Source: Jamelle Bouie/Wikimedia Commons

A child pleads for “Daddy” after the tragic shooting death of his father, a United States citizen attempting to navigate a routine day. The murdered father(s)—pulled over driver, police officer, husband, Black, White—loss their lives in the aftermath of a misguided attempt by the killer to protect himself or reconcile grievances. Social science theories give us a glimpse into the reasons for the behavior we’ve grown accustomed to seeing in America over the past couple of years: a threatened or frustrated person using disproportionate force to ensure survival or vent . Historically, social scientists ranging from psychologists and sociologists to criminologists and anthropologists have played a prominent role in changing how we respond to human rights controversies by providing scientifically validated evidence for reasons behind the most heinous behaviors. Yet the grind of scientific research is often a multi-prong process in which the benefits to the general public are many years in the making. With the country brimming with tension about police relations with people of color, can social scientists offer more immediate support for changes that will make the lives of police officers and community members safer? The simple answer: Yes.

Scientific innovations for improving police connections with the community have blossomed in recent years. In Connecticut, Yale University’s Child Development Community Policing program pairs mental health professionals with police officers responding to victims of violent crimes, ensuring psychological and physical safety of children and victims are adequately supported. In California, Stanford University is working with the Oakland police department to pioneer a data-driven approach that tackles the implicit that leads to unnecessarily aggressive police-community interactions. Many of these programs are happening in pockets of the country where researchers were funded to tackle a specific set of problems and develop an evidence base that is often shared with the public via peer reviewed journals and books. As important as this process is for assuring the necessary scientific rigor is applied to innovations aiming to improve police relations with the community, the general public often has little knowledge about the specific tools that the scientific community has available to address the challenges police officers have for managing community connections. Without this knowledge, community members don’t know the specific requests to make of their police departments, elected officials, or fellow citizens to move police and community relations forward.

Social scientists have the scientific knowledge and understanding of human behavior to help build a more informed general public that rejects the false narrative that our national challenges represent a choice between the lives of police officers and Black people. Human behavior is complex and rich with nuance that can be difficult to communicate when discussing the scientific underpinnings for why someone may have a bias toward another or feels an injustice has been perpetrated toward a family member. It is the responsibility of social scientists to use the ever increasing resources of the information age and modern technology to educate the general public with digestible information based on scientific findings, facilitate thoughtful conversations that make people feel uncomfortable because they are inching closer to the true complexity of human behavior, and move us closer to solutions for the injustices that ail our society by sharing the human stories that feed our scientific understanding (within HIPAA and IRB regulations of course). Platforms such as We Share Science create opportunities to achieve these . It is the responsibility of social scientists and the institutions that establish the rules for academia to go beyond publishing and encourage participation. Whether participation involves developing community-based centers for translating research into tangible resources for communities (which many universities do) or taking a more active and forceful role to insert behavioral science knowledge into national conversations, our participation as social scientists is critical to the progress and healing of the nation.

In one of the most profound calls to action for the scientific community, Martin Luther King Jr. challenged social scientists to engage in “creative maladjustment” by using science to bend minds and hearts toward justice. Referencing the pioneering work of Kenneth and Mamie Clark, his message at the 1967 American Psychological Association national convention was clear: social scientists can do more to spur change. The echoes of Dr. King’s message must continue to reverberate in the laboratories of universities and the streets that scientists traverse to learn more about the human condition—urging us to “emerge from the bleak and desolate midnight of man’s inhumanity to man, into the bright and glittering light of freedom and justice.” You don’t have to transform into a revolutionary for change. You’re already a scientist. We just need to do a better job of letting the rest of the world know what we already do: there are scientific solutions to our hearts problems.