Roughly 2 years ago I started building a database of fatal officer-involved shootings (OIS) at the agency-year level, going back in time as far as possible. If you’re not familiar with the OIS data landscape, here’s the gist:
Official data compiled by the FBI and NVSS have long been recognized as woefully incomplete and thus inadequate.
Unofficial data compiled by current/former journalists, activists, and researchers have become available over the last decade or so.
Abstract In Nebraska, concerns about racial disparities in traffic enforcement demand serious attention from police executives. Fortunately, other states like Connecticut have developed model practices that have been successfully adopted elsewhere, including Rhode Island, Oregon, and California. We propose to implement the Connecticut Model in Nebraska by creating an Advisory Board, securing and analyzing data compiled by the Nebraska Commission on Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice (NCC) with multiple “benchmark tests,” and developing and rolling out strategies to mitigate uncovered disparities (e.
BOTTOM LINE: Yes, there was a merge error in our research note, “When Police Pull Back”. However, correcting it did not render all our key findings nonsignificant as Jacob Kang-Brown claimed. In his replication, Jacob calculated our spatial lag variable differently, thereby reintroducing the endogeneity problem we designed our analysis to avoid. We are correcting, not retracting, the research note.
What happened? We made an honest mistake. We own that.
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.
Many U.S. cities witnessed both de-policing and increased crime in 2020, yet it remains unclear whether the former contributed to the latter. Indeed, much of what is known about the effects of proactive policing on crime comes from studies that …
Would police racial and gender diversification reduce Black Americans' fear of the police? The theory of representative bureaucracy indicates that it might. We tested the effects of officer diversity in two experiments embedded in a national survey …
Policing scholars frequently use surveys to understand officer attitudes and behavioral intentions. Yet, it is difficult to gain access to one - let alone multiple - agencies. Thus, officer surveys often reflect views in a single department, making …
**Purpose:** Demonstrate the need for further examination of legal judgments and the exercise of discretion in policing. **Design:** A factorial vignette survey with traffic stop scenarios based on US Court of Appeals decisions was administered to …
Much is being made about an apparent increase in the use of deadly force by U.S. police officers. In January, The Guardian ran a story titled “It never stops: killings by US police reach record high in 2022”.1 And last week, The Washington Post (WAPO) ran a story titled “Fatal police shootings are still going up, and nobody knows why”. In this story, one of us (Justin) was quoted as saying “It’s hard to know if the increase is meaningful or random.
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 …
**Objectives**: Judgments about police procedural fairness consistently have a stronger influence on how the public ascribes legitimacy to the police than evaluations of police effectiveness. What remains largely underexplored, however, is the …
Abstract In reaction to high-profile incidents of excessive and deadly force, policymakers, advocates, scholars, and the general public, have all called for police departments to embrace de-escalation training as a method for improving police-citizen interactions. This practice has, in turn, spurred a small, but growing, number of evaluations of police de-escalation training programs. The findings of these studies have been mixed, but incomplete. In particular, we argue that prior studies of de-escalation have been hindered by (1) a lack of consideration of changes in officer behavior in incidents not involving force, (2) a singular focus on whether or not force was used rather than alterations to the “trajectory” of use-of-force encounters, and (3) a failure to measure the intervening mechanisms between de-escalation training and officer behaviors (i.
Abstract For decades, extremist groups in the U.S—particularly on the far-right—have encouraged their members to infiltrate law enforcement agencies and the military. While there are anecdotal examples of insider threats in law enforcement, we do not have a systematic understanding of whether these are isolated incidents or indicative of a more pervasive issue. It is not feasible to examine officer-level risk of engagement as an insider threat at this time.
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 …
At the 2022 ACJS Conference, my colleagues and I present an ongoing project on the relationship between police discretionary behaviors and crime in Denver.
I’ve been screaming this into the void on Twitter lately so I figured I’d pull all my thoughts together in a blog post.
On January 12th, ABC News published a story claiming that fatal police shootings had declined 13% in 2021 “amid calls for reform on use of force.” The story also claimed that Florida saw the biggest decrease in shootings (from 93 to 44).1
At that time, The Washington Post’s (WAPO) database was showing 888 fatal police shootings.
We discuss how I got into academia, as well as my research on police legitimacy, organizational justice, the Ferguson Effect, and officer decision-making.
We look at 7 years of firearm assaults on US police officers and find that proximity to trauma care is not significantly associated with odds of survival.