A Georgia police department is requiring officers to complete an implicit bias training course that teaches that the criminal justice system was “set up by white men to benefit white men.”
The Gwinnett County Police Department, serving the northeast part of metro Atlanta, is mandating that officers take an online course that includes an article by Dr. Lois James, PhD, known for her work studying racial bias in police encounters.
The course, just one part of Gwinnett County officers’ training for the year, was flagged to The Daily Wire by a source within the department who requested anonymity.
“Systemic discrimination entails systems and institutions discriminating against certain groups of people. The clearest example is systemic racism, which permeates housing, education, healthcare and criminal justice systems,” James writes in the article, which addresses “common misperceptions” about implicit bias and first responders.
“Each of these systems were set up by white men to benefit white men. That is not to lay blame, simply to explain how practices that favor the majority tend to evolve,” James wrote.
The article also states that the results of Implicit Association Tests show that “a majority of Americans have a preference for white people over Black people.”
The department insider called the article “troubling” but said it is nothing new for the department to receive implicit bias training.
The government is “delegitimizing itself” by telling police officers that the entire social system including the criminal justice, education, and healthcare systems are “a product of systemic racism” without providing evidence, the department insider said in an interview with The Daily Wire.
“That’s really I guess where I have an issue, going from the implicit bias to telling us systemic racism,” the source said.
Morale among Gwinnett County police officers has remained at a low ebb lately amid the ongoing national conversation about race and police brutality and as the trial of Derek Chauvin, the former Minneapolis cop charged with the murder of George Floyd last summer, gets underway this month. The Gwinnett County department’s morale was not lifted by the assertions in the implicit bias course.
“I may not be in politics, but I constantly live that politics severely, going to work every day,” the insider said.
The course is approved by the Georgia Peace Officer Standards and Training Council, the regulatory body empowered by Georgia law to set minimum training standards for the state’s law enforcement officers and eliminate unqualified individuals from the law enforcement profession.
The council states that it mission is to “provide the citizens of Georgia with qualified, professionally trained, ethical and competent peace officers and criminal justice professionals.”
Jeff Miller, the Georgia P.O.S.T.’s Director of Certification and Training Standards, told The Daily Wire that Community Policing courses, of which Implicit Bias can be a choice between several courses, is required for all of Georgia’s peace officers.
Meanwhile, the Gwinnett County Police Department is hemorrhaging police officers. The department recently had about 900 officers, but about 50 retired or transferred last month alone, according to the department insider. The high turnover rate is not a new issue for Gwinnett County and has plagued police departments in other areas of the country as well for several years.
As a result, the department has been stretched thin as it serves the county’s close to a million residents northeast of Atlanta. Some residents have allegedly complained about witnessing officers ignoring traffic violations as the officers make their way to the scene of a prior call.
After former Atlanta Police Department officer Garrett Rolfe was charged with murder for fatally shooting Rayshard Brooks in June, a number of Atlanta cops left the city’s department en masse and some apparently applied to become officers in Gwinnett County.
The department source also claimed that Gwinnett County police “does not tolerate” any kind of racial insensitivity.
“I’ve never heard a coworker utter any type of racial slur or anything like that,” the source said. “If you were either racist or had some type of bias towards another race, I don’t think there’s a way you’d survive working where we work.”
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