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.officer-involved shootings | racial disparity | racial bias | police use of force | benchmarks R ecent high-profile police shootings of Black Americans have raised questions about racial disparities in fatal officerinvolved shootings (FOIS). These shootings have captured public concern, leading in part to the Black Lives Matter movement and a presidential task force on policing (1). Central to this debate are questions of whether Black civilians are overrepresented in FOIS and whether racial disparities are due to discrimination by White officers. However, a lack of data about officers in FOIS and disagreement on the correct benchmark for determining racial disparity in FOIS have led to conflicting conclusions about the degree to which Black civilians are more likely to be fatally shot than White civilians. We address both issues by creating a comprehensive database of FOIS that includes officer information and by using a method for testing racial disparities that does not rely on benchmarks.Until recently, the only nationwide data on FOIS was compiled yearly in the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Uniform Crime Report. On a voluntary basis, departments report the number of justifiable homicides by on-duty law-enforcement officers. Not only are these shootings underreported (by ∼50%; ref.2), such reports do not provide information about the officers or circumstances surrounding these shootings. Beginning in 2015, news companies such as The Washington Post and The Guardian began to collect information about FOIS to address the issues with the FBI data. Through report...