schlosser is trying to improve upon that outcome. Their CoBRAS scores moved closer to those of minority officers, who, not surprisingly, were less likely to subscribe to colorblind racial beliefs in the first place. The researchers found that, on average, white police officers’ colorblind racial attitudes had shifted meaningfully by the end of the class. Perhaps the most compelling example is a 2012 study of New York City police officers who took a semester-long ethnic studies course. Other research has demonstrated that police racial attitudes are pliable. “Although some people think it’s good not to ‘see race,’ findings using the CoBRAS and similar scales suggest that to deny, distort or minimize the existence of racism is related to greater racial intolerance and old-fashioned racist beliefs,” she said. The CoBRAS questionnaire assesses a respondent’s tendency to acknowledge – or dismiss – racial bias in their own lives and in society in general, Neville said. That evaluation involves questions from the Colorblind Racial Attitudes Scale, a tool developed by Neville. He and his colleagues are studying whether the training meaningfully alters racial awareness in a mostly white, mostly male police force. professor of African American studies and of history Helen Neville, a professor of African American studies and of educational psychology community member Imani Bazzell and student Maria Valgoi. Schlosser designed the course with Sundiata Cha-Jua, a U. (Watch a video about the training.)Īlign image left align image center align image right Schlosser and his colleagues describe the course in a paper in the International Journal of Criminal Justice. It asks them to ponder, for example, their own and others’ innate racial biases, and offers evidence of the harm that can accrue from the notion that someone can be blind to another person’s race, or that racism is no longer a meaningful factor in many people’s lives. The Policing in a Multiracial Society Project, an optional 10-hour class to which many Illinois police chiefs elect to send their recruits, exposes new officers to ideas they may never have encountered before. Rather than adopting a military approach to training, PTI uses an adult-learning model, encouraging interactive learning and integrating scenario-based role playing into every aspect of training. The Police Training Institute trains police recruits from about 500 police departments in the state of Illinois. In early 2014, months before the police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and shortly after the Black Lives Matter movement got its start, Michael Schlosser, the director of the Police Training Institute at the University of Illinois, began offering police recruits classes that challenged their views about race and racism, introduced them to critical race theory and instructed them in methods to de-escalate potentially volatile encounters with members of minority groups.
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