Incidents throughout the United States continue to erode the faith in cities’ policing practices and protocols, and call into question whether the institutional bias against African-Americans can really be remedied. Earlier this month, a 32-year-old black woman, Kamilah Brock, alleged that the New York City Police sent her to a mental hospital and forced powerful drugs upon her simply because of her race.
Another incident in Manhattan similarly saw the New York City Police tackling and handcuffing a young black man who they confused for the suspect in a crime. The young man they tackled turned out to be James Blake, formerly the fourth-ranked men’s tennis player in the world. Blake was detained for about 15 minutes until officers realized who he was, and suffered cuts and bruises from the attack. After the incident, Blake commented that, “it’s as simple as unnecessary police force, no matter what my race is. In my mind there’s probably a race factor involved, but no matter what, there’s no reason for anybody to do that to anybody.”
HOW SDR® CAN RESTORE FAITH IN POLICING PRACTICES?
These incidents in New York are representative of a larger and broader issue that plagues the entire policing system in the United States. Although it cannot be said that every officer acts upon their negative biases, there is certainly an apparent void of effective training that would provide a methodological basis with which to recognize biases, and the operational tools to guide measured and knowledge-based practices.
SDR® training can restore respect to policing while providing increased knowledge and a higher level of efficiency, making it more effective and unprejudiced, all while improving community relations. SDR® Academy is a methodology that is founded upon recognizing potential cases of violence, public disorder, illicit activities or lethal attacks, through behavioral profiling and analysis. As SDR® relies on behavioral indicators and analysis to identify threats, the training inherently negates ethnic profiling. SDR® provides trainees with auto-critique and counter-bias tools that become a consistent part of their observation activities, thereby preventing actions based on automatic red-flagging of people of a particular gender, age, race, religion, or sexual orientation. In the cases described above, implicit biases likely played a role in why events unfolded as they did.
SDR® trainees learnhow to judge a person’s behaviors and potential threat level in just moments, and come to understand that no two circumstances are the same–there is no singular definition of who a suspect may be. SDR® is a heightened awareness training method based on observing people’s behaviors relative to their surroundings, as opposed to their physical appearance or an officer’s previous personal experiences. SDR® trains individuals to search their surroundings and observe what a state of normalcy consists of in that particular area, to detect people’s adherence to – or deterrence from – normal behavior (for that given area), and to choose the appropriate action.
RAN COHEN 