Papers by Song Richardson
Social Science Research Network, May 30, 2017
Racial disparities in police uses of force persist. Two competing explanations are often given fo... more Racial disparities in police uses of force persist. Two competing explanations are often given for these disparities. One is that these disparities are justified because police are simply responding to objectively threatening conduct. The other is that these disparities are the result of police racism. While both accounts are accurate some of the time, this chapter illuminates how "racial anxiety" can also enable racial disparities in police uses of force even in the absence of racial animus and even when people of color are acting identically to their white counterparts. The term racial anxiety references how concerns about police racism can influence the behaviors and perceptions of officers and people of color in ways that increase the potential for violence. Consideration of racial anxiety highlights the necessity of transforming policing in order to build community-police trust. Policymakers can aid in this endeavor by supporting programs, initiatives and legislation that will facilitate this transformation.
Social Science Research Network, Feb 14, 2017
for their thoughtful comments and editorial suggestions. systemic triage 863 book review contents... more for their thoughtful comments and editorial suggestions. systemic triage 863 book review contents introduction i. racism in practice A. Policing Racial Boundaries B. Culture and the Race-Blind Code C. Limitations ii. systemic triage and its racialized consequences A. Implicit Racial Bias B. Systemic Triage C. Implicit Bias Under Conditions of Systemic Triage iii. recommended remedies A. Problems with Court Watching B. Individual, Institutional, and Systemic Solutions conclusion the yale law journal 126:864 2017 8. Id. at 9.
Social Science Research Network, Nov 30, 2017
Many have embraced evidence from the mind sciences that our behaviors are often influenced by our... more Many have embraced evidence from the mind sciences that our behaviors are often influenced by our implicit biases rather than our conscious beliefs. This is one reason why implicit bias has become a staple in trainings for judges, lawyers, police officers, teachers, and health care providers. While understanding that implicit bias is important, social science research demonstrates that implicit bias alone does not fully account for the racial dynamics that undermine student achievement and trigger disproportionately harsh discipline, diminish the efficacy of health care and affect morbidity and mortality rates, trigger harsher prison sentences, result in child removal, and lead to unnecessary uses of force by police against civilians. Following the "behavioral realist" approach to provide the most empirically accurate understanding of human behavior, in this Essay, we introduce "racial anxiety" as an additional lens for understanding racial disparities of all types.
Cambridge University Press eBooks, Aug 26, 2013
Harvard Law Review, 2018
14 See Carbado, supra note 9, at 164 (framing this phenomenon as part of a broader problem of mas... more 14 See Carbado, supra note 9, at 164 (framing this phenomenon as part of a broader problem of mass criminalization).
\\jciprod01\productn\G\GWN\83-3\GWN304.txt unknown Seq: 2 18-JUN-15 15:54 2015] IMPLICIT RACIAL B... more \\jciprod01\productn\G\GWN\83-3\GWN304.txt unknown Seq: 2 18-JUN-15 15:54 2015] IMPLICIT RACIAL BIAS 1009 of profiling. In sum, the Court's current conception of race discrimination is anemic and in urgent need of reform. Chin's and Vernon's arguments increase the likelihood that the Court will condemn racial discrimination as unreasonable under the Fourth Amendment. This would mark an important first step towards moving the Court to adopt a more realistic and broader conception of the harms of race discrimination.
LSN: Law Enforcement (e.g., 2016
Perhaps no issue has been more controversial in the discussion of police union responses to alleg... more Perhaps no issue has been more controversial in the discussion of police union responses to allegations of excessive force than statutory and contractual protections for officers accused of misconduct, as critics have assailed such protections and police unions defend them. For all the public controversy over police unions, there is has been relatively little legal scholarship on them. Neither the legal nor the social science literature on policing and police reform has explored the opportunities and constraints that labor law offers in thinking about organizational change. The scholarly deficit has substantial public policy consequences, as groups ranging from Black Lives Matter to the U.S. Department of Justice are proposing legal changes that will require the cooperation of police labor organizations to implement. This article fills that gap. Part I explores the structure and functioning of police departments and the evolution of police unions as a response to a hierarchical and ...
California Law Review, 2019
I. The Solidarity Presumption ............................................................ 1994 I... more I. The Solidarity Presumption ............................................................ 1994 II. The Fallacy ................................................................................... 1996 A. Racial Anxiety Experienced by Blacks ............................ 1996 1. Conformity Pressure.................................................. 1997 2. Value Threat ............................................................. 2000 3. Lower Performance Ratings for Diversity-Valuing Behavior ................................................................... 2003 B. Racial Anxiety Experienced by Whites............................ 2004 Conclusion ........................................................................................ 2007
II. IMPLICIT RACIAL BIAS AND RACIAL ANXIETY..................................................75 A... more II. IMPLICIT RACIAL BIAS AND RACIAL ANXIETY..................................................75 A. Judgments of Suspicion: The Influence of Implicit Racial Bias ..................75 1. Increased Scrutiny .................................................................................76 2. Biased Evaluations of Ambiguous Behaviors .......................................76 B. Interactions: The Influence of Racial Anxiety .............................................78
The George Washington Law Review, 2015
In their article, “Reasonable but Unconstitutional: Racial Profiling and the Radical Objectivity ... more In their article, “Reasonable but Unconstitutional: Racial Profiling and the Radical Objectivity of Whren v. U.S.,” Professor Chin and Mr. Vernon not only provide a withering critique of the U.S. Supreme Court’s unanimous decision in Whren v. U.S. but they also present novel doctrinal arguments for reversing its problematic dicta that racial discrimination is constitutionally reasonable. Their arguments are compelling and require no extension of current doctrine. For instance, Chin and Vernon embrace Whren’s endorsement of pretextual traffic stops as long as those stops do not involve racial profiling. Additionally, the authors implicitly embrace a central premise of the Courts’ current race jurisprudence, which is that only conscious racism violates the Constitution. Thus, their framework allows the Court to reach the identical outcome in Whren, without sanctioning race-based policing. However, this Response argues that there are some disadvantages to relying upon the Court’s exist...
Police Use of Force L. Song Richardson * L. Song Richardson, Police Use of Force, in Academy for ... more Police Use of Force L. Song Richardson * L. Song Richardson, Police Use of Force, in Academy for Justice, A Report on Scholarship and Criminal Justice Reform (Erik Luna ed., forthcoming 2017). Racial disparities in police uses of force persist. Two competing explanations are often given for these disparities. One is that these disparities are justified because police are simply responding to objectively threatening conduct. The other is that these disparities are the result of police racism. While both accounts are accurate some of the time, this chapter illuminates how “racial anxiety” can also enable racial disparities in police uses of force even in the absence of racial animus and even when people of color are acting identically to their white counterparts. The term racial anxiety references how concerns about police racism can influence the behaviors and perceptions of officers and people of color in ways that increase the potential for violence. Consideration of racial anxiety...
Illinois, 15 Rhode Island, 16 Missouri, 17 and West Virginia. 18 Yet, the police consistently sto... more Illinois, 15 Rhode Island, 16 Missouri, 17 and West Virginia. 18 Yet, the police consistently stop and search blacks at higher rates than whites. 19 I do not dispute the fact that conscious racial bias against blacks can explain why the police continue to disproportionately stop and search blacks despite the hit-rate data. 20 However,
Many have embraced evidence from the mind sciences that our behaviors are often influenced by our... more Many have embraced evidence from the mind sciences that our behaviors are often influenced by our implicit biases rather than our conscious beliefs. This is one reason why implicit bias has become a staple in trainings for judges, lawyers, police officers, teachers, and health care providers. While understanding that implicit bias is important, social science research demonstrates that implicit bias alone does not fully account for the racial dynamics that undermine student achievement and trigger disproportionately harsh discipline, diminish the efficacy of health care and affect morbidity and mortality rates, trigger harsher prison sentences, result in child removal, and lead to unnecessary uses of force by police against civilians. Following the “behavioral realist” approach to provide the most empirically accurate understanding of human behavior, in this Essay, we introduce “racial anxiety” as an additional lens for understanding racial disparities of all types. In the social ps...
Yale Law Journal, 2017
In Crook County, Nicole Gonzalez Van Cleve provides a groundbreaking and disturbing ethnography o... more In Crook County, Nicole Gonzalez Van Cleve provides a groundbreaking and disturbing ethnography of the Cook County-Chicago criminal courts, the largest unified criminal court system in the United States. She details how prosecutors, judges, public defenders and sheriff’s deputies create and maintain a criminal justice system that turns race-neutral due process protections into tools of racial punishment. This review analyzes Crook County by situating it within the broader framework of pro-active policing practices that overwhelm criminal courthouses across the country with an avalanche of cases involving non-violent offenders who are primarily individuals of color. The result is what I refer to as systemic triage. Triage denotes the process of determining how to allocate scarce resources. In this review, I use the phrase systemic triage to highlight that all criminal justice system players are impacted by criminal justice policies and policing practices that engulf, not only public ...
Articles in Law Reviews Other Academic Journals, 2011
Iowa Law Review, Oct 1, 2012
The doctrine of self-defense evaluates the reasonableness of criminality judgments. Yet, it fails... more The doctrine of self-defense evaluates the reasonableness of criminality judgments. Yet, it fails to account for how non-conscious cognitions place those who are stereotyped as criminal at greater risk of mistaken judgments of criminality-sometimes with deadly consequences. Studies reveal, for example, that people are more likely to see weapons in the hands of unarmed black men than unarmed white men, and to more quickly shoot them as a result. Because self-defense doctrine does not attend to these judgment errors, it fails to interrogate how, if at all, these mistakes should affect assessments of reasonableness. Drawing from powerful and well-established mind sciences research, this Essay introduces a concept that we term the "suspicion heuristic." This concept explains how non-conscious processes can lead to systematic and predictable errors in judgments of criminality-and influence subsequent behaviors-regardless of conscious racial attitudes. This Essay argues that in order to provide more equal protection, security, and liberty to all victims of violence, the law of selfdefense should account for the suspicion heuristic in its assessments of reasonableness. This Essay traces the broad outlines of a theoretical and legal framework for doing so.
Fordham Law Review, 2015
The recent rash of police killing unarmed black men has brought national attention to the persist... more The recent rash of police killing unarmed black men has brought national attention to the persistent problem of policing and racial violence. These cases include the well-known and highly controversial death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, 1 as well as the deaths of twelve-year-old
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Papers by Song Richardson