Where and When Police Use Deadly Force: a County-Level Longitudinal Analysis of Fatalities Involving Interaction with Law Enforcement

Nolan Kopkin ()
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Nolan Kopkin: University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

Journal of Economics, Race, and Policy, 2019, vol. 2, issue 3, No 2, 150-162

Abstract: Abstract In the past few years, there have been numerous high-profile shootings by police, with wide-spread speculation many may have been either racially motivated or the result of an abuse of power by police. While past researchers have used community-level data to test theories of “racial or economic threat”—that police target violence at minorities or the poor to prevent redistributive criminal activity and maintain the existing order—or “reactive hypotheses” of policing focused on the use of force to prevent violence against officers and other citizens, the majority of these studies are dated, rely on incomplete government data on justifiable police killings, and fail to consider predictors of police killings such as non-murder violent offense rates, property crime rates, or violence against police. However, recently, many internet archives have collected more complete data on police killings, and this study utilizes one such source to create a county-level longitudinal dataset of police-related fatalities from 2000 to 2014 to estimate the causal relationship between changes in county characteristics and police-related fatalities. In addition to finding police-related fatalities are strongly correlated with murder rates, findings show substantial evidence that police-related fatalities are also strongly correlated with rates of property crime and assaults on officers, factors not previously considered. Contrary to previous research, this study finds little to no evidence in favor of the “racial or economic threat hypotheses” when examining police-related fatalities within county over time.

Keywords: Police; Shooting; Killing; Law enforcement; Deadly force; Crime; K42; R23; J15; J10 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
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DOI: 10.1007/s41996-019-00027-z

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