The primary goal of the Policing Racial Bias project will be to develop partnerships among social psychologists and law enforcement agencies to share information and generate new knowledge on the influence of racial bias in policing. This two-year project will involve multiple steps. At Step 1, an initial conference will convene with researchers and agency representatives participating. Researchers will present data on recent studies of race and policing as well as propose new studies to be conducted with police officers as participants. At Step 2, a second conference will convene to share the results of these new studies. At Step 3, an edited volume will be produced on race, crime and policing. At Step 4, knowledge generated from the project will be disseminated broadly and the edited volume will be distributed. The proposed project is unprecedented and equivalent results cannot be obtained using structures already in place at annual conferences and other professional meetings. The proposed project places researchers (25% of whom are African American, an under-represented group in the sciences) in direct partnership with leaders in the law enforcement community (who generally are not represented at all in scientific research, even as such research affects their profession). The proposed project has the potential for serving as a national model on race and policing. It offers a unique structure under which researchers and law enforcement agencies can work together to proactively address some of the race issues that plague us all.
