The shooting death of Michael Brown, the unarmed African-American teenager, by a white police officer led to civil unrest in Ferguson, Missouri, and outrage nationwide. These events are emblematic of the fraught and often problematic interactions that minority communities have with law enforcement, including racial profiling, harassment and police brutality.
It has been more than 50 years since the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the first March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. And while our society has made major progress, the events in Ferguson are a harsh wake-up call that long-entrenched social divisions remain. In 1967, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke at APA's Annual Convention. He was disappointed in social scientists' minimal involvement in the civil rights movement. Our society is "poisoned to its soul by racism," he said, and he believed that social scientists had the opportunity and the responsibility to help change that. He called on us to take on the enormous challenges of racism, unemployment and economic inequality, and violence.
"The problem is deep," he said. "It is gigantic in extent, and chaotic in detail. And I do not believe that it will be solved until there is a kind of cosmic discontent enlarging in the bosoms of people of good will all over this nation."
APA's mission is to advance the creation, communication and application of psychological knowledge to benefit society and improve people's lives. The Public Interest Directorate's mission builds on that mission to apply "psychology to the fundamental problems of human welfare and social justice" and to promote "equitable and just treatment of all segments of society through education, training and public policy." I went into psychology because I believed in its power to create positive change. Many psychologists have worked tirelessly on the issues Dr. King named, yet I believe we have fallen short.
We need an in-depth and honest conversation about the influence of race and racism in interactions between law enforcement and minority communities. We want to highlight psychologists and other social scientists working to understand problems and to develop solutions. We must include law enforcement in this conversation; they are essential partners in making positive change. We want to draw attention to good models of law enforcement that have improved the effectiveness of policing and interactions with minority communities. We want to identify legal and policy changes that could lead to common-sense solutions.
Toward that end, we invite psychologists, other social scientists, law enforcement, legal scholars and policymakers to offer their perspectives in a series of guest posts on APA's Psychology Benefits Societyopens in new window blog. The topics we will explore include stereotyping and racial profiling, the role of implicit bias in police perceptions and decisions to use force, racism and the criminal justice system, safety and preparing minority youth for interactions with police, fostering positive relationships between police and communities of color, assisting recovery of communities after violence or unrest, and economic and power inequities that lead to community unrest.
Clearly, the questions are complex and require multiple perspectives. This is one reason a blog series can be helpful because it provides a quick and effective way to gather perspectives from experts on the different pieces of this larger puzzle.
So, we want to hear from you. Do you perform research relevant to this discussion? Do you implement programs within communities or with law enforcement that could offer insight or practical solutions? If you would like to contribute, please submit your topic on the blog's authorsopens in new window page.
A final word: Our immediate goal is to explore and highlight efforts that increase our understanding and create meaningful change. Our hope is to build on the "cosmic discontent enlarging in the bosoms of people of good will all over this nation," so that 50 years from today, we will have truly changed the world for the better.
