Case Study: Design to Address Racial Biases & Excessive Use of Force in Law Enforcement
By: Bowen Zhou
Tags: Ui Ux Design, Law Enforcement, Police, Police Brutality, Racism

4 Pain Points:

1. Officers lack the social experience to do well in civilian interactions.

“You need social work & skills to work as a police [officer] or else you create walls during the interaction.” — Anynomous Officer

There needs to be more social interaction based training and practice. Here is one of my favorite quotes from an officer:

“What we do is customer service.” — Anynomous Officer

Most officers’ jobs orient around working with and responding to the people. Most of the time they are responding to small incidents and discourses, only a small percentage of these incidents are violent.

Good social skills are vital to their job. How they interact and respond to civilians directly determines an incident’s outcome, and dictates if the situation escalates or dissolves peacefully.

2. Officers have insufficient empathy and understanding for minority members of society.

Through our interviews, we found that only some cities' police training involves diversity training.

Officers reflected that learning about social issues like understanding race on textbooks simply does not achieve a degree of understanding that overcomes their pre-established biases.

Officers need more education and exposure to different members of the society that are not textbook-based.

3. Officers feel misunderstood and attacked by civilians

“ I am frequently attacked online, especially now.” “ It feels like I have to avoid mentioning my job because of the possible backlash. I feel more isolated in the job now more than ever.” “An immediate family member of mine is a cop. He’s angrier and more aggressive than usual.” (referring to the racial protests in U.S.)

— Anonymous Officers & online responses

Police Officers feel judged by the public when they have their uniforms on. Furthermore, they have difficulty discussing their experiences with others who are not officers because they believe others simply can not understand. The recent heat and protests around issues of police brutality have only increased their disconnect with the public and increased feelings of hostility between them. The conclusion we can draw from their feedbacks is:

Officers want to be understood

“The amount of force used on someone is and should be dictated by the subject.” “A lot of civilians know they are innocent so they don’t comply. When they resist, we have to move up the level of force being used because we don’t know that they are innocent. ”

— Anonymous Officers

Officers expressed that civilians often don’t understand protocols during incidents. As a result, they respond incorrectly without knowing that certain responses would require officers to move up on the “ladder of force” and use more aggression on the civilians. To conclude:

Officers want civilians to have more knowledge of the police’s job and incident protocols

4. Stress from the job can influence officer to civilian interactions negatively

“my work is not difficult 99% of the time but it’s that 1% that can break some people.” “A lot of us suffer from mental health issues. We are very afraid…terrified, during gunfire and the idea of someone trying to kill you will stick with you forever.”

— Anonymous Officers

Officers are very stressed

“Most of the time we have to deal with people when they are at their worst. It’s hard to stay postive after that. Some of us don’t know how to disconnect from that and become nagative. The negative people often make all of their interactions on the job negative.” — Anonymous Officer

When stress becomes severe and unmanageable, officers let stress influence their actions

From these insights, we can create a User Persona that accurately describes our user group and their needs.