When police confronted the white man suspected of killing 10 Black people at a Buffalo supermarket, he was the very poster boy for armed and dangerous.
and a host of other Black people have died at police hands when the initial circumstances were far less volatile.“There’s just a stark contrast between how a Kyle Rittenhouse or a Payton Gendron gets treated by the system in these incidents versus how a Black man gets treated in general,” said Insha Rahman, vice president of advocacy and partnerships at the Vera Institute — a national nonprofit research and advocacy group focused on criminal justice.
The difference has been noted in Buffalo, said Jillian Hanesworth, 29, the city's poet laureate and director of leadership development at Open Buffalo, a nonprofit focused on social justice and community development. “The perception of racism is perpetuated because it’s rooted in a reality,” Sabelli said, noting the impact of implicit bias on policing has been studied extensively. “We are unfortunately in the process of trying to reverse decades or even longer of explicit racism in many police departments around the country and that is often aggravated by implicit bias that exists at a subconscious level.
The specific training is known as ICAT, for integrating communication assessment and tactics. Wexler’s group trained Buffalo’s police trainers on the tactics in February 2021, he said, adding that the department had not completed that training with all of its officers yet.“That gives you a sense of how the department was thinking,” Wexler said. “It’s communication, slowing things down, using time and distance and cover, rather than rushing into a situation.