Jennifer Eberhardt Is Analyzing Police Bias With AI

To most people, footage from a police body cam is only useful as evidence. To Jennifer Eberhardt, it’s a rich source for research, full of data that can help explain—and maybe even level—the disparities in the treatment of Black people and others within the criminal-justice system. Eberhardt, a professor of both psychology and organizational behavior at Stanford University and a recipient of a 2014 MacArthur “genius grant,” studies bias and how a cultural association between Black Americans and crime can affect not just what people think, but also what they notice and remember, and how they punish. 

Eberhardt’s most famous experiments found novel ways to uncover unconscious bias. She had people think about either crime or something else before being shown an image of Black person and a white person. No matter the race of the participant, those who thought about crime looked at the image of the Black person first. People were also able to identify blurry images of guns or knives sooner after exposure to Black faces than after white faces or images without faces. “What I’ve been doing with a number of different colleagues across the past 25 years,” she says, “is demonstrating the power of this particular association between Blackness and crime.”

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