Disparity does not mean bias: making sense of observed racial disparities in fatal officer-involved shootings with multiple benchmarks

Tregle, Brandon; Nix, Justin; Alpert, Geoffrey P.

doi:10.1080/0735648x.2018.1547269

Cited by 66 publications

(55 citation statements)

References 44 publications

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“…What These Findings Do Not Show. Our analyses test for racial disparities in FOIS, which should not be conflated with racial bias (21). Racial disparities are a necessary but not sufficient, requirement for the existence of racial biases, as there are many reasons why fatal shootings might vary across racial groups that are unrelated to bias on the behalf of police officers.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…However, using population as a benchmark makes the strong assumption that White and Black civilians have equal exposure to situations that result in FOIS. If there are racial differences in exposure to these situations, calculations of racial disparity based on population benchmarks will be misleading (20,21). Researchers have attempted to avoid this issue by using racespecific violent crime as a benchmark, as the majority of FOIS involve armed civilians (22).…”

Section: How To Calculate Racial Disparities In Foismentioning

confidence: 99%

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RETRACTED: Officer characteristics and racial disparities in fatal officer-involved shootings

Johnson

Tress

Burkel

et al. 2019

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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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...

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: How To Calculate Racial Disparities In Foismentioning

confidence: 99%

RETRACTED: Officer characteristics and racial disparities in fatal officer-involved shootings

Johnson

Tress

Burkel

et al. 2019

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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“…Deaths from police intervention are extremely rare -there are roughly 1,000 of them each year in the context of tens of millions of police-civilian interactions (Hyland et al, 2015;Tregle et al, 2019). It is far more common for officers to take armed/dangerous individuals into custody without using deadly force (Wheeler et al, 2018;Worrall et al, 2018).…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Police killings of unarmed Black Americans: A reassessment of community mental health spillover effects

Nix¹,

Lozada²

2020

Preprint

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We reevaluate the claim from Bor et al. (2018: 302) that “police killings of unarmed black Americans have effects on mental health among black American adults in the general population.” The Mapping Police Violence data used by the authors includes 91 incidents involving black decedents who were either (1) not killed by police officers in the line of duty or (2) armed when killed. These incidents should have been removed or recoded prior to analysis. Correctly recoding these incidents decreased in magnitude all of the reported coefficients, and, more importantly, eliminated the reported statistically significant effect of exposure to police killings of unarmed black individuals on the mental health of black Americans in the general population. We caution researchers to vet carefully crowdsourced data that tracks police behaviors and warn against reducing these complex incidents to overly simplistic armed/unarmed dichotomies.

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“…These have often relied on different quasi-experimental designs, such as the hit rates test (Coviello & Persico, 2015), examining traffic stops in daylight versus nighttime (Grogger & Ridgeway, 2006), or using different benchmarks (Miller, le Masurier, & Wicks, 2000;Tregle, Nix, & Alpert, 2019) to assess racial bias in how police treat minorities.…”

Section: Fairness In Allocating Police Resourcesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Allocating Police Resources While Limiting Racial Inequality

Wheeler

2019

Justice Quarterly

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Police targeting hot spots of crime tends to disproportionately burden minorities via stops and arrests. This work attempts to reduce disproportionate minority contact by formulating a crime hot spots spatial allocation strategy for police that prioritizes areas of high crime, but constrains the targeted hot spots given different levels of acceptable racial inequality. This racial inequality constraint is measured as the proportion of minorities likely to be stopped in those areas prioritized by police. Using data on stops and crime in New York City, I show that police stops can be more equitably distributed according to race, but there are fundamental trade-offs. One cannot gain a racial distribution of stops proportionately equal to the residential population without large decreases in the efficiency of targeting high crime areas. More modest gains can be had though in reducing the proportion of minorities stopped while still targeting high crime locations.

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Disparity does not mean bias: making sense of observed racial disparities in fatal officer-involved shootings with multiple benchmarks

Cited by 66 publications

References 44 publications

RETRACTED: Officer characteristics and racial disparities in fatal officer-involved shootings

RETRACTED: Officer characteristics and racial disparities in fatal officer-involved shootings

Police killings of unarmed Black Americans: A reassessment of community mental health spillover effects

Allocating Police Resources While Limiting Racial Inequality

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