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The Impact of State Laws on Officer-Involved Deaths (OIDs)
Abstract
While the public debates whether law enforcement has a problem with mis- or over-using force, the field lacks critical information concerning how often officers use force when interacting with citizens. Moreover, researchers have not examined how differences in how states restrict officers’ ability to use force affect the frequency of force used. Consequently, the various reforms proposed have little evidence supporting them. Using data from Mapping Police Violence combined with census data, we examined the impact of the incorporation of U.S. Supreme Court jurisprudence and the overall restrictiveness each state placed on law enforcement’s ability to use force when making an arrest and what constituted reasonable force within each state. We found that while the state’s population size and violent crime rate were strong predictors of the number and rate of officer-involved deaths (OIDs), state statutory restrictions on use of force had negligible effects. This has important implications for reforming state and national discussions around reforming use of force.
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Background: A growing body of research has found a link between firearm availability and police shootings of citizens across place. The problem, however, is that the previous studies on the topic tend to suffer from several limitations: a near exclusive focus on citizen fatalities, units of analysis at the state or county levels, and a variety of proxy measures tapping into community-level firearm access. The current study set out to address these issues by examining the relationship between different forms of firearm availability and both fatal and nonfatal injurious police shootings of citizens at the city-level.
Methods: More specifically, it merged The Trace’s “Missing Pieces” measures of guns reported lost and stolen to police as well as licensed firearms dealers across jurisdictions from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) as proxies for firearm availability with data on police shootings of citizens in California and Florida from California’s URSUS system and the Tampa Bay Times’ “Why Cops Shoot” database, respectively. Negative binomial regression analyses were performed on a sample of 253 cities across the two states and a subsample of cities with licensed firearms dealers.
Results: Findings uncovered a small positive association between rates of federally-licensed guns stores and the number citizens shot by police as well as police shooting incidents while controlling for several community-level measures (e.g., concentrated disadvantage, gun homicide rates). Rates of guns lost or reported stolen were generally not significantly associated with the outcome measures in the multivariate models.
Conclusions: Firearm availability is a significant correlate of police shootings. Pooled counts of both citizens shot by police and police shooting incidents are heightened in jurisdictions with higher rates of licensed gun dealers, which may be due to the fact that all firearms sold in the United States first make their way to the public through these mechanisms. Such licensed gun dealers must be appropriately monitored and audited to reduce illicit behavior and prevent firearms from making their way into secondary markets. Addressing access to firearms can be meaningful for a host of gun-related morbidity and mortality outcomes, including police shootings of citizens.
Research Question
How adequate is research in the USA for discovering best policies and practices, and best implementation strategies, for reducing loss of life and injury from police use of force.
Data
This analysis examines police agency policies on the use of force regulation, evaluations of training initiatives, research on supervision, problem officers, and other dimensions of the issues and possible solutions.
Methods
The analysis examines both documented correlates and the strength of causal inference about those correlates of reductions in the use of force.
Findings
The analysis concludes that while many promising ideas have been offered, there are few tested strategies that have demonstrated substantial effects in reducing the use of force. There are virtually no successful strategies that have been replicated.
Conclusions
The current proliferation of untested programs may divert effort from a coherent and well-funded program of research to test and select effective policies that are urgently needed.
Purpose of Review
Traumatic injury sits at the nexus of law enforcement and structural racism. This narrative review aims to explore the major impacts of law enforcement on health, its intersections with US structural racism, and their joint impacts on traumatic injury and injury care.
Recent Findings
Many of the same forces of systemic disadvantage that put Black people, other people of color, and other marginalized groups at risk for violent injury also expose these same individuals and communities to intensive policing. Recent evidence speaks to the broad impact of police exposure and police violence on individual and community physical and mental health. Moreover, injured patients who are exposed to law enforcement during their care are at risk for erosion of trust in and relationships with their healthcare providers. To optimize the role of law enforcement agencies in injury prevention, collaboration across sectors and with communities is essential.
Summary
A broad approach to the prevention of injury and violence must incorporate an understanding of the intersecting impacts of law enforcement and structural racism on health and traumatic injury. Clinicians who seek to provide trauma-informed injury care should incorporate an understanding of the role of law enforcement in individual and community health.
Objectives
To quantify nonfatal injurious police shootings of people and examine the factors associated with victim mortality.
Methods
We gathered victim-level data on fatal and nonfatal injurious police shootings from four states that have such information publicly available: Florida (2009–14), Colorado (2010–19), Texas (2015–19), and California (2016–19). For each state, we examined bivariate associations between mortality and race/ethnicity, gender, age, weapon, and access to trauma care. We also estimated logistic regression models predicting victim mortality in each state.
Results
Forty-five percent of these police shooting victims (N = 1,322) did not die. Black–white disparities were more pronounced in nonfatal injurious police shootings than in fatal police shootings. Overall, Black victims were less likely than white victims to die from their wound(s). Younger victims were less likely to die from their wound(s), as well as those who were unarmed.
Conclusions
Racial and age disparities in police shootings are likely more pronounced than previous estimates suggest.
Policy implications
Other states should strongly consider compiling data like that which is currently being gathered in California. Absent data on nonfatal injurious police shootings–which account for a large share of deadly force incidents–researchers and analysts must be cautious about comparing and/or ranking jurisdictions in terms of their police-involved fatality rates.
This research note provides new evidence consistent with systemic anti-Black racism in police killings across the United States. Data come from the Mapping Police Violence Database (2013-2021). I calculate race-specific odds and probabilities that victims of police killings exhibited mental illness, were armed with a weapon, or attempted to flee the scene at the time of their killing. Multilevel, multivariable logistic regression techniques are applied to further account for the victim's age, gender, year of killing, and geographical clustering. I find that White victims are underrepresented, and Black victims overrepresented in the database. Relative to White victims, Black victims also have 60% lower odds of exhibiting signs of mental illness, 23% lower odds of being armed, and 28% higher odds of fleeing. Hispanic victims exhibit 45% lower odds of being armed relative to their White peers but are otherwise comparable. These patterns persist regardless of the victim's age, gender, year of killing, or geographical location (zip code, state, and neighborhood type). Thus, the threshold for being perceived as dangerous, and thereby falling victim to lethal police force, appears to be higher for White civilians relative to their Black or Hispanic peers. Current findings provide empirical support for political initiatives to curb lethal police force, as such efforts could help to reduce racial disparities in deaths by police nationwide.
In spite of long‐term declines in the violent victimization of U.S. police officers, the danger of police work continues to structure police socialization, culture, and behavior. Existing research, though attentive to police behavior and deviance that negatively affects the public, analytically ignores how the danger of policing engenders officer behavior that harms police themselves. Drawing on ethnographic observations and interviews in three U.S. police departments, this article describes how police are informally and formally socialized into the danger imperative—a cultural frame that emphasizes violence and the need for officer safety—and its effect on officer behavior. As a result of perception mediated through the danger imperative, officers engage in policy‐compliant and policy‐deviant behaviors to protect themselves from violence. Unfortunately, policy‐deviant behaviors such as unauthorized highspeed driving and not wearing a seatbelt, though justified in the name of safety, lead to catastrophic car accidents that injure and kill both police and members of the public. This article concludes with discussion of how seemingly mundane policy deviant behaviors are a reflection of assumptions within police culture that undergird police practices that damage public wellbeing and perpetuate boarder inequalities in U.S. policing.
Recent events in the United States have highlighted the fact that American police resort to force, including deadly force, much more often than in many other Western countries. This Article describes how the current regulatory regime may ignore or even facilitate these aggressive police actions. The law governing police use of force in the United States derives in large part from the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures. As construed by the United States Supreme Court, the Fourth Amendment provides police wide leeway in using deadly force, making custodial arrests, and stopping and frisking individuals. While state and local police departments can develop more restrictive rules, they often do not. Additionally, the remedies for violations of these rules are weak. The predominant remedy is exclusion of evidence, the impact of which falls primarily on the prosecutor and in any event only has a deterrent effect when evidence is sought. Civil and criminal sanctions have been significantly limited by the Supreme Court, particularly through the doctrine of qualified immunity (applied to individual officers) and the policy or custom defense (applied to municipalities). This minimal regulatory regime is one reason police-citizen encounters in the United States so often result in death or serious bodily harm to citizens, in particular those who are Black. The Article ends with a number of reform proposals.
Over the last few years, there has been a series of high-profile, premeditated ambush attacks on police, which has led some to conclude there is a “war on cops.” Unfortunately, prior research has not examined the prevalence of police ambushes over an extended period of time, and the most recent study only analyzed the phenomenon through 2013. Moreover, the “war on cops” thesis implies a very specific motivation for an ambush: hatred of police or desire to seek vengeance in response to police killings of citizens. Prior research has not sufficiently explored the motivations of ambush attacks, or whether recent trends in ambushes are linked to a “war on cops” motive. I investigate ambush killings of police from 1970 to 2018 using data from the Officer Down Memorial Page in an attempt to address these research gaps. I apply a temporal coding scheme of when the attack occurred to isolate killings of police that are consistent with the International Association of Chiefs of Police definition of an ambush. Results from linear regression show that the annual rates of ambush killings of police have declined by more than 90% since 1970. Although ambushes spiked in 2016 and 2018 to the highest rates in 20 years, interrupted time series analysis indicates no statistically significant increase post-2013. Spikes have also occurred in nonambush killings since 2014. Police leaders and researchers should monitor trends in ambush and nonambush killings of police, as the recent spikes may presage the emergence of a chronic problem.
Although researchers and the public intuitively know that the lack of available data on the topic of officer-involved shootings (OIS) is a problem, the scope of the problem has not been identified. A lack of transparency regarding OIS data contributes to the legitimacy crisis facing policing in the United States. Valid and reliable OIS data would create the ability to craft and assess informed public policy. In addition, police organizations’ roles could then be evaluated allowing for accountability and additional training based on OIS incidents. Employing content analysis of websites for police agencies, their municipal/county governments, and sheriffs’ offices servicing populations of 100,000 or more according to the 2010 U.S. Census, the availability of OIS data is identified and classified. It was found that 155 (of 277) police agencies and 96 (of 548) sheriffs’ offices made some form of data available related to OIS incidents across five categories (annual reports, OIS summary reports, individualized shooting reports, press releases, and spreadsheet reports). The current assessment is the first in the literature to systematically evaluate the transparency of law enforcement organizations servicing large jurisdictions regarding OIS incidents. Those reports and data available are described and placed within the context of the recommended national database proposed by Klinger and colleagues to begin to assess the extent of OIS data transparency issues facing policing. In addition, agencies providing data were compared utilizing one-way analysis of variance on a number of structural variables drawn from the 2008 Census of State and Local Law Enforcement Agencies to evaluate any patterns demonstrated by those organizations providing data. Findings suggest great variation in the type, classification, and quality of data presented by law enforcement organizations, which limits its utility for the purposes of research as well as policy creation and evaluation.
Objectives
Use of lethal force by police officers has incited riots, inspired social movements, and engendered socio-political debate. Police officers also assume a high level of risk during police–citizen encounters. Yet, existing studies tend to center on these two phenomena independently. Additionally, the under-utilization of multilevel research in these areas of inquiry has hampered attempts to empirically disentangle the individual, agency, and contextual correlates of fatal police–citizen encounters. This study integrates the predominantly distinct research bases on these phenomena to examine the contexts in which police use lethal force, relative to the contexts in which officers are killed in the line of duty.
Methods
Data were compiled on 6416 citizen fatalities and 709 officer fatalities distributed across 1735 agencies and 1506 U.S. places from 2000 to 2016. A series of three-level logistic regression models examined the civilian and officer characteristics, organizational factors, and contextual features that impacted the odds of citizen fatalities by the police relative to police lethal victimization.
Results
Findings indicated that structural disadvantage increased the odds of police lethal victimization relative to citizen fatalities by the police. Moreover, this contextual effect was, in part, a product of increased firearm usage by citizens who killed police in more disadvantaged areas.
Conclusions
A more complete understanding of fatal police–citizen encounters requires considering police use of lethal force and police lethal victimization concurrently in their broader social contexts.
Black males are disproportionately the victims of police killings in the United States, yet few studies have examined their personal narratives of trauma and bereavement resulting from police violence. Informed by critical race theory and stress and coping theory, we used a modified grounded theory approach to conduct and analyze in-depth, semistructured life history interviews with 40 young Black men (aged 18-24 years) in Baltimore, Maryland. Study participants were recruited from a GED and job readiness center serving Baltimore youth. Study results offer a nuanced understanding of the patterning and mental health consequences of police violence for young Black men. Participant disclosures of witnessing and experiencing police violence began in childhood and spanned through emerging adulthood, met Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders–Fifth Edition criteria for trauma exposure, and embodied theoretical conceptualizations of racial trauma. Exposures to police violence fostered distrust of police and informed participants’ appraisals of their vulnerability to police violence across the life course. Six study participants disclosed losing loved ones to police killings. Injustice and hypervigilance accompanied grief. Implications for research, policy, and practice are discussed.
Research Summary
In this article, we provide the most comprehensive narrative review to date of the research evidence base for body‐worn cameras (BWCs). Seventy empirical studies of BWCs were examined covering the impact of cameras on officer behavior, officer perceptions, citizen behavior, citizen perceptions, police investigations, and police organizations. Although officers and citizens are generally supportive of BWC use, BWCs have not had statistically significant or consistent effects on most measures of officer and citizen behavior or citizens’ views of police. Expectations and concerns surrounding BWCs among police leaders and citizens have not yet been realized by and large in the ways anticipated by each. Additionally, despite the large growth in BWC research, there continues to be a lacuna of knowledge on the impact that BWCs have on police organizations and police–citizen relationships more generally.
Policy Implications
Regardless of the evidence‐base, BWCs have already rapidly diffused into law enforcement, and many agencies will continue to adopt them. Policy implications from available evidence are not clear‐cut, but most likely BWCs will not be an easy panacea for improving police performance, accountability, and relationships with citizens. To maximize the positive impacts of BWCs, police and researchers will need to give more attention to the ways and contexts (organizational and community) in which BWCs are most beneficial or harmful. They will also need to address how BWCs can be used in police training, management, and internal investigations to achieve more fundamental organizational changes with the long‐term potential to improve police performance, accountability, and legitimacy in the community.
As part of their duties, police regularly engage with citizens, which can result in the use of force. While we know how often and under what circumstances officers use force, little is known about officers’ decision-making processes that lead to force. The study took a naturalistic decision-making approach to analyze debrief sessions between 91 recruits and their trainers after partaking in a use-of-force assessment scenario. Results show recruit’s decision making was more aligned with an intuitive style rather than an analytical style. Recruits reported experiencing perceptual, cognitive, and physiological impairments that influenced the way they assessed the situation and affected their ability to successfully execute force techniques. The findings provide valuable insights into the theoretical knowledge around police decision making and how officers are making use-of-force decisions in the field. This has real-world implications for training/education and could help reduce the effects of decision-making impairments.
Background
Prior research suggests that United States governmental sources documenting the number of law-enforcement-related deaths (i.e., fatalities due to injuries inflicted by law enforcement officers) undercount these incidents. The National Vital Statistics System (NVSS), administered by the federal government and based on state death certificate data, identifies such deaths by assigning them diagnostic codes corresponding to “legal intervention” in accordance with the International Classification of Diseases–10th Revision (ICD-10). Newer, nongovernmental databases track law-enforcement-related deaths by compiling news media reports and provide an opportunity to assess the magnitude and determinants of suspected NVSS underreporting. Our a priori hypotheses were that underreporting by the NVSS would exceed that by the news media sources, and that underreporting rates would be higher for decedents of color versus white, decedents in lower versus higher income counties, decedents killed by non-firearm (e.g., Taser) versus firearm mechanisms, and deaths recorded by a medical examiner versus coroner.
Methods and findings
We created a new US-wide dataset by matching cases reported in a nongovernmental, news-media-based dataset produced by the newspaper The Guardian, The Counted, to identifiable NVSS mortality records for 2015. We conducted 2 main analyses for this cross-sectional study: (1) an estimate of the total number of deaths and the proportion unreported by each source using capture–recapture analysis and (2) an assessment of correlates of underreporting of law-enforcement-related deaths (demographic characteristics of the decedent, mechanism of death, death investigator type [medical examiner versus coroner], county median income, and county urbanicity) in the NVSS using multilevel logistic regression. We estimated that the total number of law-enforcement-related deaths in 2015 was 1,166 (95% CI: 1,153, 1,184). There were 599 deaths reported in The Counted only, 36 reported in the NVSS only, 487 reported in both lists, and an estimated 44 (95% CI: 31, 62) not reported in either source. The NVSS documented 44.9% (95% CI: 44.2%, 45.4%) of the total number of deaths, and The Counted documented 93.1% (95% CI: 91.7%, 94.2%). In a multivariable mixed-effects logistic model that controlled for all individual- and county-level covariates, decedents injured by non-firearm mechanisms had higher odds of underreporting in the NVSS than those injured by firearms (odds ratio [OR]: 68.2; 95% CI: 15.7, 297.5; p < 0.01), and underreporting was also more likely outside of the highest-income-quintile counties (OR for the lowest versus highest income quintile: 10.1; 95% CI: 2.4, 42.8; p < 0.01). There was no statistically significant difference in the odds of underreporting in the NVSS for deaths certified by coroners compared to medical examiners, and the odds of underreporting did not vary by race/ethnicity. One limitation of our analyses is that we were unable to examine the characteristics of cases that were unreported in The Counted.
Conclusions
The media-based source, The Counted, reported a considerably higher proportion of law-enforcement-related deaths than the NVSS, which failed to report a majority of these incidents. For the NVSS, rates of underreporting were higher in lower income counties and for decedents killed by non-firearm mechanisms. There was no evidence suggesting that underreporting varied by death investigator type (medical examiner versus coroner) or race/ethnicity.
Objectives:
To examine whether stricter firearm legislation is associated with rates of fatal police shootings.
Methods:
We used a cross-sectional, state-level design to evaluate the effect of state-level firearm legislation on rates of fatal police shootings from January 1, 2015, through October 31, 2016. We measured state-level variation in firearm laws with legislative scorecards from the Brady Center, and for fatal police shootings we used The Counted, an online database maintained by The Guardian.
Results:
State-level firearm legislation was significantly associated with lower rates of fatal police shootings (incidence rate ratio = 0.961; 95% confidence interval = 0.939, 0.984). When we controlled for sociodemographic factors, states in the top quartile of legislative strength had a 51% lower incidence rate than did states in the lowest quartile. Laws aimed at strengthening background checks, promoting safe storage, and reducing gun trafficking were associated with fewer fatal police shootings.
Conclusions:
Legislative restrictions on firearms are associated with reductions in fatal police shootings. Public Health Implications. Although further research is necessary to determine causality and potential mechanisms, firearm legislation is a potential policy solution for reducing fatal police shootings in the United States. (Am J Public Health. Published online ahead of print May 18, 2017: e1-e8. doi:10.2105/AJPH.2017.303770).
Objectives
Examines the influence of positive, negative, and neutral police behavior during traffic stops on citizen perceptions of police. Methods
Participants were randomly assigned to view a video clip of a simulated traffic stop in which the officer communicates with the driver in a positive (procedurally just), negative (procedurally unjust), or neutral manner. After viewing the video, participants completed a survey about their perceptions of police, including their level of trust in police, obligation to obey police orders, and willingness to cooperate with police. ResultsObserving positive interactions with police enhanced people’s self-reported willingness to cooperate with police, obligation to obey police and the law, and trust and confidence in police, whereas observing negative interactions undermined these outcomes. The effects of these interactions were much stronger for encounter-specific outcomes than for more general outcomes. Conclusions
The results from this randomized experiment confirm that procedural justice can enhance people’s prosocial attitudes toward police, whereas procedural injustice can undermine these attitudes. While positive (procedurally just) interactions tend to have weaker effects than negative (procedurally unjust) interactions, this study finds little support for the notion that only negative experiences shape people’s views about the police.
Scholars have long theorized that constraining police officer discretion via organizational policy improves decision-making. Empirically, prior research shows that more restrictive lethal force policies result in a reduction in the number of police shootings and in racial disparity. Yet, researchers have never examined the impact of less lethal force policies in relation to the full spectrum of less lethal force tactics. In addressing this research void, we examine 3,340 use of force incidents from three US agencies, each varying in terms of policy direction and restrictiveness. The results consistently show that officers working within the most restrictive policy framework used force less readily than officers who operated within more permissive policy environments. Hence, police administrators wishing to reduce coercion should consider the potential effect that a more restrictive policy may have on such behavior.
The question of legitimacy has become an increasingly important topic in criminological analysis in recent years, especially in relation to policing and to prisons. There is substantial empirical evidence to show the importance of legitimacy in achieving law-abiding behavior and cooperation from citizens and prisoners, especially through what has been described as procedural justice (that is, quality of decisionmaking procedures and fairness in the way citizens are personally treated by law enforcement officials). Yet the dual and interactive character of legitimacy, which necessarily involves both power-holders and audiences, has been largely neglected. This situation has arisen because criminologists have not fully explored the political science literature on legitimacy; hence adequate theorization has lagged behind empirical evidence. The principal aim of this Article is therefore theoretical: we aim to advance the conceptual understanding of legitimacy in the contexts of policing and prisons, drawing on insights from wider social science literatures, but applying them to criminal justice contexts. A central contention is that legitimacy is dialogic, involving claims to legitimacy by power-holders and responses by audiences. We conclude by exploring some broad implications of our analysis for future empirical studies of legitimacy in criminal justice contexts.
The police murder of George Floyd sparked nationwide protests in the summer of 2020 and revived claims that public outcry over such high‐profile police killings perpetuated a violent “war on cops.” Using data collected by the Gun Violence Archive (GVA) on firearm assaults of U.S. police officers, we use Bayesian structural time series (BSTS) modeling to empirically assess if and how patterns of firearm assault on police officers in the United States were influenced by the police murder of George Floyd. Our analysis finds that the murder of George Floyd was associated with a 3‐week spike in firearm assaults on police, after which the trend in firearms assaults dropped to levels only slightly above that which were predicted by pre‐Floyd data. We discuss potential explanations for these findings and consider their relevance to the contemporary discussion of a “war on cops,” violence, and officer safety.
The current study provides findings from a systematic review of the police use of deadly force literature over the most recently completed decade (2011–2020). After an exhaustive search of four scientific databases, 1,190 peer-reviewed articles related to the use of force were identified. Of these, 181 articles specifically examined deadly force, with 86 of them drawing on such force as the dependent variable. We found that the number of articles examining police use of deadly force increased dramatically over the course of the study period and encompassed a wide range of determinants of behavior. Citizen possession of a weapon continues to be the most consistent risk factor of police use of deadly force across decades of policing literature. Additionally, while many studies have attempted to examine the link between race and lethal force, a determination of such a relationship is difficult given both mixed findings and a lack of available national data.
Purpose
The current study examines the media's depiction of demands to defund the police. Although this call to action has been a part of the public discourse for decades, the call has reached mainstream attention following the police-involved death of George Floyd in May 2020. Black Lives Matter, the American Civil Liberties Union, Color of Change, and other prominent organizations have endorsed this call. However, there is a lack of agreement on the “correct” meaning of this socio-political movement.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors performed an inductive content analysis of the news articles using MaxQDA, a qualitative data analysis program. The authors focus on the text and its themes and patterns in the descriptions of #DefundThePolice, both implicit (e.g. tone) and explicit (e.g. defining the movement as problematic). The codes were further refined following open coding to fully develop the existing patterns. The results are organized by the themes within the articles. The findings also include direct quotes to reinforce the themes.
Findings
In the authors' content analysis of news reports, the authors find that the US and UK news outlets report definitions that parallel the M4BL's description of the movement. In this respect, media coverage reflected the basic tenets of the movement accurately as opposed to using definitions that misrepresent the group's primary objective. Although these sampled news articles generally adhered to the basic description of the defund movement, the authors found that the overall substance and tone of coverage varied across outlets. This divergence yielded five overarching themes that included: the involvement of corporate America in the defunding debate, the frequent use of opinion pieces, mentions of history for informing the debate, the inclusion of the police perspective, and reporting that seemed to tie the defund movement to increases in violent crime.
Originality/value
This article explores how the mass media reports and defines the #DefundThePolice movement. Although much debate surrounds this issue, there is limited understanding of the mainstream news media's depiction of the movement. The current study addresses this research gap and informs the defunding debate by examining whether media descriptions of the movement coincide with the Movement for Black Lives benchmark delineation.
About 1,000 civilians are killed every year by a law enforcement officer in the USA, more than 90% by firearms. Most civilians who are shot are armed with a firearms. Higher rates of officer-involved shootings (OIS) are positively associated with state-level firearm ownership. Laws relaxing restrictions on civilians carrying concealed firearms (CCW) have been associated with increased violent crime. This study examines associations between CCW laws and OIS. We accessed counts of fatal and nonfatal OIS from the Gun Violence Archive (GVA) from 2014–2020 and calculated rates using population estimates. We conducted legal research to identify passage years of CCW laws. We used an augmented synthetic control models with fixed effects to estimate the effect of Permitless CCW law adoption on OIS over fourteen biannual semesters. We calculated an inverse variance weighted average of the overall effect. On average, Permitless CCW adopting states saw a 12.9% increase in the OIS victimization rate or an additional 4 OIS victimizations per year, compared to what would have happened had law adoption not occurred. Lax laws regulating civilian carrying of concealed firearms were associated with higher incidence of OIS. The increase in concealed gun carrying frequency associated with these laws may influence the perceived threat of danger faced by law enforcement. This could contribute to higher rates of OIS.
Research summary
Changing police use of force policies and training to incorporate de‐escalation tactics is one of the most routinely recommended police reform measures. Despite widespread promotion and proliferation of de‐escalation trainings, to date, no research has empirically demonstrated that these trainings reduce use of force in the field (Engel, R. S., McManus, H. D., & Herold, T. D., 2020). Therefore, it is unknown if de‐escalation trainings actually reduce force, have no impact, or have unintended consequences that possibly increase injuries to officers or citizens. We collaborated with the Louisville Metro Police Department (LMPD) in 2019 to evaluate the impact of the Integrating Communications, Assessment, and Tactics (ICAT) de‐escalation training developed by the Police Executive Research Forum. Using a stepped‐wedge randomized controlled trial research design, the panel regression results demonstrated statistically significant reductions in use of force incidents (−28.1%), citizen injuries (−26.3%), and officer injuries (−36.0%) in the post‐training period. These significant reductions were larger than any changes in LMPD arrest patterns during the same period. Other possible time‐based confounders were also considered; the combined analyses show robust, consistent, and immediate impacts on use of force counts after training.
Policy implications
Our findings suggest that agencies should continue to implement and evaluate de‐escalation trainings and adopt other resiliency‐based approaches to police training. To facilitate long‐term changes in police behavior, a holistic approach is recommended that supports training tenets with complementary policies, supervisory oversight, managerial support, and community involvement in reform efforts. Finally, researchers must continue to support police executives willing to open their agencies for evaluation and oversight. Due to the LMPD's partnership with researchers, evidence now exists that de‐escalation training can make police encounters with the public safer for all. Continuing to implement and evaluate innovative police trainings is our best opportunity for meaningful changes in policing.
This research note empirically assessed similarities and differences among three open-source data sets from 2015-2019. Fatal police shooting incidents were compared across Washington Post, Mapping Police Violence, and Fatal Encounters data over a five-year period. One-way ANOVAs, bivariate correlations, and proportional percentage differences were used to examine mean differences, correlational strength, and yearly percentage difference trends. No significant mean differences were observed between Fatal Encounters, Mapping Police Violence, and Washington Post. With one exception, bivariate correlations between all three data source dyads were consistently strong. Percentage difference comparisons among data source dyads, however, revealed that the sources are becoming more dissimilar in their reporting of fatal shootings over time. Our results complement existing literature that has compared open-source police shooting data to government sources and suggest that the three data sources were strongly associated with one another from 2015-2019. Increasing differences between sources, however, necessitate continued inspection of the data across the various open-source platforms over time.
Among industrialized countries, the U.S. holds two somewhat inglorious records: the highest rate of fatal police shootings and the highest rate of deaths related to firearms. The latter has been associated with firearms prevalence mostly due to permissive legislation in several member states. The present paper investigates the relation between firearms legislation and the number of fatal police shooting episodes using a seven–year U.S state–level panel dataset. Our results confirm the negative impact of stricter firearms regulations on deadly use of force by police officers found in previous cross–sectional studies. However, in contrast with previous findings, we show that such impact is not mediated by gun availability. We also show that regulations pertaining to gun owner accountability are most effective in reducing fatal police shooting incidence. These results suggest that, from a public health perspective, what matters most is who owns guns rather than how many guns are owned.
Police accountability has long been a topic of discussion and debate among police practitioners, politicians, and scholars. This topic re-emerges every time there is highly publicized police shooting or incident of police misconduct. This article provides an overview of the current state of police accountability in the USA. This overview includes several examples of the ways in which police accountability has been enhanced in recent years at the local, state, and federal levels. Next, several obstacles to the progression of police accountability in the USA are discussed including a lack of ‘buy-in’ by some police personnel; limited research on the efficacy of common police accountability tools; lack of financial resources; lack of support and guidance by the federal government in recent years; and police unions. Finally, the article concludes with suggestions for overcoming some of the impediments associated with police accountability in the USA.
The use of force by police has proven to be a challenging and divisive issue in the United States, and for good reason. Philosophically, the government’s use of violence against community members is in tension with basic democratic norms of individual liberty, personal security, and bodily autonomy. In practice, officers use force on hundreds of thousands of individuals every year. Police violence plays an important role in shaping public attitudes toward government generally and toward policing specifically. Community trust and confidence in policing has been undermined by the perception that officers are using force, including deadly force, unnecessarily, too frequently, or in problematically disparate ways. The use of force can also serve as a flashpoint, a spark that ignites long-simmering community hostility. There are, in short, compelling reasons to think critically about police uses of force. This book explores an essential, but largely overlooked, facet of the difficult and controversial issues of police violence and accountability: the question of how society evaluates police uses of force. The authors—a prominent legal scholar and former officer, a long-time police commander, and a distinguished criminologist—draw on their experience and decades of research to offer five different answers to that question, discussing in depth the rules established by constitutional law, state laws, agency policies, international law, and community expectations, and providing critical information about police tactics and force options to allow for the accurate application of those analytical frameworks.
This paper draws on 79 in-depth interviews with police chiefs in Arizona, California, and Michigan to advance sociological understandings of race, masculinity, and policing. While the bulk of scholarship on public law enforcement focuses on urban settings, this paper juxtaposes police’s perceptions of urban, suburban, and rural gun violence. It details how police chiefs construct criminal gun violence according to two overarching tropes: (1) gang- and drug-related gun violence involving black and brown perpetrators and victims in urban spaces and (2) active shooting-related gun violence involving white perpetrators and victims in suburban and rural spaces. The analysis shows that police understand their own guns in part through reference to these tropes, embracing two racially distinct styles of police masculinity: the “warrior” and the “guardian.” Whereas the “warrior” brand of police masculinity emphasizes aggressive enforcement against (black and brown) perpetrators, the “guardian” brand of police masculinity emphasizes assertive protection on behalf of (white) victims. Detailing masculinity as a bifurcated axis along which racialized policing is enacted and amplified, this study broadens scholarly understandings of public law enforcement as a race-making institution and suggests the limitations of police reforms that fail to address whiteness as shaping public law enforcement.
The aim of this study was to assess the association between state firearm legislation and law enforcement-related deaths (LEDs) and its modification by race. We used secondary data from an ecological cohort of 16 states (2010 to 2016), using the National Violent Death Reporting System (NVDRS), the State Firearm Law Database and additional public sources. Poisson regression with generalised estimating equations and inverse probability of exposure weights to account for time-varying confounding were used to quantify the association. LEDs were also disaggregated by race (Black vs non-Black). A total of 1593 LEDs took place during the 6-year study period. After adjusting for confounders, the IRR among non-Blacks was 0.48 (95% CI 0.26 to 0.89) and 1.53 (95% CI 0.93 to 2.54) among Blacks. Our findings highlight the fact that increased firearm provisions may decrease rates of LED among non-Black American individuals-an association not observed among Black Americans.
“Wandering officers” are law-enforcement officers fired by one department, sometimes for serious misconduct, who then find work at another agency. Policing experts hold disparate views about the extent and character of the wandering-officer phenomenon. Some insist that wandering officers are everywhere—possibly increasingly so—and that they’re dangerous. Others, however, maintain that critics cherry-pick rare and egregious anecdotes that distort broader realities. In the absence of systematic data, we simply do not know how common wandering officers are or how much of a threat they pose, nor can we know whether and how to address the issue through policy reform. In this Article, we conduct the first systematic investigation of wandering officers and possibly the largest quantitative study of police misconduct of any kind. We introduce a novel data set of all 98,000 full-time law-enforcement officers employed by almost 500 different agencies in the State of Florida over a thirty-year period. We report three principal findings. First, in any given year during our study, an average of just under 1,100 officers who were previously fired—three percent of all officers in the State—worked for Florida agencies. Second, officers who were fired from their last job seem to face difficulty finding work. When they do, it takes them a long time, and they tend to move to smaller agencies with fewer resources in areas with slightly larger communities of color. Interestingly, though, this pattern does not hold for officers who were fired earlier in their careers. Third, wandering officers are more likely than both officers hired as rookies and those hired as veterans who have never been fired to be fired from their next job or to receive a complaint for a “moral character violation.” Although we cannot determine the precise reasons for the firings, these results suggest that wandering officers may pose serious risks, particularly given how difficult it is to fire a police officer. We consider several plausible explanations for why departments nonetheless hire wandering officers and suggest potential policy responses to each.
Exploratory factor analysis (EFA) is widely used by researchers in the social sciences to characterize the latent structure underlying a set of observed indicator variables. One of the primary issues that must be resolved when conducting an EFA is determination of the number of factors to retain. There exist a large number of statistical tools designed to address this question, with none being universally optimal across applications. Recently, researchers have investigated the use of model fit indices that are commonly used in the conduct of confirmatory factor analysis to determine the number of factors to retain in EFA. These results have yielded mixed results, appearing to be effective when used in conjunction with normally distributed indicators, but not being as effective for categorical indicators. The purpose of this simulation study was to compare the performance of difference values for several fit indices as a method for identifying the optimal number of factors to retain in an EFA, with parallel analysis, which is one of the most reliable such extant methods. Results of the simulation demonstrated that the use of fit index difference values outperformed parallel analysis for categorical indicators, and for normally distributed indicators when factor loadings were small. Implications of these findings are discussed.
Objectives:
To evaluate the National Violent Death Reporting System (NVDRS) as a surveillance system for fatal shootings of civilians by law enforcement in the United States.
Methods:
We cross-linked individual-level mortality data from the 2015 NVDRS and 5 open-source data sets ( FatalEncounters.org , Mapping Police Violence, the Guardian's "The Counted," Gun Violence Archive, and The Washington Post's "Fatal Force Database"). Using the comprehensive cross-linked data set, we assessed the proportion of study-identified fatal police shootings that were captured by NVDRS, overall and by state, and by each open-source data set.
Results:
There were 404 unique study-identified fatal shootings by law enforcement in the 27 states for which data were available from NVDRS, 393 (97%) of which were captured in NVDRS. The proportion of shootings captured by NVDRS varied only slightly by state.
Conclusions:
The NVDRS provides a comprehensive count of fatal police shootings. Public Health Implications. Expanding NVDRS to all 50 states would provide comprehensive counts of fatal police shootings and detailed circumstantial information about these deaths at the national level. Open-source data can continue to provide real-time data collection as well as more complete information about nonfirearm officer-involved deaths. (Am J Public Health. Published online ahead of print February 21, 2019: e1-e7. doi:10.2105/AJPH.2018.304904).
Rape victims can benefit from trauma-informed approaches when reporting rape to police. Police interviewing skill can prevent survivor re-victimization while eliciting useful crime statements. However, rape myth acceptance and police culture may pose obstacles to a trauma-informed approach. Client empowerment, demystification, trigger reduction, and expressed concern for victim safety can be implemented by police agencies. Interdisciplinary collaboration, combating sexual harassment, gender balancing, emotional debriefing of officers, accountability to victims, new reporting methods, and advanced training protocols are elements of a trauma-informed approach.
This Article seeks to contribute to the national conversation on reforming police practices by evaluating the current law on police use of deadly force, identifying problems with that law, and suggesting a modest change to that law in the form of model legislation governing police use of deadly force. Existing statutes on police use of deadly force tend to focus on the reasonableness of the officer's belief in the need to use force. This Article suggests that the law should be reformed to explicitly include a focus on the reasonableness of the officer's actions. Under the proposed model statute, to be considered a justifiable shooting, the jury must find that both the officer's beliefs and actions were reasonable. To provide better guidance to juries than that provided by current use-of-force statutes, the model statute specifies three factors that the fact finder must consider when deciding whether the officer's actions were reasonable: (1) whether the victim/suspect had or appeared to have a weapon (and whether he or she refused orders to drop it), (2) whether the officer engaged in de-escalation measures prior to using deadly force, and (3) whether the officer engaged in any preseizure conduct that increased the risk of a deadly confrontation. It also borrows from imperfect self-defense law in civilian homicide cases, permitting the jury to find an officer charged with murder not guilty of murder, but guilty of voluntary manslaughter, if the officer's belief in the need to use deadly force was honest but unreasonable or if the officer's belief was reasonable, but his actions were unreasonable. © 2018 University of Illinois College of Law. All rights reserved.
This Article reports the findings of the largest and most comprehensive study to date of the role qualified immunity plays in constitutional litigation. Qualified immunity shields government officials from constitutional claims for money damages so long as the officials did not violate clearly established law. The Supreme Court has described the doctrine as incredibly strong—protecting “all but the plainly incompetent or those who knowingly violate the law.” Legal scholars and commentators describe qualified immunity in equally stark terms, often criticizing the doctrine for closing the courthouse doors to plaintiffs whose rights have been violated. The Court has repeatedly explained that qualified immunity must be as powerful as it is to protect government officials from burdens associated with participating in discovery and trial. Yet the Supreme Court has relied on no empirical evidence to support its assertion that qualified immunity doctrine shields government officials from these assumed burdens. This Article is the first to test this foundational assumption underlying the Supreme Court’s qualified immunity decisions. I reviewed the dockets of 1,183 Section 1983 cases filed against state and local law enforcement defendants in five federal court districts over a two-year period and measured the frequency with which qualified immunity motions were brought by defendants, granted by courts, and dispositive before discovery and trial. I found that qualified immunity rarely served its intended role as a shield from discovery and trial in these cases. Across the five districts in my study, just thirty-eight (3.9%) of the 979 cases in which qualified immunity could be raised were dismissed on qualified immunity grounds. And when one considers all the Section 1983 cases brought against law enforcement defendants—each of which could expose law enforcement officials to burdens associated with discovery and trial—just seven (0.6%) were dismissed at the motion to dismiss stage and thirty-one (2.6%) were dismissed at summary judgment on qualified immunity grounds. My findings enrich our understanding of qualified immunity’s role in constitutional litigation, belie expectations about the policy interests served by qualified immunity, and show that qualified immunity doctrine should be modified to reflect its actual role in constitutional litigation.
Research on police officers has found that they tend to associate African Americans
with threat. Little is known however about the stability of implicit racial bias in police
officers, whose attitudes could be expected to fluctuate based on their day-to-day
encounters or from internal stressors such as fatigue. To investigate, this study tested
80 police officers using the Weapons Implicit Association Test (IAT) on four separate
occasions. Officers’ sleep was also monitored using wrist actigraphy. Officers’ IAT
scores varied significantly across the testing days (f¼2.36; df¼1.468; p<.05), and
differences in IAT scores were associated with officers’ sleep (f¼6.49; df¼1.468;
p<.05). These findings indicate that implicit racial bias was not stable among officers,
and that when officers slept less prior to testing they demonstrated stronger association
between Black Americans and weapons. The implications of these findings
within the current climate of police–citizen unrest are discussed.
Responding to the problems of mass incarceration, racial disparities in justice, and wrongful convictions, scholars have focused on prosecutorial overcharging. They have, however, neglected to address undercharging-the failure to charge in entire classes of cases. Undercharging can similarly undermine the efficacy and legitimacy of the criminal justice system. While few have focused on this question in the domestic criminal law context, international law scholars have long recognized the social and structural cost for nascent democratic states when they fail to charge those responsible for the prior regime's human rights abuses. This sort of impunity threatens the rule of law and misses the opportunity to reinforce important democratic values. This Article draws on international law scholarship to argue that there is a duty to investigate and a limited duty to charge crimes that implicate core democratic principles of equality and fairness. Police use of excessive force against unarmed African-American suspects is just this sort of crime.
We investigated links between police brutality and poor health outcomes among Blacks and identified five intersecting pathways: (1) fatal injuries that increase population-specific mortality rates; (2) adverse physiological responses that increase morbidity; (3) racist public reactions that cause stress; (4) arrests, incarcerations, and legal, medical, and funeral bills that cause financial strain; and (5) integrated oppressive structures that cause systematic disempowerment.
Public health scholars should champion efforts to implement surveillance of police brutality and press funders to support research to understand the experiences of people faced with police brutality. We must ask whether our own research, teaching, and service are intentionally antiracist and challenge the institutions we work in to ask the same.
To reduce racial health inequities, public health scholars must rigorously explore the relationship between police brutality and health, and advocate policies that address racist oppression.
Killings of civilians by police officers have become a matter of intense public concern in the United States. High-profile deaths, especially those of black citizens, have caused outrage and sparked the Black Lives Matter movement with calls for dramatic changes in how police agencies operate. However, little systematic research exists to answer questions about which policies should be ended or put in place to reduce these deaths. The authors leverage a large data set of gun deaths by police officers in the United States, combined with agency-level policy data and community demographic data, to examine whether certain policies are associated with lower or higher rates of officer-involved gun deaths. Findings show that one policy—the requirement that officers file a report when they point their guns at people but do not fire—is associated with significantly lower rates of gun deaths.
We analyzed 990 police fatal shootings using data compiled by TheWashington Post
in 2015. After first providing a basic descriptive analysis of these shootings, we then
examined the data for evidence of implicit bias by using multivariate regression models
that predict two indicators of threat perception failure: (1) whether the civilian was not
attacking the officer(s) or other civilians just before being fatally shot and (2) whether
the civilian was unarmed when fatally shot. The results indicated civilians from “other”
minority groups were significantly more likely than Whites to have not been attacking
the officer(s) or other civilians and that Black civilians were more than twice as likely
as White civilians to have been unarmed.
Reports often claim a widespread use of excessive force on the part of American law enforcement officers. Although documented cases of excessive force do occur, this presumption of widespread force may be overstated. This paper reports the findings of a survey questionnaire administered by the authors to 295 sworn, active police officers across the USA regarding their experiences related to the use of force. The results of the study indicate that approximately 70 per cent of the police officers sampled had been in a situation where they could have legally used their firearm but chose not to. Furthermore, police officers exercised restraint in deadly force in 93 per cent of the situations in which they could have legally fired their weapon. Rather than an excessive use of force on the part of these officers, great restraint on their part was displayed. The interchange between the law enforcement officer and the offender in high-risk situations in which deadly force can be used legally and ethically is complex, dynamic and rapidly changing. To understand why officers in these situations very frequently choose not to use deadly force is examined within the context of ‘the deadly mix’.
Objectives This study examines UCR and NCVS serious violence crime trends in urban, suburban, and rural areas, and assesses the extent to which discrepancies in the two data series are due to victim reporting or police crime-recording practices. Particular attention is paid to the dynamics of the rural data series. Methods NCVS data for 1973-2010 are used to estimate subnational rates of serious violence and comparable rates for crimes that victims said were reported to police, and these estimates are compared to subnational UCR data. Time-series cointegration analysis is used to assess convergence in the NCVS and UCR series along with descriptive comparative analyses. Results The degree of convergence in UCR and NCVS trends was found to vary across areas; however this was not due to differences in rates of reporting to police. Suburban and urban UCR and NCVS trends converged with and without adjustment for police reporting. Little evidence of NCVS/UCR series convergence was found in rural areas even after victim reporting was taken into account. Conclusion The recording and production of crime data by the police appears to contribute to subnational differences in the convergence between the UCR and NCVS series. The findings suggest rural crime trend analysis should not be based solely on UCR data. To illustrate the difference between conclusions based on UCR and NCVS rural violence trends, we find that poverty rates have a large, significant association with rural violence as measured in the NCVS, but are unrelated to UCR rates.