The killing of George Floyd by a white police officer in Minneapolis shook the nation and set off massive protests around the world over the last few months — putting unprecedented attention on racial bias in law enforcement. For Phillip Atiba Goff, a social psychologist at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, the tragedy hit especially close to home.
A Black man in a historically white field, Goff has been using every tool at his disposal — research, data and personal persuasion — for well over a decade now, to prevent unequal and unjust treatment of minorities at the hands of police. He has personally worked with police departments in dozens of US cities, including Minneapolis. The knee on Floyd’s neck and the acts of police violence in Kenosha, Wisconsin, and elsewhere served as sobering reminders that his work was far from over. “This is what I do with my life,” he says. “The goal is fewer dead Black people and fewer Black folks in the hospital.”
Goff is the cofounder and CEO of the Center for Policing Equity (CPE), a national coalition of criminal justice scholars, law professors and former police officers. Part research hub, part advocacy organization and part boots-on-the-ground reform squad, the CPE is in the middle of one of society’s most pressing issues. By some estimates, police kill about 1,000 people annually, and those deaths aren’t evenly distributed. Black men are about 2.5 times more likely than white men to die at the hands of the police, according to a 2019 analysis in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
To understand police behavior, Goff and his colleagues combine real-world data with insights from the fields of social psychology and criminal justice. The CPE, founded in Los Angeles and now based at Yale, has worked directly with more than 60 police departments across the country to help them evaluate — and in some cases, radically adjust — their treatment of African Americans and other people of color. Invariably, its investigations show room for improvement. A 2016 CPE report on combined findings from 12 departments around the country found that Black citizens were more than 3.5 times more likely than white citizens to be subjected to police force, ranging from bodily contact to pepper spray to shootings.
