Unfortunately, rather than investigate allegations of abuse and target those agencies that abuse the program, the State Department will almost certainly add layers of bureaucracy and fees that will create difficulties for those agencies that are operating ethically, while doing nothing to target abuse.

well the door swings both ways – many students work under the table jobs far beyond the approved time allowed to make extra money to send home. My wife during graduate school worked for ethnic restaurants near the university where she was paid in cash every night – while at school she had a student assistant job in the department she studied in. Yes it is bad I have seen for myself how many students are asked to work beyond the time allotted – both are wrong and must be enforced to protect the student and stop the idea that working is a way of putting your little brother through school back home.

As a law enforcement professional for over 35 years, I find your response to this story insulting.  Professional police officers are not trained or socialized to distrust people or to be afraid of people.  That may be the rational that ignorant people use to hurt people but it is not true of a professional police officer.  I live in the South and policed in a large southern city for most of my career.  Saying that white people are afraid of black people is also extremely ignorant.  I have found what is true, is that police officers tend to lack patience with ignorant people which may be what inspired me to respond to your comments. 

Really?  Please don’t spew comments stating that it’s insulting to think that police officers are not socialized to distrust people or be afraid of people.  If you have no idea to know what it’s like to walk into a store and watch women clutch their purses a little tighter or people to follow you around don’t speak about the experiences of those who have experienced this type of prejudice.  There are numerous stories about racial profiling and other sorts of injustices that blacks, especially black males face.  Let’s just call it what it is which is that you’re a privileged person of authority who has obviously not tried to see life from a different perspective.  If you’re even in the slightest bit interested in learning start small and watch the movie Crash. 

This is ridiculous on so many levels…

Spike33, your hostility is apparent.  Liveyourlife might’ve done a whole lot of things to make the world a better place, even things that he *didn’t* get generously paid for, but going into all that could take the discussion seriously off-topic. 

Whether cops start off with anger and prejudice, get it from their police training, or develop it as a result of “being lied to, assaulted, disrespected, etc.”, there’s no question in my mind that it generally appears eventually.

You say cops are stereotyped, too — maybe that’s as a result of so many of them flagrantly ignoring rules and courtesy on the road, littering, parking in handicapper spots at donut shops, etc.  Not to mention news reports of overly aggressive “subduing” of suspects … or abusive behavior in their homes.

Further, police choose their jobs — their identity — as police, and that choice can certainly be taken to express something about their personality and beliefs.  The race one was born with was not chosen, so it says nothing about the person behind the skin.

I visited Atlanta last summer, for a conference.  I spoke to two police officers, asking directions.  Both advised me not to go where I wanted to go, for my safety.  Both used the “n-word.”  (I went anyway, on foot, and had no trouble.)

If your city is Atlanta, I assure you that your ranks are not yet rid of racist cops.

There is no point in arguing against the white supremacist ideology spewed by realangel (an ironic moniker if ever say one!)

But do you actually agree that you can tell the intelligence of a person by the amount of melaning in his/her  skin?

Would you actually advise a black man to look at a cop in the eye when stopped for DWB (driving while black)?  Don’t you know what happens to black people when they lood at a white cop in the eyes?

Up to the early seventies, black men and women AND CHILDREN were lynched for the crime of looking at  any white person in the eye.  You really think that a black men or women looking straight in a cop’s eye will not risk being pepper sprayed or beaten and/or hauled off to the police station?

As for the insane belief that someone speaking a different dialect of English than your own shows a lack of intelligence, why don’t you read a Linguistics 101 textbook?  Good grief!  How ignorant can you be. 

Of course that would be useless.  Racists listening to Obama actually “heard” black  English. 

The gist of this white supremacist argument is that intelligence is measured by the amount of melanin you  have in  your skin…   Does that seem intelligent to you?

Not all white persons are afraid of black persons.  But that false fear was inculcated to most white people in the South.  Don’t you remember the time when black folks were expected to get off the sidewalk to let a white person pass without risk of touching them (which did not prevent white men from raping black women without any fear of consequences).  Don’t you remember Jim Crow?

It would appear from your post that you might be from the same generation as I am, so what happened to your memory? 

And of course, not all white people are afraid of black folks.  Many white people participated in the Civil Rights movement.  Many white people are still aware of the historically deep rooted racism in our country and are still trying to fight it.  Yes they are  trying “to make the world a better place” and some have lost their lives  doing it

PS: perhaps you might be interested in the SPLC website which keeps track of hate crimes and hate groups in the county, including the couple of black hate groups (in contrast to the hundreds of white hate  groups).  Perhaps you might also read a few books or talk to a few people who experienced Jim Crow and the terror of whites it created in ALL black people? 

One of the greatest omissions of the study is that in the African community it is widely known that there is a war on the black community and police officer shoot unarmed blacks with impunity. Then later, suddenly these black become “armed”. There is a separate protocol used by police when dealing with the black community. Time and time again, witnesses to police shooting will state that the victim had no gun, but somehow, a gun always shows up when needed.

It would have been nice to have you as a police officer in St Louis 3 of my boys are dead and the police are not interested in them because it was just another black they were all educated the police use to harass them so bad and in each crime one was robbed. doctor killed one he was white and he fled St Louis they let him go .the other son was caught in a random shooting one I buried 7 months ago and the white authorities treat me so bad because I want justice they snap at me and they are uncaring but all the white young men that get murdered they do everything to solve the murders can you come work here as far as white officer are concerned that’s just another dead black I will leave the other word out black no justice all were college men

I told my son that while he was in the first thing they see is his color he was in high school at 12 but in their eyes he was still just a black an honor student but after his death the college did a beautiful honor the president of the college did attend the honor at the college but you no a black honor student kicked it off with a beautiful newspaper article.I know you are being real in your comment the police here in St Louis act like the KKK

“Q. Based on these results, is there anything officers (and others) should do?
“A. One of the key questions that these
results raise is: What can police officers and police departments do to
increase accuracy in shooting decisions?”

Really?  That’s the “key question” this researcher thinks of in response to the interviewer’s question?  Not, “How can we address these societal prejudices in our officers during these stressful situations?”  Not, “How can we train law enforcement personnel to treat citizens fairly based on their attitudes and actual threat levels and not their skin color?”  Maybe I’m missing something here.

Now I have to take the other side, just for a moment, because part of your post reminded me of people’s behavior toward me when I first moved to Chicago.

Actually, the first incident I recall was after my interview for my current job.  I was just roaming the streets, looking for a place to eat, and saw two young black guys walking in the opposite direction, apparently veering left to enter a fast food place.  I was in their way, so I broke into a brief trot to get past the door more quickly (as I always do whenever I think I’m in someone’s way).  To my astonishment, they interpreted what I did as an act of fear, and said so, shouting loudly and derisively at me.

What a shock.  This was Chicago?  Indeed, the segregation in housing is extreme, and racism isn’t hard to find, but was it so bad that black people had come to see racism in a minor gesture of courtesy?  Never again did I *hear* any black person misinterpret an action of mine as racist, but I’ve often wondered how often they might be *thinking* it.

Also, your remark about women clutching their purses reminds me of my walk to the train during my first few years here.  I saw women do the exact same thing when *I* approached them … and I’m a tiny little white female!  Both men and women (generally white) avoided my eyes, looked down, and refused to respond even to a “good morning,” even after I had seen them most every morning for a year.  I remember writing to my parents about this bizarre behavior.  I must have been living in an unusually paranoid neighborhood; once I moved out of it, my new neighbors behaved much more normally.  If I had been black, I certainly would have perceived racism in their behavior, but since I’m not, I know that people sometimes just act weird, and the reason is sometimes unfathomable.

Being shot at and having guns pointed at me by policemen, though … nothing like that ever happened to me!  One can hardly argue that there’s any misunderstanding about that!

It is interesting to read these impassioned comments. I am a co-author on the study – the lead author, Modupe Akinola completed this research as part of her dissertation at Harvard, which I supervised. I do think it is important to point out that the interview and the comments don’t quite cast the results correctly. What we found is that police officers were *more* accurate (made fewer errors) in their shooting decisions when the targets were African American compared to when the targets were White. As someone who has studied racial discrimination for the past 15 years, I can tell you that in much of our research we find evidence of stereotyping and discrimination especially when using implicit measures like physiological responses or reaction time measures, but in this example, we did not observe more shooting errors with black targets. Indeed, we had some difficulty getting this work published initially, and I would speculate it was, in part, because the results were less newsworthy due to the finding that the police officers did not make more errors when targets were African American. This finding doesn’t sit with news accounts of police officers mistakenly shooting unarmed African Americans. I will note that non-police officers do tend to make more errors when completing this task, and do tend to shoot more unarmed African American targets than White targets, but that was not the case in our sample of police officers.
Wendy Berry Mendes
Professor, Department of Psychiatry, UC San Francisco

Pianiste, this is a good question. The majority of the officers were White (56%), 29% were Black, 14% were Latino (there was 1 Asian officer). The pattern of decision making looked similar between White and Black officers — meaning both groups made fewer errors when making shooting decisions with Black targets compared to White targets. Latino officers also showed the same pattern, but note that we are now talking about 10 officers so the numbers are really too small to be confident about the results.  In short, in this sample there were no officer race differences in shooting decisions.  

Though there was reasonable (not great) racial diversity there was not good gender diversity. Only 2 female poice officers so we can’t conclude anything about their shooting decisions.

I agree it is unclear why there were no race differences and it may be due to training, cultural stereotypes or some other factors.