The effect of suspect race on police officers’ decisions to draw their weapons

Abstract

Researchers are working to identify appropriate benchmarks for exploring racial bias in the officer-involved shooting (OIS) context. Two recent studies benchmarked OIS against incidents in which officers drew weapons but did not shoot. A problem is that the decision to draw a weapon may itself be subject to bias. Using 2017 use-of-force data from the Dallas Police Department, we modeled officers’ decisions to draw their weapons as a function of suspect race and other suspect, officer, and incident characteristics. We benchmarked by limiting analyses to arrest and active aggression cases, thereby excluding interactions in which it was less likely suspects would have had weapons drawn against them. The key finding was that black suspects were no more or less likely to have weapons drawn against them than other suspects.

Keywords:

• Officer-involved shootings
• use of force
• deadly force
• suspect race

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Most scholarly attention to the issue has unfolded in the racial profiling literature (see, e.g., Alpert, Smith, and Dunham, 2004; Smith, Tillyer, Lloyd, and Petrocelli, 2019).

2 There were advantages and disadvantages to each approach. We discuss them in the Results section.

3 The Reverend Jessie Jackson called the Baton Rouge shooting of Alton Sterling “a legal lynching.” (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/alton-sterling-jesse-jackson-legal-lynching_us_577d126be4b0a629c1ab56c6). Another story in the Huffington Post characterized one OIS as an “extrajudicial” execution (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/justin_cohen/advice-for-white-folks-in_b_10861488.html).

4 A reviewer raised the concern that Cesario et al. (2019) and Tregle et al. (2019) fail to address the shooting of unarmed people by the police, as there is no reason to assume they are violent criminals.” In the reviewer’s words, “[t]he excessive killing of unarmed non-aggressing black people is not justified on the basis of the average crime rate.” We do not disagree with this point entirely, but it is fair to say “excessive” is open to interpretation because while, according to the work of Cesario et al. (2019), 40 unarmed blacks were killed in 2015 and 2016, 62 unarmed whites were also killed during the same period. The crime statistics used in Cesario et al. (2019) and Tregle et al. (2019) are proxies for enhanced exposure and they are obviously imperfect. The Shjarback and Nix (2020) study is something of an improvement given its benchmarking with violence against officers.

5 A reviewer correctly pointed out that if there is racial bias not just in killing unarmed black people but also “tasing” black people, then the denominator would be inflated, giving a false impression of anti-white bias.

6 Dallas Police Department General Order 906.02 (np). Rev. 6/19/09.

7 Dallas Police Department training, and thus required reporting, does not distinguish between drawing and pointing. No officers are taught, for instance, to draw their weapons and hold them at their sides without pointing them at someone or something.

8 We adopted different coding schemes in supplementary analyses reported below.

9 It would be ideal to have a deadly resistance category, but no such indicator is available in the official data.

10 Yet another plausible explanation for this finding is that active aggression and suspect weapon display are collinear, or that one is a subset of other. Fortunately, this was not a possibility in our data. Officers could choose either active aggression or suspect weapon display as their reason for using force, but not both. Nevertheless, we estimated separate models excluding one or the other while keeping all the other variables listed in the last column on table 2. When active aggression was retained and weapon display was excluded, the active aggression odds ratio was .29 (p < .001), and when weapon display was retained and active aggression was excluded, weapon display odds ratio was 60.89 (p < .001). No other findings were appreciably altered.

11 If multiple force “types” are deployed in a particular encounter, which is common, officers are required to report what was used first, second, and so on. In the 2017 UoF data, there were just two cases in which a TASER was followed by a gun draw, and there were just 15 cases where a weapon was drawn first, then followed by a TASER. In our TASER models, we excluded all cases in which a gun was drawn, including the 17 just mentioned.

12 Thirty percent of the non-arrest cases involved weapon draws, so it is fair to say this benchmarking approach is imperfect. As such, we conducted additional analyses (see below) limited to active aggression cases.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

John L. Worrall

John L. Worrall is Professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Texas at Dallas. He has published articles and book chapters on a variety of topics ranging from legal issues in policing to crime measurement. He is also the author or coauthor of 17 books, including the popular Crime Control in America: What Works? (4^th ed., Pearson) and Introduction to Criminal Justice (16^th ed., Cengage). He currently serves as Editor of the journal Police Quarterly and as Executive Director of the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences.

Stephen A. Bishopp

Stephen A. Bishopp holds an appointment as Adjunct Assistant Professor (w/o Tenure)-University of Texas School of Public Health. He is also a Sergeant and 30-year veteran of the Dallas Police Department. He received his PhD (2013) in Criminology from the University of Texas at Dallas. His research interests include police mental health/well-being, police behavior, and criminological theory.

William Terrill

William Terrill is Interim Associate Dean in the Watts College of Public Service and Community Solutions, and Professor in the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Arizona State University. His research centers on police behavior, with an emphasis on police use of force and police culture. He has published numerous scholarly articles, chapters, and reports, as well as two books entitled "Police Coercion: Application of the Force Continuum" (2001, LFB Scholarly Publishing) and "Police Culture: Adapting to the Strains of the Job" (2013, Carolina Academic Press).