The WSU Police Department is working with the Student Legal Research Association to better understand racial disparities in arrest data and officers’ implicit bias.
WSU PD Chief Bill Gardner said it was disheartening when he read in a 2019 Evergreen article that Black residents are nearly five times as likely to be arrested by the department.
All the officers were taken back by the statistic. They began questioning their implicit biases and whether they contributed to this disparity in arrest data. Gardner said the department wants to understand the statistic and what drives this disparity.
“We’ve done a considerable amount of training for officers on implicit bias,” he said. “We’ll continue to do that.”