This weekend marks 5 years since George Floyd was killed by Officer Derek Chauvin of the Minneapolis Police Department. Expect to see some news stories in the coming weeks wrestling with the question of why police killings have not become any less frequent, despite the wave of reforms that were introduced in the wake of the “Defund” movement. In fact, police killings have continued on an upward trend, with 2024 witnessing the greatest number of people killed by police since 2013, according to Mapping Police Violence.
Historically, a lack of comprehensive data on police shootings has hindered a nuanced understanding of this critical issue. However, in the past decade, the research landscape rapidly evolved with the emergence of improved data facilitated by …
The other day I got a Google Scholar alert about this new article in Injury Epidemiology. It’s a descriptive study showing that 60% of police killings involve municipal departments, 29% county departments, 8% state departments, 3% federal agencies, and <1% tribal or other departments. It looked interesting (and it was!) so I downloaded the full text, and the following passage in the methods section immediately caught my eye:
MPV defines fatal police violence as “any incident where a law enforcement officer (off-duty or on-duty) applies, on a civilian, lethal force resulting in the civilian being killed whether it is considered ‘justified’ or ‘unjustified’ by the U.
Some invited comments on an article by Julie Ward and team in AJPH
We analyzed police shootings in Canada (except Québec) between 2017 and 2019. Drawing upon media reports and information provided by police oversight agencies, we attempted to identify all incidents where on-duty police officers discharged their …
My talk provides a broad overview of the research on police use of deadly force – how often it happens, where it happens, and why it happens. I'll also point out the holes in our knowledge due to data constraints. I conclude with a discussion of …
Correcting 91 misclassified incidents renders Bor et al.’s (2018) key finding non-significant.