On Racial Disparities in Recent Fatal Police Shootings

TL;DR

This study investigates racial disparities in fatal police shootings in the US by analyzing local demographic and arrest data, revealing significant disparities that are reduced when accounting for local arrest demographics, with no impact from body camera presence.

Contribution

The paper introduces resampling methods to assess racial disparities in police shootings considering local demographics and arrest data, providing a nuanced understanding of bias.

Findings

Significant racial disparities in shooting victims relative to local population demographics.

Disparities decrease when local arrest demographics are considered.

No evidence that police body cameras affect victim racial distribution.

Abstract

Fatal police shootings in the United States continue to be a polarizing social and political issue. Clear disagreement between racial proportions of victims and nationwide racial demographics together with graphic video footage has created fertile ground for controversy. However, simple population level summary statistics fail to take into account fundamental local characteristics such as county-level racial demography, local arrest demography, and law enforcement density. Utilizing data on fatal police shootings between January 2015 and July 2016, we implement a number of straightforward resampling procedures designed to carefully examine how unlikely the victim totals from each race are with respect to these local population characteristics if no racial bias were present in the decision to shoot by police. We present several approaches considering the shooting locations both as fixed and also as a random sample. In both cases, we find overwhelming evidence of a racial disparity in shooting victims with respect to local population demographics but substantially less disparity after accounting for local arrest demographics. We conclude our analyses by examining the effect of police-worn body cameras and find no evidence that the presence of such cameras impacts the racial distribution of victims.