Science Vs - Police Shootings: The Data and the Damage Done

Episode Date: November 22, 2019

It’s been five years since the high profile shootings of several unarmed black teenagers and men launched the Black Lives Matter movement. Since then, police departments have been doing all kinds of things to respond to the deaths and protests. But do any of them work? To find out we speak with social psychologist Prof. Jennifer Eberhardt, psychologist Prof. Phillip Atiba Goff, public policy expert Dr. David Yokum, criminologists Dr. Lois James, and Dr. Stephen James.  Check out the full transcript transcript here: http://bit.ly/2D23jAR  Selected references:  Jennifer’s study on respectful language during traffic stops, and her book on implicit bias: http://bit.ly/2XGHobN  Phil’s study on bias and the Las Vegas policy changes: http://bit.ly/2O8Ndf3  David’s study on whether body cameras reduce police use of force: http://bit.ly/2pJj5gU  Credits: This episode was produced by Meryl Horn with help from Wendy Zukerman, along with Rose Rimler, Michelle Dang, Lexi Krupp, and Kaitlyn Sawrey. We’re edited by Caitlin Kenney and Blythe Terrell. Fact checking by Diane Kelly. Mix and sound design by Peter Leonard with help from Cedric Wilson. Music written by Peter Leonard, Benny Reid, Emma Munger, and Bobby Lord. A big thanks to Professor Lawrence Sherman, Dr. Joe Cesario, Dr. Sam Walker, Chuck Wexler, Dr. Peter Moskos, Dennis Flores, Hawk Newsome, Professor William Terrill, Dr. Arne Nieuwenhuys, Professor Franklin Zimring, Dr. Joan Vickers, and Dr. Justin Nix. Thanks to all police officers we spoke to- we really appreciate your help. And special thanks to Amber Davis, Chuma Ossé, Daniel Domke, Christina Djossa, the Zukerman family and Joseph Lavelle Wilson. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It's season three of The Joy of Why, and I still have a lot of questions. Like, what is this thing we call time? Why does altruism exist? And where is Jan Eleven? I'm here, astrophysicist and co-host, ready for anything. That's right. I'm bringing in the A-team. So brace yourselves.

Get ready to learn. I'm Jan Eleven. I'm Steve Strogatz. And this is... Quantum Magazine's podcast, The Joy of Why. New episodes drop every other Thursday, starting February 1st. What does the AI revolution mean for jobs, for getting things done? Who are the people creating this technology, and what do they think?

I'm Rana El-Khelyoubi, an AI scientist, entrepreneur, investor, and now host of the new podcast, Pioneers of AI. Think of it as your guide for all things AI, with the most human issues at the center. Join me every Wednesday for Pioneers of AI. And don't forget to subscribe wherever you tune in. Hi, I'm Wendy Zuckerman, and you're listening to Science Versus from Gimlet. This is the show that pits facts against force. On today's show, when police kill people.

And heads out, this episode has some violent descriptions and swear words, so take care when you're listening. It's been five years since the high-profile shootings of several unarmed black teenagers and men, which launched the Black Lives Matter movement. Black lives matter! Black lives matter! Thousands of people protested, saying cops are using unnecessary force. The deaths sparked national debate about what exactly was going on in police departments,

with some saying this is a systemic problem, and others saying, no, that's not right. A recent Pew survey found that around 40% of the public and about two-thirds of officers interviewed thought that these deaths were just, quote, isolated incidents. This whole anti-police rhetoric is based on a lie. There is no data, there is no research

that proves any of that nonsense. None. But despite this, police departments have been doing all kinds of things to respond to the deaths and the protests. Police departments are employing a new tactic, body-mounted video cameras. The Sacramento Police Department has been doing implicit bias training. Officers and recruits are required to attend an eight-hour implicit bias course. Meanwhile, it feels like we're still seeing a lot of black people being killed at the hands of police.

Like just a few weeks ago. Put your hands up! Show me your hands! A Tatiana Jefferson was shot in her home in Texas. Jefferson had been playing video games with her eight-year-old nephew when she was gunned down right in front of him. So, today on the show, what can new research tell us about police shootings in the US? And what can police departments be doing to save lives? Do implicit bias training or body cams actually help?

When it comes to police shootings, there are a lot of opinions, but then there's science. Okay, so when you want to know the science of what is happening with all these police shootings, you have to know that we don't have good data here. There's no official database that tallies all the people in the US who were shot and killed by police. So without official stats, media organisations like the Washington Post have started counting. And here's what they've found. About a thousand people in the US are killed by police each year. Roughly half of those don't have a gun. And while white people do get killed by cops, you're two to three times more likely to be killed by police in the US

if you're black. And every researcher that we spoke to told us that this wasn't just on the cops. So, for example, this difference is partly explained by the fact that because of the history of this country, black people are more likely to live in places with gun violence and cops are more likely to be assigned to these neighbourhoods. So one idea here is that if a lot of cops are interacting

with more black people than white people, in the rare times that cops do draw their weapons, there's a greater chance that the person on the other end of the barrel will be black. But lots of people in the U.S. think that something else is going on here too. Racial bias or racism among cops. So how widespread is that? Well, what feels like a messy and politically charged question can actually be answered with science. Hi, my name is Jennifer Eberhardt, and I work at Stanford University. Jennifer's a professor of social psychology, and in 2014,

she started working with the Oakland Police Department to analyze their data on stops and searches. And she was basically asking the question that when you look at the data, are cops stopping and searching more black people? She looked at more than 28,000 stops from 500 police officers, and she said there was a clear pattern. They stopped way more African-Americans, and the same was true for the searches. And when they did the searches, like what did they find? Were black people like more likely to have weapons or drugs or something like that? No, they weren't. In Oakland, black men were searched four times more often than white men, despite the fact they were no more likely to have weapons or drugs than white guys. A similar trend was found for Latinos.

And this isn't just Oakland. One big study published just this year analysed almost 100 million police stops from 28 different states all across the US, and they found similar patterns. And these differences, they often stuck around even after you controlled for the crime rate. And so Jennifer wanted to go a step further

to find out what exactly was happening in the interactions between police officers and the people they stopped. Like, besides being stopped, how were black people being treated? And she found a cool way to study this. Body cams. For the first time, we have these body-worn cameras and we have footage where we can actually see. We can be actually at the scene, right, when this is happening.

So as a social psychologist, this was just like gold, right? Oakland PD gave Jennifer their body cam footage from traffic stops. You know, when a cop stops someone for speeding or having a broken taillight. And Jennifer's team transcribed the conversations between cops and drivers for nearly a thousand traffic stops. They then took samples and showed the transcripts to people waiting in line at the DMV, which is easily the most exciting thing to happen at a DMV for years. So they're Oakland drivers for the most part. And we had them rate the officer's language.

You know, they didn't know the race of the driver at all. They would just look at a transcript. And she got them to rate the conversation to see how respectful and fair the officers were being. Now, overall, people thought the officers were generally professional. But... There was a difference in how they spoke to black versus white drivers. So they spoke to black drivers with less respect than white drivers. And you could see this from the very beginning of the stop. It actually started in the first five seconds.

So this was before the driver even had a chance to say a word. So with white drivers, they were more likely to greet them with sir or ma'am or mister. But with black drivers? They used words like bro, dude. Bro? Yeah. Oh my gosh. Yeah. The cops were also more likely to tell black drivers to keep your hands on the wheel and were less likely to reassure the black drivers. They would say to white drivers things like, you know, it'll be okay, don't worry, that kind of thing, which they were less inclined to do with black drivers. I'm literally just thinking about all the times that I've been stopped by a cop

and I think they have always said, nothing to worry about here. Just got to ask you some questions and then like be safe out there or something. You know, you always get that or I always get that, be safe out there. Jennifer is black, by the way. So I have never been told by an officer that I was stopped by nothing to worry about here. I have to say. She thought maybe this was just a few cops who were behaving badly. But another look at the data showed no. This was happening across the board. Even if the cop was black or white, on average, they all treated black

drivers worse. And the differences were stark. Jennifer actually fed all her data into a machine learning algorithm. And just by analysing what the cop said, the algorithm could figure out the race of the driver. Based on the words that the officers used alone, we could predict whether that officer was talking to a black person or a white person. Whoa! So it was real effects here.

When the computer program, like like spat out the answer and got it right a lot of the time, were you surprised? I don't know. I mean, I so it wasn't, I think it kind of crystallized everything. I put it that way. Jennifer looked at a lot of different things to try to explain what she was seeing. Like maybe the black drivers were getting stopped for driving more dangerously, so then the cops came on strong.

No, no, that wasn't it. She looked at gender, criminal history, location of the stop. That didn't explain it. Everything we considered, we found that it didn't make much of a difference. Of course, there is one obvious explanation here. Cops are intentionally treating Black people with less respect. Or maybe they're behaving differently due to some kind of unconscious or implicit bias that they have.

Jennifer thinks this could be part of what's going on. So I think when people think about racism, they're thinking about people who are bad actors, people who are filled with hate, you know, people who are burning crosses and those kinds of things. For implicit bias or this unconscious bias, it can be a bias that you have

even when you don't know you have it and even when you don't have a bad heart. Scientists study this kind of bias using a test called the implicit association test. In one version, you can see pictures of black and white faces alongside weapons or harmless objects. And the test basically records how you react. It's not a perfect test, but it finds that more than 80% of police officers tested link black faces to dangerous weapons. And it's not just cops who have implicit bias.

A lot of us do. It's thought we get these associations from things around us, like movies and TV, and these associations, they can form pretty quickly. Like, Jennifer told us a story about one cop she spoke to. He was new to the US, and he told Jennifer that he could feel these biases kicking in. He wasn't sort of thinking about a black person

in terms of fear and threat and aggression and all of those things. But when he came here to the U.S., he was. And a lot of that, he felt like, came from the police work that he did, where day in and day out, he would hear blaring over the police radio, you know, male black, black, male, black, right? And so he felt like after a while, he could feel it affecting him even when he wasn't working. And he saw a black man, he would get, you know, worried. He would start looking for his hands. He would be on high alert. And he was saying even his friends noticed that he was changing and noticed that he was doing this and called him on it. And he could tell he had changed, and he was worried about it.

He could see, he could feel, you know, this bias creeping in to how he thought and how he looked at black people. So there's evidence that cops are treating black people in America differently to white people. And while we don't have great data when it comes to police shootings, it's clear when you look at the data on stops and searches. And in Jennifer's study, it was also clear when you just looked at how police said hello. So the big question right now is how do we fix this?

Are there any scientifically backed solutions out there? Let's first take a look at implicit bias training. If we know that cops have implicit bias, then maybe the answer is giving them training to fix it. In the past decade, implicit bias training has become all the rage among police departments. Programs have popped up all across the country, from New York to Kentucky to Oregon, the Department of Justice has gone mad for them too. A couple of years ago, they announced that they're officially getting all federal law enforcement officers and prosecutors to do this kind of training. And it's a big deal. In some

cases, these workshops can go for several days, and they can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars for a police department. So we wanted to know, do they work? For this, we talked to Professor Philip Atiba-Goth, who runs the Centre for Policing Equity, which is based at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York. Philip works with police departments to prevent unnecessary force. He says that over the last few years, police chiefs have been calling him up left,

right, and center. They came out of the woodwork. Police chiefs? Police chiefs, yeah. They were calling you to say help? Yes. Please help us make this better. This being too much force, racially disparate force, racially disparate contact, help make our department less deadly and more fair. They came out of the woodwork asking for it. Black my whole life. Did not see it coming. And one of the things that lots of police chiefs ask Phil about is implicit bias training. So Phil told us that in these implicit bias workshops, a big thing is just to teach cops what is implicit bias and getting them to acknowledge that, like a lot of us, they have them too.

And Phil says that isn't always easy. Sometimes they won't cop to it. Some folks think that it's just BS. They think that all of this is a way to call them bigots, words people don't understand. Policing. But Phil says there are ways to talk to cops to help them see implicit bias differently. Like, he told us this story of a police officer who was called into a shooting. And the first thing the officer thought

was, oh, this guy will be black, maybe Latino. So he walks in, sees that there's a woman, and he's like, I got to get this woman behind me and out. But as he's trying to make that move to get her behind him, he's realizing she's not panicked, she's not scared, she's exactly where she wants to be. This is going to be one of the shooters. So he draws on her at exactly the same time that she shoots at him. The cop survived, and the shooter was taken to hospital. For Phil, though, this shows the dangers of falling prey to your implicit biases.

The implicit bias there was that shooter means male. And in this case, there was a male and a female, there was a man and a woman. There was a man and a woman. And if you rely only on your implicit biases, that officer who lived to tell that story would have been dead. They understand it. And as soon as it clicks for them, that it's not just gender, that it's race, that it's class, that it's neighborhood,

they understand that failing to recognize it is a, it's just a survival thing. So getting cops to understand implicit bias, that's one thing. But it's hoped that these trainings will also reduce that bias. And there's some evidence that they can help. Like one big meta-analysis looked at implicit bias training for all sorts of people, so not just cops, and it showed that the trainings can reduce people's bias. But it's not like they magically erase it, and often the effect doesn't last long. So sometimes in a few days, people go back to their old ways.

And when it comes to cops specifically, there's hardly any research on whether these trainings can change police behaviour, like reduce use of force. Which is why Phil says... I am not yet convinced that the marketplace of people who charge for implicit bias trainings, that that's a valuable add to law enforcement. On top of this, Phil told us that because of the demand

for these training sessions, all sorts of people end up running them. No one's policing this. That doesn't feel comfortable to me. And this rush to do something on implicit bias because we know it's a real thing in the world doesn't mean that the trainings are doing what we want them to be doing. And the stakes are high because it's possible that crappy implicit bias training

can backfire. Studies have found that showing people these biases can actually validate them and people end up stereotyping more. Okay, so implicit bias training, not a slam dunk. The next idea we want to interrogate are body cams. Around 60% of police departments in the US now use body cameras. 60%. And some people are really hopeful about this because they think that if cops are recorded all the time, then they won't behave badly.

So, do body cams prevent police shootings or other unnecessary force? One of the best studies we found on this was run by David Yochum. He's from Brown. And he'd heard a lot of hope about these cameras. It wasn't, you know, there's one or two instances where this is going to make a big difference. It was, this is going to dramatically curb uses of force and complaints across the board. To see if it was true, David zoomed in on Washington, D.C. That police department was about to roll out its body cam program. And so David thought, hold up, this could be the perfect opportunity to study this. And the police department agreed to play ball. So instead of giving all the cops the cameras at once,

David thought, let's randomly give some police officers body cams and leave others without them. We kind of like flip a coin, and if it was a heads, an officer would get a camera. If it was a tails, an officer would not get a camera. And David's team were flipping a lot of coins. This was a big study. Just a little bit over 2,200 officers. Oh, wow.

So it's a very large study. It's actually the largest in the world. They followed these officers for about seven months, tracking citizen complaints against officers and uses of force, like any time a cop tackled someone to the ground or drew a weapon. Like, did the use of force go up? Did they go down? Did they stay the same?

Did you have a hunch on what was going to happen? I really didn't. I mean, I didn't. I didn't. So what did he find? The groups of officers with cameras and without cameras looked to have about the same amount of use of force. We didn't actually detect any meaningful differences on any of the things that we measured, actually. On anything? On anything. On anything. A review paper looking at 10 other studies on body cams found the same thing. They had no effect on police using force. Now, studies like David's can't tell if body cams will affect shooting specifically, and that's because they're

so rare. You'd actually need to track things for more than seven months to get proper data on this. But still, David told us that he doesn't think body cams would have a big effect on shootings either. After all, he says there's quite a few cases where police have been filmed shooting someone unnecessarily. When you give examples like those YouTube clips that pop up where everybody has a camera out and you ask yourself, why didn't the behavior change in those moments? Like if you really kind of slow down and think about it, it's maybe not as obvious as everybody was kind of having a first intuition on however many years ago. But David told us that

even though these cameras might not reduce overall force, they may be useful in very specific circumstances, like for people to know exactly what happened when something does go wrong. If I was the emperor of the day in D.C., for instance, I would not immediately turn around and say deactivate the program. But if I was in a jurisdiction that did not have a camera program, I would probably not tomorrow buy them right away. So we've got one big problem and two strikes out.

After the break, things get more complicated, but then a breakthrough. I'm incredibly optimistic about where we are in policing. I think it's one of the best news race stories in the country. Welcome back. We're looking for a way to cut down on unnecessary police violence. It feels like an intractable problem,

but after calling scores of academics and police chiefs, we found something that we think can help. But to really understand why it might work, we need to take a closer look at what's happening in these intense situations that can lead to someone getting shot by police. So I went to a shooting simulator in Spokane, Washington, with my producer Meryl Horn. Cops often get trained here. I ask, because we have to ask everybody, any live weapons at all?

No. Okay. Go on through. Wendy? No. That's Lois James, a researcher at Washington State University. We walked into a small room about the size of a squash court. So we're in the simulator. On one end of the room is this giant video projection

screen. That's where Lois plays videos that she's created. They're based on real situations that police have been in, which have led to shootings. I looked at 30 years of data collected by the FBI on typical officer-involved shootings. A lot of police shootings start with a call for a domestic disturbance. That's an argument between family members or roommates. So to see what it's like to be in one of these, I strapped on a holster and was handed a gun. Lois's husband, Steve James, is a researcher too.

He runs the lab. There's nothing in the magazine. And what we've done is we've screwed a laser into the barrel of this Glock. So as you pull the trigger, it fires an infrared beam. So I just need to take it out of the holster. And pull the trigger. And pull the trigger.

And heads up, there's some violence in this next 40 seconds. If you'd rather skip it, do it now. All right. The simulation started. I walked into a house where a couple was fighting. I walked down a hallway and was looking down a staircase. You are not leaving this house! Police! Police here!

You are not leaving this fucking house! Police here! Can you calm down? Did you fucking call the cops? It was kind of hard to see what was going on and I wasn't sure if the man had a gun. Lois told me that it's important to look at a suspect's hand in case they have a weapon.

Then he pulled out a gun and started shooting at me. And I shot back. After it was over, Steve showed me what happened. Look how quickly that was. You fired six rounds in two and a half seconds. Wait, so after I shot him once, then I just kept shooting? Yes, you hit him three times in the chest. I didn't realise how quickly things can escalate in these situations.

Everything happens so fast. And Steve said it's not just podcast hosts who have these situations. Everything happens so fast. And Steve said it's not just podcast hosts who have these reactions. We've had police officers in here triple their heart rate, standing still, even though the threat is not real. Studies of cops, trainees and soldiers have found that in the heat of the moment,

the body can be flooded with stress hormones. And this is when it's more likely that someone will make a mistake. Like in other scenarios that Lois runs, instead of a gun, someone whips out a black wallet. And a few cops, they get confused and still shoot. And Lois thinks this is what might be happening in some of the situations that we see in videos,

where police kill unarmed people for seemingly no reason. In these situations where it's like, how in the world could the officer have shot in that situation and there's footage of it, where it just goes horribly wrong and it's clearly the fault of the officer, I would speculate or certainly argue that it's fear-based. What do you mean by that? The officer is not thinking.

They have lost the ability. They're reacting and not thinking. What Lois and Steve Simulator tells us is that it can be very difficult to stop what's going on once you're in the heat of the moment. So we need a solution, something that kicks in sooner before things get this bad. To find out how this might be possible, we went back to Professor Philip Goff, who you heard from before, talking about implicit bias training. He's got an idea that seems to be working. So, because of the... Hmm?

It's just a siren. I hear that, yes. That's not just tone painting for what we're doing? Well, we'll obviously have it running through the entire bit. I would assume. OK, let's get our own siren going. So Phil told us what he thinks gives us the best chance to stop unnecessary force in policing.

OK, OK, cut the siren, cut the siren. So Phil told us that we shouldn't focus on fixing what's in the minds of police officers. Instead, he says, make rules and policies that stop police officers getting into unnecessary situations where someone might get killed. I don't care that much about saving the souls of people who may or may not be engaged in racially discriminatory behaviors. I care about the behaviors. Solving the hearts and minds thing is a distraction from fixing the behaviors. So I'd much rather change policy than change your mind.

And he says that finding out exactly what policies need to be changed might be different for each city. As an example, Phil told us about what happened when he got a call from the Las Vegas Police Department. There had been some high-profile shootings of unarmed men, and calls for reform were getting louder. So Phil wanted to dive into their data to find out what needed fixing. And the department was like, great, let's do this.

Only problem... There were rules in Nevada about sending data from a police department. So Phil drives out to the desert to collect the files. And he figured, hey, let's have some fun with this. I was wearing a black, double-breasted, thick, white, pinstripe suit with a black hat and red carnations, very hot. It was the most, like, cloak-and-dagger thing I could imagine. So we rented a car. I think they also rented a car.

It was two black cars. We put them trunk to trunk. They opened their trunk. They took out a box of papers. They put it in our trunk. Phil went back to the office, presumably still wearing his pinstriped suit. He started sifting through the data,

and he was looking for patterns when cops tended to use a lot of force. I was going through the paper files, and you go through each file, you're like, it's foot pursuit, foot pursuit, foot pursuit, foot pursuit, foot pursuit. That's a lot of foot pursuits. Foot pursuits are basically when a cop has to run after someone who's running away from them. And Phil was finding that in Las Vegas, things were escalating really quickly in these pursuits. That's when police tended to use a lot of force.

And Phil totally gets why. He's actually been on a few ride-alongs with cops where he was in a foot pursuit. And he said that by the time he caught up with the suspect, even nerdy, pinstripe-wearing Phil was pissed off. He was ready to beat up someone. Like, my politics are the left of Gandhi on this stuff, and I wanted to give the guy a shot to the kidneys.

Because you're hopped up on adrenaline. You're like, this bad guy is putting me in danger. Come here. So Phil told the chief, here's the rule. To help stop police force, tell your officers when you're in a foot pursuit and you catch up to a suspect, say they're surrounded by cops, they've stopped running. Slow down. The new training actually suggested that they count to 10 before doing anything. So before, you're on that foot pursuit, guy says, hey, don't hurt me, and then they're tackled. Now, afterwards, this guy don't hurt me and be like, I want to hurt you real bad. Two, three, four, five, oh, I really want to beat you up. Seven, eight, nine, ten, hands on your head.

But in general, it was slow down and make sure that you're responding appropriate to the current situation, not just to your adrenaline. After a couple of years of these new kinds of policies, the Las Vegas Police Department checked to see if it worked. When they started training their officers to do that, the following year they saw a 23% reduction in police use of force across the board. 23%. So that's almost a quarter less use of force incidents. And that included large drops in the use of pepper spray, tasers, and handcuffs. A lieutenant from Las Vegas PD actually came to work for Phil and he told him, hey, you know, that stuff you guys did, it really worked. And that was exciting to us. We're like, oh, hey, that stuff we thought worked.

It worked. Phil's ideas are part of a larger strategy that's sometimes called de-escalation. And it's basically bringing in a raft of rules and trainings and policies that slow things down so that a situation doesn't escalate. It can include stuff like the foot pursuit policy, but also telling officers to calmly talk to a suspect or to not use force at all if someone isn't posing a physical threat. And while it's early days here, police reports from this year suggest that this approach is also working in San Francisco, Seattle and New Orleans.

In fact, in New Orleans, their department credits de-escalation training for lowering police shootings since 2012. Now, some officers that we spoke to, though, were concerned that by not being allowed to use as much force, they couldn't do their jobs properly. They'd be put at risk and crime would go up. Is that true? Well, it's actually very rare for an officer to die on the job. You're more likely to die as a roofer or a fisherman. But injuries are pretty common.

So would they go up? We're not actually sure. In one city, there was an uptick in police hospitalisations after these policies kicked in. But it could have been because the department changed how those cases were reported. In other cities, these policies didn't affect officer injuries. And we do know that similar changes in the past

have actually made things safer for cops. So in the 1970s, 50 cities all across the U.S. put tighter rules around when cops could shoot people. And this was linked to a huge drop in shootings of both civilians and cops. And Phil says this makes sense. De-escalating situations could work for everyone. Think about it.

If you and I are having a disagreement and you think you can take me, one of us is going to go home hurt, and it might be me, right? But if nobody has to fight, everybody goes home happy. And what about crime? Are these policies affecting the crime rate?

Well, crime goes up and down for all sorts of reasons that science doesn't fully understand. Seriously, it's kind of a huge mystery. So far, though, these policies aren't affecting crime in any consistent way. So all in all, Phil is pretty optimistic. People are surprised I don't sound like an optimistic guy in general,

but I'm incredibly optimistic about where we are in policing. I think it's one of the best news race stories in the country. I don't believe that the arc of the moral universe is just born that way. I think we have to bend it ourselves. But I think we're going to win, right? I think we're going to win. So when it comes to police shootings, what do we know?

Police in the US do treat black people differently from white people. While we don't have lots of good data on police shootings, these differences are really stark when you look at the data in stops and searches. So far, implicit bias training and police body cams aren't the silver bullet that many had hoped for. What is emerging as a breakthrough here, though, something that could really help,

is making clear rules and policies that tell cops when they should and shouldn't use force and encouraging them to de-escalate situations. For now, this idea really does seem to be helping. That's Science Versus. Hello, hello, hello. Hello. Hi, Meryl, producer at Science Versus.

Hey, Wendy. How many citations in this week's episode? This week we have 120 citations. 120. And if people want to see these citations in this week's episode? This week we have 120 citations. 120. And if people want to see these citations, where should they go? They can head to our website and follow the links to the transcript. And they're also in the show notes. Yes, they're also in the show notes.

Thanks, Meryl. Thanks, Wendy. This episode was produced by Meryl Horne, with help from me, Wendy Zuckerman, along with Rose Rimler, Michelle Dang, Lexi Krupp and Caitlin Sorey. We're edited by Caitlin Kenney and Blythe Terrell. Fact-checking by Diane Kelly. Mix and sound design by Peter Leonard,

with help from Cedric Wilson. Music written by Peter Leonard, Benny Reid, Emma Munger and Bobby Lord. A big thanks to Professor Lawrence Sherman, Dr Joe Cesario, Dr Sam Walker, Chuck Wexler, Dr Peter Moskos, Dennis Floris, Hawke Newsome, Professor William Terrell, Dr Anna Nieuwenhus, Professor Franklin Zimmering, Dr Joan Vickers and Dr Justin Nix. Thanks to all the police officers we spoke to as well.

We really appreciate your help. And a special thanks to Amber Davis, Chuma Osei, Daniel Domke, Christina DiGiosa, the Zuckerman family and Joseph Lavelle-Wilson. I'm Wendy Zuckerman. Back to you next time.