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

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.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...

Reply to Schimmack: Critique of Cesario et al. (2019)

“…This is the foundational fact on which our paper was based. What is clear from the above examples (and also more systematic and full analyses by e.g., Nix, Campbell, Byers, and Alpert (2017) and Johnson, Tress, Burkel, Taylor, and Cesario (2019)), is that violent crime is the context of fatal police shootings. Yes, shootings of unarmed and nonviolent citizens do occur, but they are a small minority of cases.…”

Reply to Knox and Mummolo: Critique of Johnson et al. (2019)

“…The first critique of Johnson et al (2019) centers around the idea that the only quantity of interest in understanding racial bias in fatal police shootings is Pr(shot|race, X), that is, the probability of being shot given a civilian's race and some covariates. Thus, according to Knox and Mummolo (2019), Pr(race|shot, X) does not provide any useful information in understanding the topic of race and police shootings.…”

“…Research on realworld policing behavior indicates fatal shootings are strongly tied to situations where violent crime is committed (Klinger, Rosenfeld, Isom, & Deckard, 2016). This is reflected in the fact that between 85% -90% of fatal police shootings involve armed civilians (Johnson et al, 2019;Nix, Campbell, Byers, & Alpert, 2017). While we do not know the exact rate at which police encounter Black and White individuals in the context of violent crime, we can estimate these rates from several different proxies.…”

“…In fact, we have computed this quantity in our past research (Cesario, Johnson, & Terrill, 2019), which we discuss in more detail below. However, the goal of Johnson et al (2019) was not to compute Pr(shot|race, X). It was instead to provide information about the nature of fatal police shootings from a different angle, by predicting the race of the person shot from a set of predictor variables.…”

No Evidence of Bias When Using Inappropriate Test for Bias: Comment on Cesario, Johnson, & Terrill 2018

“…While we believe the problem we cover here is the most critical issue with this paper, there are other methodological issues present in this paper including, among others, issues with the reliability of The Counted data (which can use media reports based only on police reports), base rate neglect (for a broader discussion of issues with administrative data on police shootings seeKnox et al 2019), and contradictory results found in other papers which are not adequately explained(Ross 2015). In particular, we would like to note the extensive criticism by Ulrich Schimmack and Rickert Carlsson of a similar publication by many of these same authors(Johnson et al 2019), which notes a number of serious flaws in that publication as well (Schimmack 2019).…”