The Decision to Shoot Black Suspects in Brazil: The Police Officer’s Dilemma

Abstract

Reports of Amnesty International (2015) indicate that Brazilian police are among the most violent in the world, and that such violence victimizes, above all, black citizens. Using the “First Person Shooter Task” (FPST), developed by Correll et al. (2002), we analyzed in three studies the impacts of suspect skin color on the Brazilian civilian and military police decision to shoot. The first study involved 97 white college students. The results indicated the presence of racist shooter bias: participants shot a black armed suspect faster than a white one and took longer to shoot an unarmed black suspect than a white one, and also made more mistakes not shooting the armed white man than the armed black man. In the second study, 60 male military police officers (MP) participated, 10 of them were white, 41 brown and 9 black. All police officers had 3 months of police service. The results indicated again the presence of racist shooter bias, but only in the response times. There was no effect of the participant’s skin color. The third study was conducted with 58 male MPs, 11 of them were white, 37 brown and 10 black, all with more than 10 years of police service. The same pattern of study 2 was found. The general results demonstrate that levels of racist shooter bias of police officers are not higher than that of civilians. The data are discussed considering the risk of racism in making extreme life and death decisions.