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. 2019 Aug 6;116(32):15877-15882.
doi: 10.1073/pnas.1903856116. Epub 2019 Jul 22.

Officer characteristics and racial disparities in fatal officer-involved shootings

David J Johnson  1   2 , Trevor Tress  2 , Nicole Burkel  2 , Carley Taylor  2 , Joseph Cesario  2
Affiliations

Officer characteristics and racial disparities in fatal officer-involved shootings

David J Johnson et al. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. .

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Abstract

Despite extensive attention to racial disparities in police shootings, two problems have hindered progress on this issue. First, databases of fatal officer-involved shootings (FOIS) lack details about officers, making it difficult to test whether racial disparities vary by officer characteristics. Second, there are conflicting views on which benchmark should be used to determine racial disparities when the outcome is the rate at which members from racial groups are fatally shot. We address these issues by creating a database of FOIS that includes detailed officer information. We test racial disparities using an approach that sidesteps the benchmark debate by directly predicting the race of civilians fatally shot rather than comparing the rate at which racial groups are shot to some benchmark. We report three main findings: 1) As the proportion of Black or Hispanic officers in a FOIS increases, a person shot is more likely to be Black or Hispanic than White, a disparity explained by county demographics; 2) race-specific county-level violent crime strongly predicts the race of the civilian shot; and 3) although we find no overall evidence of anti-Black or anti-Hispanic disparities in fatal shootings, when focusing on different subtypes of shootings (e.g., unarmed shootings or "suicide by cop"), data are too uncertain to draw firm conclusions. We highlight the need to enforce federal policies that record both officer and civilian information in FOIS.

Keywords: benchmarks; officer-involved shootings; police use of force; racial bias; racial disparity.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Figures

Fig. 1.
Fig. 1.
Odds ratios predicting the race of civilians fatally shot by police from county-level race-specific violent crime (estimated by race-specific homicide data) and population size. Values to the left (right) of the dotted line indicate that the civilian was more likely to be White (Black/Hispanic). Civilian race was regressed on each variable individually due to multicollinearity. Lines represent 95% CI. n = 917.
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References

    1. President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing , Final Report of the President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing (Office of Community Oriented Policing Services, Washington, DC, 2015).
    1. Davis A. C., Lowery W., FBI director calls lack of data on police shootings “ridiculous,” “embarrassing.“ The Washington Post, 7 October 2015. https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/fbi-director-calls-lack-of-data-....
    1. Data from “Shot dead by police.” The Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/national/police-shootings/. Accessed 1 January 2016.
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    1. Donner C. M., Popovich N., Hitting (or missing) the mark: An examination of police shooting accuracy in officer-involved shooting incidents. Policing Int. J. 42, 474–489 (2018).

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