Running the Center for Policing Equity means I work with departments that want to reduce bias and violence. Yet the assumption that victims, particularly Black victims, must have deserved their fate is deeply ingrained. Even reform-minded officers start by fitting each shooting into a story they think they’ve seen before: resistant suspect shot by threatened officer. If I begin telling a different story, about the violence of poverty or the fear of police brutality, officers search for the “real” reason — and change becomes an afterthought..."
Continue reading Phillip Atiba Goff's op-ed piece in the Chicago Tribune.