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Abstract
This study empirically examines recent race-specific police shootings and offers a theoretical test of racial threat arguments. Our analysis includes all aspects of threat – economic, political, and racial composition – when examining state-level counts of police shootings of Black citizens spanning 2014–2016. For comparison, police shootings of Whites were also analyzed. Significant findings for racial composition are reported across both races, while political predictors are significant in the Black-specific model when controlling for other structural features. Our results also highlight the need to disaggregate police shootings by race. With partial support for racial threat arguments, we offer directions for future research.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1 While there has been a general decline in crime, evidence suggests that violent crimes, including homicides, did increase between 2014 and 2016 (James, 2018).
2 Recently, it has been suggested that claims of disproportionality may need to be reassessed. For example, Tregle, Nix, and Alpert (Citation2019) argue that using population as a benchmark for disproportionality is flawed since large portions of the population may never be exposed to the risk of deadly force. Instead, they argue for benchmarking police killings against estimates of the population who encounters the police (i.e. arrests, police–citizen interactions).
3 While we do not consider perceptions of threat directly in the current study, past research has found a relationship between important structural characteristics as outlined in racial threat theory (i.e. changes in the size of the Black population, unemployment rates) and individual-level perceptions of Black Americans, and that both the macro and individual are important in helping us understand punitiveness (King & Wheelock, 200785).
4 Previous race-specific studies have limited the analysis to geographic areas with Black populations of at least 2,000 persons or greater to avoid estimates based on small samples. Only two states had a Black population less than 5,000 – Montana and Wyoming. Due to data limitations, Wyoming is missing from the analysis and results were unchanged by removing Montana; thus, Montana remains in our final models.
5 There has been some recent development regarding national databases that could provide better data than other official sources. The National Violent Death Reporting System may provide an alternative to the SHR and NVSS; however, this collection effort has not been implemented across the entire US and still reports less lethal force incidents than The Guardian or Washington Post (Barber et al., 2016). Additionally, the BJS redesigned the Arrest-Related Death Program to consider media accounts followed-up by law enforcement and medical examiner and coroner records which improved the data collected (Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2016).
6 With regard to classification differences, there was a recent exchange in The Lancet over the definition and classification of the unarmed status of victims killed by police in the MPV data (Bor et al., 2018, 2019; Lozada & Nix, 2019).
7 Unfortunately, MPV and many other deadly force databases only capture incidents where a death occurs thereby missing all instances where deadly force was employed but did not result in death. Shjarback (Citation2019) offers one detailed discussion of this issue, including an examination of Texas’ database that captures police shootings resulting in injury or death.
8 It is important to note that MPV did have missing data with 119 (of 3,060) deadly shootings being reported as “unknown” regarding the race of the person killed, which totals 3.889% of shootings over the 3-year period observed. Efforts were made to test for the potential impact of this missing information on our multivariate analyses. The results indicated that our findings remained generally consistent, including the racial threat measures remaining robust in the models. The remaining police shootings that resulted in death between 2014 and 2016 were distributed across other racial and ethnic groups: Asians (56/3,060: 1.830%), Hispanic (540/3,060: 17.647%), Native American (44/3,060: 1.438%), Pacific Islander (14/3,060: 0.458%).
9 We also estimated models with other political indicators – ratios of Republicans to Democrats and the ratio of conservative to liberal ideology – to examine the relative nature of political ideology/threat. These indicators had statistically insignificant relationships with police shootings across racial groups. All other findings remained relatively consistent with those reported in our models regardless of which combination of political measures were included.
10 Some research suggests evidence of racial bias increases for unarmed victims, wherein Blacks are more likely to be shot and killed when unarmed than Whites (Ross, Citation2015). We examined this possibility in our data and found that the disparities between Blacks and Whites increase when isolating police shootings to unarmed victims. Specifically, there are 324 unarmed persons – Black and White – killed in police shootings with Blacks totaling 138 (42.593%) and Whites totaling 186 (57.407%). However, when we estimate the association of racial threat indicators with race-specific police shootings of those unarmed, the parameter estimates remain robust. Some of the control variables change, but there are no significant differences for our racial threat estimators when regressed on race-specific police shootings of unarmed persons compared to total shootings of Blacks and Whites. To avoid the loss of shooting counts and since there have been concerns over the classification of unarmed status in the MPV data, we do not limit our analysis to unarmed persons.
11 Ross, Winterhalder, and McElreath (Citation2018) offer some criticism to Fryer’s (Citation2016) conclusions based on using exposure measures and his arguments about there being little racial bias in police shootings against Blacks. They argue that because of differential encounter rates between Black Americans and the police, population-based measures are better at indicating racial disparities than exposure measures.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Andrew C. Gray
Andrew C. Gray is a Doctoral Candidate in Criminology in the Department of Sociology and Criminal Justice at the University of Delaware. His research interests include studying race/ethnicity and exploring the influence of structural forces on forms of violence and social control. He is also interested in examining racism and racial violence throughout American history, including the legacies created by past racial violence. His published work has examined the importance of “unofficial” databases in studying the use of lethal force by police across racial groups.
Karen F. Parker
Karen F. Parker is Professor and Chair in the Department of Sociology and Criminal Justice at the University of Delaware. Her research interests include exploring the influence of macro-level constructs on urban violence, particularly labor markets, racial segregation, urban inequality, and concentrated disadvantage. Much of her work has incorporated longitudinal models to examine how changes in the local urban economy differentially influence race-specific homicide rates over time.