Sage Journals: Discover world-class research

Abstract

Is there evidence of a Black–White disparity in death by police gunfire in the United States? This is commonly answered by comparing the odds of being fatally shot for Blacks and Whites, with odds benchmarked against each group’s population proportion. However, adjusting for population values has questionable assumptions given the context of deadly force decisions. We benchmark 2 years of fatal shooting data on 16 crime rate estimates. When adjusting for crime, we find no systematic evidence of anti-Black disparities in fatal shootings, fatal shootings of unarmed citizens, or fatal shootings involving misidentification of harmless objects. Multiverse analyses showed only one significant anti-Black disparity of 144 possible tests. Exposure to police given crime rate differences likely accounts for the higher per capita rate of fatal police shootings for Blacks, at least when analyzing all shootings. For unarmed shootings or misidentification shootings, data are too uncertain to be conclusive.

Keywords

deadly force police use of force officer-involved shootings fatal shootings race bias racial disparity Black Lives Matter

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Ayres

(2002). Outcome tests of racial disparities in police practices. Justice Research and Policy, 4, 131–142.

Barnes

J. C.

Jorgensen

Beaver

K. M.

Boutwell

B. B.

Wright

J. P.

(2015). Arrest prevalence in a national sample of adults: The role of sex and race/ethnicity. American Journal of Criminal Justice, 40, 457–465.

Binder

Fridell

(1984). Lethal force as a police response. Criminal Justice Abstracts, 16, 250–280.

Binder

Scharf

(1980). The violent police-citizen encounter. American Academy of Political and Social Science, 452, 111–121.

Brown

Langan

(2001). Policing and homicide 1976–98: Justifiable homicide by police, police officers murdered by felons. Bureau of Justice Statistics. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice.

Cooper

Smith

E. L.

(2011). Homicide trends in the United States, 1980–2008 (Report No. NCJ 236018). Washington, DC: Bureau of Justice Statistics.

Correll

Park

Judd

C. M.

Wittenbrink

(2002). The police officer’s dilemma: Using ethnicity to disambiguate potentially threatening individuals. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 83, 1314–1329.

The Counted. (2016). The Guardian. Retrieved from http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2015/jun/01/the-counted-police-killings-us-database

Davis

A. C.

Lowery

(2015, 10 7). FBI director calls lack of data on police shootings ‘ridiculous,’ ‘embarrassing.’ Retrieved from https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/fbi-director-calls-lack-of-data-on-police-shootings-ridiculous-embarrassing/2015/10/07/c0ebaf7a-6d16-11e5-b31c-d80d62b53e28_story.html?utm_term=.78d215173aa5

10.

Duncan

B. L.

(1976). Differential social perception and attribution of intergroup violence: Testing the lower limits of stereotyping of Blacks. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 34, 590–598.

11.

Fryer

R. G.

Jr . (2016). An empirical analysis of racial differences in police use of force. NBER Working Paper Series Working Paper 22399.

12.

Fyfe

J. J.

(1980). Philadelphia police shootings 1975–78: A system model analysis. Civil rights division. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice.

13.

Fyfe

J. J.

(1981). Toward a typology of police shootings. In Fyfe

J. J.

(Ed.), Contemporary issues in law enforcement (pp. 136–151). Beverly Hills, CA: Sage.

14.

Gabrielson

Jones

R. G.

Sagara

. (2014). Deadly force, in black and white: A pro publica analysis of killings by police shows outsize risk for young black males. Pro Publica Retrieved from https://www.propublica.org/article/deadly-force-in-black-and-white

15.

Geller

Karales

(1981). Shootings of and by Chicago police: Uncommon crises—Part I: Shootings by Chicago police. Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, 72, 1813–1866.

16.

Goff

P. A.

Kahn

K. B.

(2012). Racial bias in policing: Why we know less than we should. Social Issues and Policy Review, 6, 177–210.

17.

Goff

P. A.

Lloyd

Geller

Raphael

Glaser

. (2016). The science of justice: Race, arrests, and police use of force. New York, NY: Center for Policing Equity.

18.

Harrell

(2007). Black victims of violent crime (Report No. NCJ 214258). Washington, DC: Bureau of Justice Statistics.

19.

Jussim

Cain

T. R.

Crawford

J. T.

Harber

Cohen

(2009). The unbearable accuracy of stereotypes. In Nelson

T. D.

(Ed.), Handbook of prejudice, stereotyping, and discrimination (pp. 199–227). New York, NY: Psychology Press.

20.

Klinger

Rosenfeld

R. R.

Isom

Deckard

(2016). Race, crime, and the micro-ecology of deadly force. Criminology and Public Policy, 15, 193–222.

21.

Koper

C. S.

(2016). Advancing research and accountability on police use of deadly force. Criminology and Public Policy, 15, 187–191.

22.

Kunda

Thagard

(1996). Forming impressions from stereotypes, traits, and behaviors: A parallel-constraint-satisfaction theory. Psychological Review, 103, 284–308.

23.

Lai

C. K.

(2017). Reducing implicit racial preferences: II. Intervention effectiveness across time. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 145, 1001–1016.

24.

Nix

Campbell

B. A.

Byers

E. H.

Alpert

G. P.

(2017). A bird’s eye view of civilians killed by police in 2015: Further evidence of implicit bias. Criminology and Public Policy, 16, 309–340.

25.

Payne

(2006). Weapon bias: Split-second decisions and unintended stereotyping. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 15, 287–291.

26.

Ross

C. T.

(2015). A multi-level Bayesian analysis of racial bias in police shootings at the county-level in the United States, 2011–2014. PLoS One, 10, e0141854.

27.

Selby

Singleton

Flosi

(2016). In context: Understanding police killings of unarmed citizen. St. Augustine, FL: Contextual Press.

28.

Steegen

Tuerlinckx

Gelman

Vanpaemel

(2016). Increasing transparency through a multiverse analysis. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 11, 702–712.

29.

Takagi

(1974). A garrison state in a “democratic” society. Crime and Social Justice, 1, 27–33.

30.

Vazire

(2015). Most damning result. Retrieved from http://sometimesimwrong.typepad.com/wrong/2015/12/most-damning-result.html

31.

White

(2006). Hitting the target (or not): Comparing characteristics of fatal, injurious, and noninjurious police shootings. Police Quarterly, 9, 303–330.

32.

White

(2016). Transactional encounters crisis-driven reform and the potential for a national police deadly force database. Criminology & Public Policy, 15, 223–235.

Supplementary Material

Please find the following supplemental material available below.

For Open Access articles published under a Creative Commons License, all supplemental material carries the same license as the article it is associated with.

For non-Open Access articles published, all supplemental material carries a non-exclusive license, and permission requests for re-use of supplemental material or any part of supplemental material shall be sent directly to the copyright owner as specified in the copyright notice associated with the article.

0.00 MB

0.07 MB

Is There Evidence of Racial Disparity in Police Use of Deadly Force? Analyses of Officer-Involved Fatal Shootings in 2015–2016

Abstract

Keywords

Get full access to this article

References

Supplementary Material