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Increased visibility of police violence against Black and Brown communities, across the globe has put pressure on police departments to enact anti-racist policies and practices that curb such violence (eg, body camera usage, mandated de-escalation training, eliminating qualified immunity). Many police departments, however, have been hesitant to enact such systemic changes. One potential reason for why police departments have not yet adopted recommended anti-racist policies and practices is due to threat and defensiveness to the “racist cop” stereotype—that is, officers may perceive enacting policy change to be a tacit admission of racism among police, feel threatened and defensive, and, therefore, resist change efforts. Self-affirmation is one tactic to reduce threat and defensiveness to counter-attitudinal messages. In the present research, we examined whether police officers (N= 140) who self-affirm (vs. officers who do not) will show less threat and defensiveness to a persuasive message about anti-racist action in policing and, in turn, show greater support for anti-racist policies and practices. As expected, we found that police officers who self-affirmed reported less threat than officers who did not self-affirm. But, unexpectedly, self-affirmation was unrelated to defensiveness (which was, on average, low among officers) and anti-racism policy support (which was, on average, high among officers). We discuss the implications of these findings for police departments and propose avenues for future research aimed at promoting more relationships between police departments and the Black and Brown communities they serve.