On the challenges associated with the study of police use of deadly force in the United States: A response to Schwartz & Jahn

Abstract

In response to Gabriel Schwartz and Jaquelyn Jahn's descriptive study, "Mapping fatal police violence across U.S. metropolitan areas: Overall rates and racial/ethnic inequalities, 2013-2017," I provide three reflections. First, the framing of this issue is vitally important. Second, police-involved fatalities represent a nonrandom sample of all incidents involving police use of deadly force (i.e., physical force that causes or is likely to cause death), and unfortunately, we lack comprehensive data on use of deadly force that does not result in fatalities. Finally, to make sense of who is killed by the police, researchers must also identify who was exposed to the risk of being killed by the police.

Association of Residential Racial and Ethnic Segregation With Legal Intervention Injuries in California

“…We linked hospital data on legal intervention injuries to the characteristics of the counties in which they occurred. By mandating the reporting of all emergency department visits and inpatient admissions in California, our data fill a gap in tracking legal intervention injuries, which are currently underreported, 14 , 15 , 37 , 38 , 39 , 40 , 41 especially for Black residents. 42 We hope this work will inform policies that respond to the enduring pattern of segregation that perpetuates stark racial disparities in legal intervention injuries.…”

“…13 A limitation of these studies is the use of data sources known to underreport legal intervention injuries. 14,15 This study is the first, to our knowledge, to analyze hospital data on legal intervention injuries within the context of community characteristics. We used hospital administrative data from 2016 to 2019 to provide updated statistics on injuries in California.…”

“… 13 A limitation of these studies is the use of data sources known to underreport legal intervention injuries. 14 , 15 …”

Elevated police turnover following the summer of George Floyd protests: A synthetic control study

“…The framing of how often and why police-involved fatalities occur can have powerful effects on the way individuals think about police use-of-force specifically, and policing more generally. Labeling every police-involved death as the result of "police violence" wrongly suggests the officer is the sole cause of every police-involved fatality, diminishing the citizen's contribution to the outcome (Nix, 2020).…”

Leadership Matters: Police Chief Race and Fatal Shootings by Police Officers

“…One limitation of using the Washington Post ’s “Fatal Force Database” is that police shootings that do not result in death are excluded from the observations. Nix (2020) discusses some of the challenges in studying this topic given the fact that police‐involved deaths are not a random sample of all instances of the use of deadly force. This results in an imperfect measure of officers’ use of deadly use of force because most victims who are shot do not end up dying, and research has shown that survival rates are strongly predicted by the distance from a trauma care center and the transport time one takes before receiving hospital care (Mackenzie et al., 2006; Crandall et al., 2013; Circo, 2019).…”