Can VR Help Stop Police Shootings?
It isn’t a new problem. It isn’t even the first time reporters have taken note. In 2015 the Guardian wrote an in-depth article about police-involved shootings in the United States. They discovered that in the first 24 days of 2015, police in the US fatally shot more people than police in England and Wales, combined, over the past 24 years. In Germany, fewer citizens (15) were fatally shot in two years than unarmed black American men (19) in five months. Police in Canada average 25 fatal shooting a year. In California, a state just 10% more populous than Canada, police fatally shot nearly three times as many people in just five months.
Yet the news surfaced, bubbled, and disappeared. People forgot; rage dissipated. It isn’t a new problem.
But 2016 is the year people refused to forget. It’s the year the conversation has changed. The problem isn’t just police shootings. We are finally, hopefully consequentially, talking about the indivisible issue of racism in police involved shootings. The rate of death for young black men in police shootings is five times higher than white men of the same age. One in every 65 deaths of a young African American man in the US is a killing by police; and those men are far more likely to be unarmed than the white men (who are also being killed by police in staggering numbers, a fact that should not be forgotten).
We are living in an age of technology. From automated cars that promise to reduce car collision fatalities to advances in drug therapies that save lives every day, we are using modern advances to make the lives of the world’s citizens safer, happier, and longer. So is there a way to use technology — to use virtual reality — to address the issue of police involved killing?
Some people believe there is.
Effectively screening out candidates who have the potential to be involved in civilian shootings is a crucial step towards addressing police violence; however, there’s a lot of evidence that good training is actually more important in addressing police violence than officer selection. A study of 2,010 police candidates enrolled at the Catalan Institute for Public Safety found that academic qualifications predicted only 27% of performance variance; the ability to predict candidate’s future job success is hugely improved when training is included as a mediator of personal dispositions.
Some jurisdictions are already aware of this; they use assessment centres to decide if a candidate has the right personality to become an officer. The argument in the favour of this model is that unlike a written exam, an assessment centre tests what an officer can do, rather than what they know.
So if we already have assessment centres, why do we need virtual reality?
Current tests might run a candidate through a real-life encounter where they are asked to fire only at the cardboard pop-ups holding guns (remember that scene from Men in Black? Yeah, that’s a real training exercise — only with guns instead of aliens), or they might expect them to prove they understand statutes and regulations and how they’re applied to the real world. Unlike these traditional training simulations, virtual reality can test reasoning as well as reaction. It isn’t enough to know that Will Smith shot the little blonde girl — we have to know why. It isn’t enough to know that an officer will only draw when the civilian is armed. Do they know how to de-escalate? Can they effectively handle a person with mental illness?
The current VR offering doesn’t directly address issues of racial bias. It’s focused on teaching officers to de-escalate, and while that’s incredibly valuable, the question remains — could we use VR not just to weed out those with inherent racial biases, but even more so, to teach people to have more empathy and understanding?
There is evidence that the answer might be yes. Researchers have found that slipping on a VR headset and walking around in a body that isn’t your own can make people less racist — when testing racial bias before and after the experience, they found racial bias significantly decreased after white people spent time in a VR world where they appeared to be African American.
Policing isn’t the only area hoping to increase understanding using VR. The NFL is using VR to increase empathy in the hopes of having a more diverse workplace for women, while Sweden is trying to make the military and police and civilans work better together.
This kind of empathy training is a perfect fit for beleaguered police departments; we should be using every tool at our disposal to work towards a safer, more responsive and more inclusive police force. But a lot of the time, it feels like the solutions to problems of this magnitude are out of our hands. So what can you, as an individual, do to help usher in the future we all hope to see?
If you’re an American citizen, you can start by writing to your congressperson. You can find their contact information here. In March, lawmakers in Utah passed a bill that explicitly authorizes the attorney general to fund and support a statewide virtual reality training center for use of force and de-escalation policies for agencies across the region; you can reference that as precedence for other states following the same path. (It might help to mention the VirTra 300, which is the unit being used to such great effect in New Jersey.)
No matter where in the world you live, you can also support Campaign Zero, a list of ten (incredibly reasonable) demands on how to improve police-community relations and end the killings of African Americans by police. Number 7 on the list is simply “Training,” which covers better training for police. Let them know VR is in their tool belt — and let them know that you’re on their side.
written by Wren Handman. follow the Hammer & Tusk weekly newsletter by signing up here.
Originally published at www.hammerandtusk.com.
