The Palm Springs Police Department today continued its week-long training against implicit bias.
On Tuesday, the city announced that all police department employees began their eight-hour daily training in principled policing, procedural justice, and implicit bias.
The city defined implicit bias “as the automatic association people make between groups of people and stereotypes about those groups.”
According to city officials, these associations can influence behavior in certain situations and cause people to make biased or prejudiced choices.
The training is broken down into small groups and focuses on policing approaches that emphasize respect, listening, neutrality and trust, while tackling the biases that can impede these approaches.
“Reducing the influence of implicit bias is vitally important to strengthening relationships between the police and our community at large,” Acting Chief of Police Melissa Desmarais said. “The Palm Springs Police Department is committed to providing advanced officer training in this subject that is not only engaging and relevant but also evaluated and measured in a way that creates a significant positive impact on our organization.”
