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Some years ago,
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I was on an airplane with my son
who was just five years old at the time.
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My son was so excited
about being on this airplane with Mommy.
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He's looking all around
and he's checking things out
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and he's checking people out.
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And he sees this man, and he says,
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"Hey! That guy looks like Daddy!"
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And I look at the man,
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and he didn't look anything
at all like my husband,
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nothing at all.
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And so then I start
looking around on the plane,
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and I notice this man was
the only black guy on the plane.
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And I thought,
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"Alright.
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I'm going to have to have
a little talk with my son
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about how not all
black people look alike."
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My son, he lifts his head up,
and he says to me,
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"I hope he doesn't rob the plane."
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And I said, "What? What did you say?"
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And he says, "Well, I hope that man
doesn't rob the plane."
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And I said, "Well, why would you say that?
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You know Daddy wouldn't rob a plane."
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And he says, "Yeah, yeah,
yeah, well, I know."
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And I said, "Well,
why would you say that?"
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And he looked at me
with this really sad face,
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and he says,
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"I don't know why I said that.
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I don't know why I was thinking that."
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We are living with such severe
racial stratification
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that even a five-year-old can tell us
what's supposed to happen next,
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even with no evildoer,
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even with no explicit hatred.
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This association between
blackness and crime
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made its way into the mind
of my five-year-old.
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It makes its way into all of our children,
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into all of us.
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Our minds are shaped by
the racial disparities
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we see out in the world
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and the narratives that help us
to make sense of the disparities we see:
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"Those people are criminals."
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"Those people are violent."
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"Those people are to be feared."
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When my research team
brought people into our lab
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and exposed them to faces,
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we found that exposure to black faces
led them to see blurry images of guns
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with greater clarity and speed.
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Bias cannot only control what we see,
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but where we look.
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We found that prompting people
to think of violent crime
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can lead them to direct their eyes
onto a black face
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and away from a white face.
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Prompting police officers
to think of capturing and shooting
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and arresting
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leads their eyes to settle
on black faces, too.
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Bias can infect every aspect
of our criminal justice system.
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In a large data set
of death-eligible defendants,
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we found that looking more black
more than doubled their chances
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of receiving a death sentence --
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at least when their victims were white.
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This effect is significant,
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even though we controlled
for the severity of the crime
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and the defendant's attractiveness.
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And no matter what we controlled for,
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we found that black
people were punished
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in proportion to the blackness
of their physical features:
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the more black,
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the more death-worthy.
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Bias can also influence
how teachers discipline students.
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My colleagues and I have found
that teachers express a desire
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to discipline a black
middle school student more harshly
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than a white student
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for the same repeated infractions.
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In a recent study,
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we're finding that teachers
treat black students as a group
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but white students as individuals.
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If, for example,
one black student misbehaves
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and then a different black student
misbehaves a few days later,
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the teacher responds
to that second black student
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as if he had misbehaved twice.
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It's as though the sins of one child
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get piled onto the other.
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We create categories
to make sense of the world,
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to assert some control and coherence
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to the stimuli that we're constantly
being bombarded with.
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Categorization and the bias that it seeds
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allow our brains to make judgments
more quickly and efficiently,
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and we do this by instinctively
relying on patterns
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that seem predictable.
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Yet, just as the categories we create
allow us to make quick decisions,
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they also reinforce bias.
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So the very things that help us
to see the world
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also can blind us to it.
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They render our choices effortless,
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friction-free.
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Yet they exact a heavy toll.
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So what can we do?
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We are all vulnerable to bias,
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but we don't act on bias all the time.
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There are certain conditions
that can bring bias alive
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and other conditions that can muffle it.
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Let me give you an example.
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Many people are familiar
with the tech company Nextdoor.
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So, their whole purpose is to create
stronger, healthier, safer neighborhoods.
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And so they offer this online space
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where neighbors can gather
and share information.
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Yet, Nextdoor soon found
that they had a problem
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with racial profiling.
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In the typical case,
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people would look outside their window
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and see a black man
in their otherwise white neighborhood
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and make the snap judgment
that he was up to no good,
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even when there was no evidence
of criminal wrongdoing.
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In many ways, how we behave online
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is a reflection of how
we behave in the world.
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But what we don't want to do
is create an easy-to-use system
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that can amplify bias
and deepen racial disparities,
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rather than dismantling them.
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So the cofounder of Nextdoor
reached out to me and to others
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to try to figure out what to do.
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And they realized that
to curb racial profiling on the platform,
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they were going to have to add friction;
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that is, they were going
to have to slow people down.
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So Nextdoor had a choice to make,
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and against every impulse,
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they decided to add friction.
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And they did this by adding
a simple checklist.
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There were three items on it.
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First, they asked users to pause
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and think, "What was this person doing
that made him suspicious?"
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The category "black man"
is not grounds for suspicion.
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Second, they asked users to describe
the person's physical features,
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not simply their race and gender.
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Third, they realized that a lot of people
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didn't seem to know
what racial profiling was,
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nor that they were engaging in it.
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So Nextdoor provided them
with a definition
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and told them that it was
strictly prohibited.
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Most of you have seen
those signs in airports
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and in metro stations,
"If you see something, say something."
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Nextdoor tried modifying this.
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"If you see something suspicious,
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say something specific."
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And using this strategy,
by simply slowing people down,
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Nextdoor was able to curb
racial profiling by 75 percent.
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Now, people often will say to me,
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"You can't add friction
in every situation, in every context,
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and especially for people who make
split-second decisions all the time."
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But it turns out we can add friction
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to more situations than we think.
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Working with the Oakland Police Department
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in California,
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I and a number of my colleagues
were able to help the Department
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to reduce the number of stops they made
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of people who were not
committing any serious crimes.
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And we did this by pushing officers
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to ask themselves a question
before each and every stop they made:
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"Is this stop intelligence-led,
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yes or no?
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In other words,
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do I have prior information
to tie this particular person
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to a specific crime?"
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By adding that question
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to the form officers complete
during a stop,
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they slow down, they pause,
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they think, "Why am I considering
pulling this person over?"
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In 2017, before we added that
intelligence-led question to the form,
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officers made about 32,000 stops
across the city.
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In that next year,
with the addition of this question,
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that fell to 19,000 stops.
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African-American stops alone
fell by 43 percent.
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And stopping fewer black people
did not make the city any more dangerous.
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In fact, the crime rate continued to fall,
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and the city became safer for everybody.
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So one solution can come from reducing
the number of unnecessary stops.
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Another can come from improving
the quality of the stops
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officers do make.
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And technology can help us here.
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We all know about George Floyd's death
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because those who tried to come to his aid
held cell phone cameras
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to record that horrific, fatal
encounter with the police.
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But we have all sorts of technology
that we're not putting to good use.
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Police departments across the country
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are now required to wear body-worn cameras
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so we have recordings of not only
the most extreme and horrific encounters
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but of everyday interactions.
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With an interdisciplinary
team at Stanford,
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we've begun to use
machine learning techniques
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to analyze large numbers of encounters.
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This is to better understand
what happens in routine traffic stops.
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What we found was that
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even when police officers
are behaving professionally,
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they speak to black drivers
less respectfully than white drivers.
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In fact, from the words
officers use alone,
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we could predict whether they were talking
to a black driver or a white driver.
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The problem is that the vast majority
of the footage from these cameras
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is not used by police departments
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to understand what's
going on on the street
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or to train officers.
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And that's a shame.
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How does a routine stop
turn into a deadly encounter?
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How did this happen
in George Floyd's case?
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How did it happen in others?
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When my eldest son was 16 years old,
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he discovered that
when white people look at him,
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they feel fear.
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Elevators are the worst, he said.
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When those doors close,
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people are trapped in this tiny space
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with someone they have been taught
to associate with danger.
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My son senses their discomfort,
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and he smiles to put them at ease,
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to calm their fears.
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When he speaks,
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their bodies relax.
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They breathe easier.
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They take pleasure in his cadence,
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his diction, his word choice.
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He sounds like one of them.
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I used to think that my son
was a natural extrovert like his father.
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But I realized at that moment,
in that conversation,
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that his smile was not a sign
that he wanted to connect
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with would-be strangers.
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It was a talisman he'd used
to protect himself,
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a survival skill he had honed
over thousands of elevator rides.
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He was learning to accommodate the tension
that his skin color generated
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and that put his own life at risk.
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We know that the brain is wired for bias,
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and one way to interrupt that bias
is to pause and to reflect
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on the evidence of our assumptions.
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So we need to ask ourselves:
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What assumptions do we bring
when we step onto an elevator?
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Or an airplane?
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How do we make ourselves aware
of our own unconscious bias?
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Who do those assumptions keep safe?
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Who do they put at risk?
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Until we ask these questions
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and insist that our schools
and our courts and our police departments
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and every institution do the same,
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we will continue to allow bias
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to blind us.
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And if we do,
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none of us are truly safe.
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Thank you.