The Dangerous Implications of Racialized Policing

Racial disparities and discriminatory practices targeted at people of color remain a significant and deeply concerning issue in the United States. Built on hundreds of years of entrenched racism, the U.S. continues to show how both systemic and individual acts of bias shape institutions, influence public policy, and reinforce unequal outcomes across generations of marginalized communities. These racial disparities show up across nearly every domain of life, but the criminal justice system stands out as one of the most persistent and harmful forms of structural inequality. For decades, people of color, especially Black individuals, have faced disproportionate rates of policing, arrests, sentencing, incarceration, and overall severity of treatment compared to White people. A system intended to “protect and serve” has, in reality, operated at the expense of an entire population.

These inequities extend far beyond individual choices or neighborhood crime rates. Instead, they reflect the combined effects of systemic racism and individual psychological biases that shape criminal justice outcomes for both adults and children. These forces work together to disadvantage people of color at every stage of the process. While it may be easy for some to assume that over-policing in predominantly Black neighborhoods simply reflects the need to regulate a supposedly “dangerous” community, this interpretation misses the larger picture. In practice, overpolicing triggers a cycle of racially biased outcomes, including disproportionate violence, unequal arrest rates, and systematic courtroom inequities, that continually reinforce themselves.

Police brutality is the unwarranted and/or excessive, often illegal, use of force against civilians by a police officer. This brutality can manifest in several ways, such as beatings, verbal assault, intimidation, murder, and other forms of mistreatment. Although police violence affects many communities, Black individuals experience these outcomes at significantly higher rates, revealing a long history of racialized aggression within law enforcement.

Instead, the roots of this violence are psychological. A study by Goff and colleagues highlights how deeply racist ideologies operate not only within the general public but also within the police force. The researchers found that Black youth are often perceived as older than they actually are, which makes observers more likely to view them as less innocent and more responsible for their actions. When someone is perceived as older, their presumed culpability increases as well. The study also showed that dehumanization, a psychological process in which Black individuals are implicitly associated with nonhuman traits, plays a central role in these distorted perceptions. Historically, Black people have been compared to apes as a function of dehumanization, a harmful association that continues to shape modern judgments. Goff et al. found that higher levels of dehumanization predicted both greater age overestimation and higher assumptions of culpability across general public samples and police officers (Goff et al., 2013). These findings highlight how deeply ingrained and damaging these biases are, especially within institutions that hold significant power over people’s lives.

The implications of these findings are profoundly troubling. They suggest that police officers may fall victim to powerful psychological biases, including the dehumanization of Black individuals, which in turn contributes to the disproportionate use of violence against people of color. It is therefore essential to acknowledge how these implicit processes shape real-world outcomes and to confront the systemic conditions that allow such biases to persist. Considering the deeply rooted racialized violence in the criminal justice system, is it possible to reform the system, or is it too far gone?