Are police officers conditioned to be prejudiced?

This is in response to Dave Willard's letter in the Simi Valley Acorn dated June 8, 2007.

A few hours ago I finished reading "Blink" by Malcolm Gladwell.

There is a statement in Willard's letter that is simply not true and is taken for granted too many times.

Most of what he previously says before that statement is true.

"If you simply obey the requests of the officers you are dealing with, all goes nice, calm and orderly," Willard writes.

I suppose that many of your readers can recollect television clips where police officers abused their authority without any challenge by the suspects. Like the rest of us, police are subject to biases.

According to Gladwell, for minorities, including blacks and Hispanics, the streets can be very dangerous places to be when targeted by a police officer who, acting on a stressful situation, will make snap judgments about the suspects' intentions based on his perception of race, color, social background, etc.

Judgment in stressful situations is impaired, and as many studies show (read "Blank" and the referenced studies), the person sees what he or she unconsciously has been fed by the prevailing community bias to see, most of the times in detriment of the suspect.

None of this snap judging with bias is done with awareness of what we are doing. This is done unconsciously, and most people when asked will say they are not biased.

We cannot avoid it. It is a mechanism of our minds to function in stress situations.

The book "Blink" is fascinating, and I hope many readers interested in social behavior, and this case, would acquire it, read it with an open mind and think twice before making a statement such as Mr. Willard's. I am all about obeying the law. I obey red lights, traffic signs and general regulations. But if I am caught off guard for some unintended offense, I know that the law is not blind.

It has many eyes, as many as there are different people, and policemen with different biases trying to enforce it the best they can. Nidia Palomo Simi Valley