Presented at the MCJEA 5th Annual Criminal Justice Investigator Seminar :Terrorism, Implicit Bias and De-escellation in Investigations Brandon L. Blankenship serves as an assistant professor in the Department of Criminal Justice at the University of Alabama at Birmingham where he teaches law and ethics. He also is an instructor for continuing professional education including courses he designed such as Enemy in the Camp for attorneys and Forging Future Leaders: Restoring Classrooms and Communities for secondary educators. Brandon regularly writes on the legal services industry and multi-plaintiff litigation. He received his law degree from Thomas Goode Jones School of Law where he was a member of the Jones Law Review.

1. Ethics and the Impact of
Unconscious Bias On
Investigations
Brandon Blankenship

2. Johnny

3. Unemployed, addicts, deadbeats...

4. Bias

5. Bias
● An opinion before there is reason for it

6. Bad Boy Bias in the Law

7. Cheaha Supercomputer
UAB IT Research Computing maintains the Cheaha Supercomputer. Named after the
Cheaha mountain, or Mount Cheaha, the highest natural point in Alabama. Cheaha is
currently the largest and fastest supercomputer in the state of Alabama with a theoretical
throughput of approximately 528 TFLOPS and consists of over 3500 CPU cores and 72
NVIDIA-P100 GPU’s. Cheaha is supported by a high-speed parallel file system that can
store 6 PB of data (raw) interconnected by a high speed infiniband network.
Cheaha is a campus resource dedicated to enhancing research computing productivity at
UAB. UAB researchers use Cheaha for wide variety of research such as genomics, neuro-
imaging, machine learning, statistical genetics, cancer detection etc. Cheaha is available to
members of the UAB community in need of increased computational capacity.

11. Badges of Badness

13. Badges of Badness
=
Guilt

14. Restore Good Judgment

15. Recognize Your Biases

16. Johari Window

17. Johari Adjectives

18. Avoid sharing your opinion.

20. The only group that escaped
the influence of public
opinion were psychopaths.
-Prof. Mark Leary

21. Strike the right balance
between under- and
overconfidence, between
prudence and decisiveness.

22. You might be wrong.
-Paul Thorn (American Southern rock, country, Americana,
and blues singer-songwriter from Tupelo, Mississippi)

23. Somebody is going to have to
prove to me that I am wrong.
But I’m open to the possibility.

24. Can I believe it?
vs
Must I believe it?

26. Can I believe it?
vs
Must I believe it?

27. Reverse Roles

28. See through the eyes of
others

29. Cynthi

30. Thank you!

31. Attributions:
Johari /Nohari adjectives list, Schurz High School, Chicago, IL
“Bias” The World Book Dictionary, Volume one A-K, World Book - Childcraft International, Inc. (Chicago), 1982
“Aliens implanting chips in brain” from www.google.com (retrieved December 9, 2020)
Contact:
Brandon L. Blankenship
(205)912-8248
blbjd@uab.edu