Toward a Comprehensive Understanding of Officers’ Shooting Decisions: No Simple Answers to This Complex Problem

Abstract

Police officers make life-or-death shooting decisions in complex situations under extreme time pressure. If officers make a mistake, there are dire consequences—they could kill an innocent or be killed themselves. In contrast to prior work's near-exclusive focus on suspect race, the present study examined features of methodology, officers, suspects, and neighborhoods that may affect officers’ shooting decisions. Empirical exploration of officers’ shooting decisions and mistakes is still in its infancy, and given the seriousness and importance of this phenomenon—and the potential for this research to inform policy decisions—additional research is needed.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We thank the MPD Training Staff, Former Police Chief Noble Wray, Captain Jim Wheeler, and Captain Sue Williams for their support; Ziggy Bialzik for building our gun apparatus; and Erica Baranski, Lynette Davis, Sonya Knudson, Daniel Mulligan, Erica Nagy, Megan Nelli, and Marc Rodriguez for data collection. We thank Patrick Forscher for his invaluable comments on a previous version of this article.

Notes

¹For simplicity, we call these the “non-White neighborhood” and the “White neighborhood.”.