Leveraging The Race Of The Officer
Intuitively, it seems reasonable to assume that black police officers have less antiblack bias than white officers do. So in theory, if white officers are shooting black suspects out of antiblack bias, black officers should shoot black suspects less often.
However, this assumption is difficult to leverage in a statistical analysis. For one thing, the African-American population is not evenly distributed throughout the country in places with higher black populations, both police and civilians are more likely to be black, causing officer and civilian race to be correlated in national data sets unless researchers account for local demographics. Also, black officers are more likely to be assigned to black neighborhoods even within some cities, often by choice. For example, a recent study by Bocar Ba and four coauthors, using data from Chicagowhere district assignments are based on officers preferences and seniority found: Black officers have the greatest preference for working in majority-black districts and the lowest preference for working in majority-white districts.
Bearing in mind these limitations, it helps to divide research on officer race into three categories: studies focusing on the overall racial composition of police departments studies of the correlation between officer and civilian race among those shot by police and an especially promising study that leveraged the quasi-random assignment of cops of different races to calls for service.
Control For What Happened Studies
Consider the following alternative to a typical benchmarking study. First, compile a data set that includes rich detail about police-shooting incidents, as well as a risk set of incidents where police encountered civilians in confrontational situations but did not shoot. This comparison group might include cases where suspects were Tased instead of shot, or cases where cops drew their guns without firing. Second, instead of just comparing the racial breakdowns of the two groups, as one would do in the simplest benchmarking analysis, put together a statistical model that takes into account all other details, such as the time of day, whether the suspect whom the cop encountered was armed or attacking, whether the incident started with a call or a traffic stop, and the violent-crime rate of the surrounding neighborhood. This allows you to compare black suspects and white suspects who encountered cops in roughly similar situations, and determine whether those from one racial group or the other were more likely to be shot.
The most famous study in this vein is Roland Fryers An Empirical Analysis of Racial Differences in Police Use of Force, which received prominent coverage in the New York Times in 2016 and was ultimately published in the Journal of Political Economy. Fryer found evidence of bias in the use of nonlethal force but not in fatal shootings.
Several other studies are worth noting here as well.
Eliminating Preventable Deaths Due To The Use Of Lethal Force
The need for effective strategies to reduce preventable legal intervention fatalities has resulted in numerous recommendations from policing organizations, policy-makers, federal and state agencies, researchers, and concerned communities. One recommendation has been to increase training in tactical disengagement and conflict de-escalation.2,58 Recent reports have called for restructuring police culture around the core principle of sanctity of all human life, emphasizing the need to slow the situation down or tactically disengage as an alternative to the current model of never back down, move in and take charge.2,58 Several police departments around the U.S. are currently implementing training in tactical disengagement, de-escalation, and preservation of life, some modeled on programs in other countries like the United Kingdom, that have successfully reduced their use of force.2,19 Related approaches may include changes to training or policy on use of less than lethal force technologies, such as chemical sprays or conducted energy devices, to control or incapacitate combative individuals, with some evidence suggesting decreased officer and civilian injuries associated with agency adoption of these tools.32,6971 Further research is needed to assess the effectiveness of these approaches in reducing both civilian and LE injuries.
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Police Shootings In The United States
Police shootings are an issue of great concern and controversy in the United States, which has the highest number of police shootings of any developed country and the highest rate of private gun ownership in the world. In addition to the sheer number of police shootings, the killings of 17-year-old Tamir Rice, whose killer, George Zimmerman, was acquitted after claiming self-defense and emergency medical worker Breonna Taylor, who was shot by plainclothes detectives who may have failed to identify themselves as police before breaking down her door, have sparked massive protests and concerns about racial inequality in the U.S. justice system.
The specific reasons for the abnormally high number of police shootings in the U.S., as well as their racial disparity, are matters of considerable debate. Also, while the number of police shootings in the U.S. is still abnormally high, it is noteworthy that once that number is evaluated in relation to the total population, the U.S. drops out of the top ten. When compared by the number of police killings per 10 million residents, the U.S. ranks 33rd. While this is an improvement, its number of 28.54 per 10 million residents is nearly double that of the next-highest developed country and nearly three times that of Canada .
Different Worlds Different Worldviews
On Aug. 9, 2014, police officer Darren Wilson shot and killed Michael Brown, an unarmed teenager, in Ferguson, Missouri, sparking national outrage. The Black Lives Matter protest movement grew out of that moment, and debate continues about how and why people of color are targets for police violence.
Over the years, police-involved shootings of unarmed people of color further fueled efforts to increase accountability of public safety officials and better understand the needs of the communities they are meant to serve.
In 2016, the Pew Research Center surveyed the publics opinions about police performance and found wide gaps in perception between black and white respondents, said Rich Morin, a pollster and senior editor for Pew. In the survey, only 33 percent of African Americans said police do a good or excellent job of using the right amount of force in each encounter compared to the 75 percent of white Americans who believed in the judgement of police.
Blacks and whites live in two very different worlds with two very different worldviews on a variety of issues. One of those areas is police, Morin said in 2016.
But following Ferguson, the increased attention paid to police brutality complicated the ability to collect data, Burghart wrote on his blog.
Trolls spent more time breaking the publicly editable sheet than I had time to fix it, he wrote. He had to restrict editing privileges to preserve the work.
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Statistics You Need To Know About Cops Killing Blacks
The Alton Sterling and Philando Castile shootings have caused an uproar among leftists because they fuel their narrative that racist white police officers are hunting down innocent black men. But the statistics brought to light by the superb work of Heather Mac Donald tell a different story.
Here are five key statistics you need to know about cops killing blacks.
1. Cops killed nearly twice as many whites as blacks in 2015. According to data compiled by The Washington Post, 50 percent of the victims of fatal police shootings were white, while 26 percent were black. The majority of these victims had a gun or were armed or otherwise threatening the officer with potentially lethal force, according to Mac Donald in a speech at Hillsdale College.
Some may argue that these statistics are evidence of racist treatment toward blacks, since whites consist of 62 percent of the population and blacks make up 13 percent of the population. But as Mac Donald writes in The Wall Street Journal, 2009 statistics from the Bureau of Justice Statistics reveal that blacks were charged with 62 percent of robberies, 57 percent of murders and 45 percent of assaults in the 75 biggest counties in the country, despite only comprising roughly 15 percent of the population in these counties.
If were going to have a Lives Matter anti-police movement, it would be more appropriately named White and Hispanic Lives Matter,’ said Mac Donald in her Hillsdale speech.
The Role Of Mental Illness And Suicide In Deaths Due To The Use Of Lethal Force
Agencies of LE frequently serve as first-line responders to mental health emergencies, including crises involving violence.28,39 Officers in a study of three U.S. cities reported responding to an average of 6.4 calls/month involving mental health crises.40 About 20% of people hospitalized for severe mental illness, in another study, had been arrested or picked up by police for a suspected crime in the prior 4-month period.29 Indeed, two decades of research have documented high rates of LE contact, arrest, and incarceration rates for individuals with mental illness.4144 Officers often report feeling inadequately trained to assess and respond effectively as gatekeepers for both the criminal justice and mental health systems, and community leaders have raised concerns for many years about the safety of citizens with mental health crises who often encounter, and rely on, LE.8,28,45,46
Related incidents in which the victim engaged in life-threatening or criminal behavior to provoke the use of lethal force by policewidely referred to as suicide by cophave also been recognized by LE and criminal justice researchers for several decades as a unique challenge.32 In the current study, 17.9% of fatalities due to the use of force were identified as potential suicide by cop incidents,h a number within range of prior estimates.30,32
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What About Unarmed And Not Aggressing
In addition to a variable indicating whether the deceased was armed, the Washington Post codes the threat level of each case. The classification is rudimentary. There is an attack category representing what the Post deems the most direct and immediate threat to life, with all other situations coded as other or undetermined. The Post cautions that the other category includes many incidents where officers or others faced significant threats, especially situations where a suspect brandished a knife and refused to drop it.
Some analysts have thus focused on situations where the suspect was unarmed and not attackingsometimes relying on the coding contained in the Post database or similar projects, and sometimes coding the incidents themselves. Through 2020 in the Post data, 208 cases meet this narrower definition. In these cases, 32% of the deceased in these cases were black, versus 26% of all other cases .
On average, the Post records about 11 fatal shootings of blacks in this category per year. Although this approach does a better job of zeroing in on cases that might be unjustified or at least fall into a gray area, it still covers a broad enough range of situations to justify caution.
List Of Killings By Law Enforcement Officers In The United Kingdom
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This list of people killed by law enforcement officers in the United Kingdom documents cases of people who died directly or indirectly because of the actions of British law enforcement officers, regardless of the manner of death, duty status of the officers, or if they acted officially or unofficially. It includes officers working for all law enforcement agencies, existing or historical, in England, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland, but excludes crown dependencies, colonies or other political entities subject or previously subjected to the direct control of the government of the United Kingdom. It also excludes deaths for which other government agents are responsible, such as deaths as a result of actions of the British Armed Forces.
Many of the killings were by the Royal Ulster Constabulary during the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Police in Northern Ireland killed 56 people during the conflict, including at least 30 civilians and at least 20 paramilitary members.
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Incidents Involving Intimate Partner Violence
Long-held concerns within LE that IPV situations are among the most dangerous for officers generally have not been well supported by research.27,52,53 A study of police calls found that domestic disturbance calls ranked fourth and fifth in the ratio of calls to assaults and injuries of officers, respectively.54 The current study found that 13.9% of legal intervention fatalities were IPV-related, paralleling estimates of the proportion of officers killed on duty related to an IPV incident.27 Although IPV is not a prevalent risk circumstance for lethal force incidents, specific approaches to conflict de-escalation in these situations may reduce risks to both IPV perpetrators and officers.
After Ferguson Black Men Still Face The Highest Risk Of Being Killed By Police
Five years after Michael Browns death in Ferguson, Missouri, launched a national conversation about race and police brutality, black men are still more likely to die by police violence than white men.
According to a study published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences, over the course of a lifetime, black men face a one in 1,000 risk of being killed during an encounter with police, a rate much higher than that of white men.
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Black People More Than Three Times As Likely As White People To Be Killed During A Police Encounter
Black Americans are 3.23 times more likely than white Americans to be killed by police, according to a new study by researchers from Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. The researchers examined 5,494 police-related deaths in the U.S. between 2013 and 2017. Rates of deadly police encounters were higher in the West and South than in the Midwest and Northeast, according to the study. Racial disparities in killings by police varied widely across the country, with some metropolitan areas showing very high differences between treatment by race. Black Chicagoans, for example, were found to be over 650% more likely to be killed by police than white Chicagoans.
The wide variance in deaths by police shows how preventable these deaths are, study authors Jaquelyn Jahn and Gabriel Schwartz, recent graduates from the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences, told UPI in a June 24 article.
The study was published online June 24, 2020 in PLOS ONE.
In One Year 57375 Years Of Life Were Lost To Police Violence
A new study finds that police killings exact a toll greater than accidental gun deaths.
People killed by police in 2015 and 2016 had a median age of 35, and they still had an average of about 50 years left to live when they died. Its this metricthe gap between how long someone lives and how long they were expected to livethats the focus of a new study by Anthony Bui, Matthew Coates, and Ellicott Matthay in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health.
To find the true toll of police violence, the authors focused on years of life lost. They used data from The Counted, a Guardian database of people killed by police, to find the races and ages of everyone who died at the hands of police in the United States, then compared them to the average life expectancy for those groups.
Of the 1,146 and 1,092 victims of police violence in 2015 and 2016, respectively, the authors found that 52 percent were white, 26 percent were black, and 17 percent were Hispanic. Together, these individuals lost 57,375 years to police violence in 2015 and 54,754 to police violence in 2016. Young people and people of color were disproportionately affected: 52 percent of all the years of life lost belonged to nonwhite, non-Hispanic ethnic groups. Whites also tended to be killed by police at older ages than African Americans and Hispanicsthough this is partly because, in the general population, whites are older on average than the other groups.
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List Of Killings By Law Enforcement Officers In Canada
This is a list of people whose deaths were caused by, or in relation to an interaction with non-military law enforcement officers in Canada. The list includes deaths caused by officers both on and off duty, and does not discriminate by method or motivation.
This list is incomplete there are no official statistics on fatal shootings by law enforcement officers in Canada, though the range had previously been estimated to be between 15 and 25 per year. In 2018, The CBC published “Deadly Force”, an investigative report described as “the first country-wide database of every person who died or was killed during a police intervention”, which documented 461 fatal police encounters in Canada between 2000 and 2017, suggesting the average is closer to 26 people a year. “Deadly Force” also recorded an increasing average yearly number of police-involved deaths over time. At the moment, Statistics Canada only tracks fatal police shootings if the officer involved is criminally charged.