Rotten Trees: Racism and Bad Apples in American Policing

Dr. Rashawn Ray shares his insightful lecture on Rotten Trees: Racism and Bad Apples in American Policing.

“Technological advances via mobile phones and social media are used to showcase disparities in policing and help increase police accountability. It can also be used as a training tool to reduce bias.”

Key Takeaways:

• Social media helped to drive Black Lives Matter into becoming a revolutionary movement because it transformed how activists communicate with the public.  

• Social media analysis allows us to track knowledge about policing incidents and the popularity of activists and slogans. 

• Virtual reality technology can be leveraged to reduce bias in policing by improving training for law enforcement.  

While the outcry regarding social events includes the views of the general public, missing, especially in the academic literature, are police officers themselves as well as a proper evaluation of use of force and proposed reforms . Over the past several years, Ray, along with colleagues in The Lab for Applied Social Science Research, collected interview, survey, social media, and virtual reality data with police officers, activists, and civilians. Ray’s research indicates that police reforms focused on implicit bias trainings and body- worn cameras fall short because they do not address how the structural, cultural, and organizational components of policing obstruct accountability and contribute to over-policing, profiling, and disparities. Ray concludes by discussing how a series of evidence-based policy prescriptions that focus on reallocating and shifting funding within police department budgets and innovative trainings using virtual reality technology can help transform policing in America.

About Dr. Rashawn Ray

Dr. Rashawn Ray is professor of sociology and founding executive director of the Lab for Applied Social Science Research (LASSR) at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is also a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. Ray regularly testifies at the federal and stage levels on racial equity, policing and criminal justice reform, health policy, wealth, and family policy. As the director of LASSR, Ray helped develop a virtual reality program for law enforcement and led implicit bias trainings with thousands of police officers, military personnel, and employees at companies and organizations.

Ray has published over 50 books, articles, and book chapters, and over 50 op-eds. He has written for Washington Post, New York Times, USA Today, Politico, Business Insider, Newsweek, NBC News, The Guardian, The Hill, Huffington Post, and The Conversation. Ray has appeared on CNN, MSNBC, BBC, CBS, ABC, C-SPAN, PBS, NPR, and Al Jazeera. His research addresses the mechanisms that manufacture and maintain racial and social inequality with a particular focus on police-civilian relations and men’s treatment of women. His academic articles have appeared on the American Journal of Sociology, Science Advances, Social Science Research, Ethnic and Racial Studies, Du Bois Review, and the Annual Review of Public Health. Ray’s books include Systemic Racism in America: Sociological Theory, Education Inequality, and Social Change (with Hoda Mahmoudi), How Families Matter; Simply Complicated Intersections of Race, Gender, and Work (with Pamela Braboy Jackson), and Race and Ethnic Relations in the 21st Century: History, Theory, Institutions, and Policy, which has been adopted over 40 times in college courses.

Ray has been awarded the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Mani L. Bhaumik Award for Public Engagement with Science, the Public Understanding of Sociology Award from the American Sociological Association, the Morris Rosenberg Award for Outstanding Sociological Achievement from the DC Sociological Society, and the Outstanding Young Alumni Award from Indiana University. He was recently awarded a prestigious Andrew Carnegie Fellowship.