Decision-Making Under Stress and Police Brutality

    2020 Saw a profound, aggressive rise in activism and protests in response to cases of police brutality. Although police brutality, and the likelihood of an encounter between the police and a Black pedestrian to result fatally, is by far “new news,” the abundance of platform and outreach available today allows insight to the tragedy and frequency of these encounters. An article by David Brooks, a writer for The Atlantic, examines how police brutality gets made. 

    What does the decision-making process look like for officers in high risk situations? According to Brooks, recruits are encouraged to take the “fight” route in the fight-or-flight response to danger. Training officers are told that “even when your gun is drawn on someone with his back turned, he can pivot and pull his trigger before you have the chance to fire...the message is: Don’t ever let this happen to you. When in doubt, as the saying goes, it is ‘better to be judged by 12 than carried by 6’”. The author goes on to describe the high rates of PTSD among individuals in the field, as well as examines the popular theories for the onset of police brutality. These include the popular “bad apple” theory and the theory that holds the systemic flaws of the police force accountable for the tragedy brought on to innocent lives. Brooks, however, introduces a third theory, which suggests that the problem lies within the “organizational cultures of some police forces. In forces with an us-versus-the-world siege mentality.”

    Anna Weinberg’s research appears to be profoundly relevant to matters of unjust police brutality. In her experiment, Weinberg explored the association between stress and reward sensitivity. Her study sought to understand three goals, two of which were the following: whether the “presence of an acute stressor degraded neural responses to reward-related feedback,” and “whether a robust neural reward response protected against stress-induced psychosocial arousal, as measured by salivary cortisol.” 

    According to Weinberg’s hypothesis, stress is associated with decreasing sensitivity to rewards, and the stress response process shares brain structures with reward processing. Although not consistently observed, another relevant suggestion is that cortisol released by the HPA-axis in response to stress appears to blunt or suppress the reward response. According to these suggestions, one could argue that, as police are frequently exposed to traumatic stress, their evaluation of risk versus reward may be impaired. Weinberg and her colleagues concluded that “acute psychosocial stress did not impair basic performance monitoring; rather, it impaired the elaborative processing, and possibly reduced the motivational salience, of both positive and negative feedback.” As this experiment implemented instances of only acute stress, applying results to determine how high-risk high-reward circumstances influence potentially fatal decisions would ultimately result in a invalid conclusion. However, if similarities are present between Weinburg’s research and neurological response in instances of severe risk and/or profound stress, the argument that victims of fatal police force are a result of officers’ defective decision-making could be enthusiastically rejected, prompting Blue apologists to hold offending police officers accountable. 

REFERENCES

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/06/how-police-brutality-gets-made/613030/

Ethridge, P., Ali, N., Racine, S. E., Pruessner, J., & Weinberg, A. (2020). Risk and     resilience in an acute stress paradigm: Evidence from salivary cortisol and time-frequency analysis of the reward positivity.