Individual-level analysis of police encounters obscures institutional causes of disparity

Evidence

Indeed, highlighting “apples” draws our attention to the individual actors and can blind us to the importance of “the barrel”—or the institution—in which the officers are situated. In a Pew survey, for example, 39 percent of community members and 67 percent of police officers said the deaths of Blacks during encounters with police in recent years were isolated incidents, rather than signs of a broader problem (Morin, Parker, Stepler, & Mercer, 2017). It might not be immediately clear what role institutions play in policecommunity interactions. After all, these interactions involve people. In recent years, we have grown accustomed to parsing the behavior and intentions of individuals to arrive at accounts of a particular police encounter and determine if an officer’s actions were justified. Through this lens, individuals—and their behavior, judgment, and tendencies—loom large, whereas the institutional norms, policies, practices, and culture that guide officers’ actions recede into the distance. — Joseph Avery, Jim Sidanius, Joel Cooper, Gregory Davis, Amanda N., Bias in the Law, 394

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the apples-vs-barrel framing in systems thinking and to root-cause analysis generally. — connects to: Palantir’s software predicts individual violence likelihood for police — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1236
• SHARE: The Pew split—39 percent of community vs 67 percent of officers seeing deaths as isolated—is a striking stat for someone working on policing policy.