Dara Lind suggests big data can help police departments identify racially-biased officers:
A growing body of research is showing how people subconsciously act on racial stereotypes without even realizing what they’re doing – a phenomenon known as implicit bias. (My colleagues and I have written about implicit bias in depth, especially as it influences policing and criminal justice.) Now, academics are working to figure out how to counteract those subconscious biases – and how to raise awareness of implicit bias in the real world, especially in police departments. UCLA’s Center for Policing Equity has been working with police departments to figure out whether, and when, cops are letting their implicit bias guide their decisions about who to stop and arrest.
In Denver, for example, researchers are tracking the arrest records of individual police officers, to see which officers might be arresting people of color disproportionately and why. And in San Jose, they’re working with a database of mugshots to check whether cops are more likely to arrest people with stereotypically African-American features — which are subconsciously associated with criminality and can even lead juries to give someone a harsher criminal sentence.
The Dish 