Are There Racial Differences in Police Use of Deadly Force?

Is There Evidence of Racial Disparity in Police Use of Deadly Force? Is there evidence of a Black - White disparity in death by police gunfire in the United States? This is commonly answered by comparing the odds of being fatally shot for Blacks and Whites, with odds benchmarked against each group’s population proportion. However, adjusting for population values has questionable assumptions given the context of deadly force decisions.

A report, by psychologists Joseph Cesario and David Johnson and criminologist William Terrill, analyzes trends in fatal shootings by police in 2015 and 2016 using a variety of data sources.

The study concluded: "When adjusting for crime, we find no systematic evidence of anti-Black disparities in fatal shootings, fatal shootings of unarmed citizens, or fatal shootings involving misidentification of harmless objects."

The findings are consistent with a previous study "An Empirical Analysis of Racial Differences in Police Use of Force" led by Roland G. Fryer, Jr., a professor of economics at Harvard, examined 1,332 police shootings between 2000 and 2015 in Austin, Houston and Dallas, Texas; Los Angeles; Orlando, Jacksonville,  and four other counties in Florida. The results showed that black men and women are not more likely to be shot by police than are white men and women. A closer examination of the reports from Houston showed that in tense situations, officers were about 20 percent less likely to shoot suspects if the suspect were black.

The Fryer report concluded: "On the most extreme use of force – officer-involved shootings – we find no racial differences in either the raw data or when contextual factors are taken into account. "

The most sophisticated lab study of police shoot/don’t-shoot decisions to date, published this in Criminology and Public Policy, undercuts the  narrative about trigger-happy, racist cops. Washington State University researcher Lois James put 80 officers from the Spokane, Wash., police department in highly realistic video simulators of street scenarios. Officers were confronted with potentially armed suspects identical in all aspects, including body language and weapon, except for their race. The test subjects were not told the purpose of the research, which was conducted between August 2012 and November 2013, before the issue of race in policing reached the fever pitch of prominence that it possesses today.

The officers were three times less likely to shoot unarmed black suspects than unarmed white suspects and took significantly longer to decide to shoot armed black suspects than armed white suspects. James hypothesized that officers were second-guessing themselves when confronting black suspects, due to their awareness of the potential negative repercussions of shooting a black suspect. James’s finding that participants, in her words, “displayed significant bias favoring Black suspects” in their shooting decisions replicated the results of two previous studies she has run on shoot/don’t-shoot decisions.
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Simply put, what these, and similar, studies show is that when police use deadly force it is based on the conduct of the person involved. The race of the person committing the violent crime, and thus resulting in the use of deadly force by police, is not a factor in these life and death decisions.

This also makes sense when we consider the fact that deadly force decisions are made in fractions of a second - as can be seen in this video "How Do Police Make Shooting Decisions?".