Shooting bias

Violent crime is committed by a very small number of individuals. These individuals tend to come from very poor disadvantaged communities. Since minorities are overrepresented in these communities, minorities are also overrepresented in violent crime. Thus, any statistical analysis of police bias must take this into account. Using population, police-citizen interactions, or total arrests as a benchmark, we observe that black citizens appear more likely than white citizens to be fatally shot by police officers. Using violent crime arrests or weapons offense arrests, we observe that black citizens appear less likely to be fatally shot by police officers.[3]

Additionally, data on the percent of individuals who resist arrest is also needed to draw conclusions about police bias. That data was available for Texas and California. Researchers were able to analyze this data to determine that there was shooting bias in California but not in Texas.[4]

Departments can voluntarily include justifiable homicides in the crime statistics of the FBI's Uniform Crime Reports, which means that a lot of departments don't provide data at all. Some cities haven't reported their data in years.[5] This means that the official data doesn't accurately reflect the number of civilians that are shot by the police.[6]

Newspapers like The Guardian and The Washington Post have started compiling databases of fatal police shootings,[7][8] revealing that in 2015 twice as many civilians had been fatally shot as the FBI's data suggested.[9] An FBI working group has started working on a proposal for making the reports more accurate, but they would still rely on voluntary data and therefore wouldn't fix the main reporting issue.[10]

The database developed by The Guardian is currently the largest database on fatal shootings available.[11] They gather data through police reports, monitoring of regional news, fact-checked witness statements and other crowdsourced police fatality databases.[12]

In 2016, The Guardian counted 1093 people[7] who were killed by the police in the United States. Out of these, 574 were white and 266 were black. 95 of the white victims were unarmed, while 42 of the black victims were unarmed.

More white than black people are shot. It is important to distinguish to differentiate between the number of deaths of an ethnic group and the likelihood of being shot by police. The likelihood of being shot as a black rather than a white person is higher, whether the victim is armed or not.[1]

A study carried out at the University of California found "evidence of a significant bias in the killing of unarmed black Americans compared to unarmed white Americans".[1] In this study, the probability of being shot by the police as a black, unarmed person versus as a white, unarmed person was 3.49 times higher. Unarmed Hispanics' likelihood to be shot was 1.67 times higher than for unarmed Whites. Black people have been 28% of those killed by police since 2013 despite being only 13% of the population.[13]

On the other hand a 2016–2018 study by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) of twenty-first century data recorded by 12 police departments across the U.S., which took into account various factors such as type of confrontation, whether the suspect was armed or not, and whether or not they drew a gun, found that while overall "blacks are 21 percent more likely than whites to be involved in an interaction with police in which at least a weapon is drawn" and that in the raw data from New York City's Stop and Frisk program "blacks and Hispanics are more than fifty percent more likely to have an interaction with police which involves any use of force" after "[p]artitioning the data in myriad ways, we find no evidence of racial discrimination in officer-involved shootings."[15] The study did find bias against blacks and Hispanics in non-lethal and less-extreme lethal violence, stating that "as the intensity of force increases (e.g. handcuffing civilians without arrest, drawing or pointing a weapon, or using pepper spray or a baton), the probability that any civilian is subjected to such treatment is small, but the racial difference remains surprisingly constant", and noted that "[u]ntil recently, data on officer-involved shootings were extremely rare and contained little information on the details surrounding an incident".[15]

After the NBER study was published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Political Economy, a comment on it by Steven Durlauf and (Nobel Prize in Economics recipient) James Heckman of the Harris School of Public Policy Studies at the University of Chicago stated, "[i]n our judgment, this paper does not establish credible evidence on the presence or absence of discrimination against African Americans in police shootings."[16] The NBER study's author, Roland G. Fryer Jr., responded by saying Durlauf and Heckman erroneously claim that his sample is "based on stops". Further, he states that the "vast majority of the data...is gleaned from 911 calls for service in which a civilian requests police presence."[17]

A 2018 study in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science sought to "argue for more reasonable benchmarks to compare fatal shooting rates across racial groups" than "comparing the group's raw shooting numbers against each group's overall representation in the population". On the premise that "the more [racial] group members are involved in criminal activity, the more exposure they have to situations in which police shootings would be likely to occur" the authors analyzed The Guardian's database through their own measurements of each race's involvement in criminal activity, calculated from the Federal Bureau of Investigation's Summary Reporting System (SRS) and National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS), the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's WONDER database. Once the data were weighted by these measurements, the authors were able to conclude that, for example, although "[o]dds were 3.7 times higher for Blacks relative to Whites to be fatally shot given population proportions" while holding or reaching for a harmless object, this was appropriate given higher rates of average criminal involvement among blacks. They propose, "[i]f officers are more likely to misidentify a harmless object in the hands of a Black citizen due to stereotypes, the cause of officers holding those stereotypes may rest with (the very small percentage of) those who are more likely to engage in criminal activity."[18]

A more recent study was conducted by Michigan State University and the University of Maryland, compiling a list of more than 900 fatal U.S. police shootings in 2015 using crowdsourced databases from The Washington Post and The Guardian. Then, they asked police departments for information about the race of the officers responsible for the shootings. They found black police were more likely to kill black civilians than white civilians. However, the same held true for white and Hispanic officers: Each group of police was more likely to shoot civilians of their own race. Researchers claimed this is true because police tend to be drawn from the communities they work in and are thus more likely to have deadly encounters with civilians of the same race. They conclude that "increasing diversity among officers by itself is unlikely to reduce racial disparity in police shootings".

Several experimental studies by social psychologists, in which college students are tested playing computer game simulations, have uncovered racial bias in their decisions to shoot.[19][20][21][22] A computer game simulation experiment in 2010 that tested college students, community members, and police officers found that racial bias was moderated by "prototypicality", i.e. they were more likely to shoot if a person had stronger features generally associated with black people (broader nose, large lips, etc.) regardless of the suspects actual racial category/skin colour, to the extent that white suspects with strong "black features" suffered more negative bias than black suspects with strong "white features". Furthermore they found greater racial bias among college students and community members than police officers (who are trained to overcome racial bias), and on average could not find racial bias among the police officers tested (although there was prototypicality bias).[23]

Empirical research suggests the following factors to influence the decision to shoot:

• Implicit racial bias, prejudice, and stereotypes[24]
• Status armed/unarmed[1]
• Whether or not the police officer was threatened or attacked[15]
• Gender (men are more likely to be shot)[25]
• County[1]
• Income and status of the neighbourhood[26][27]
• Previous experiences of the police officers with the ethnic group[28]
• Previous experiences of the victim with the police[28]
• Emotional facial expression of the civilian[2]
• Fatigue of the police officer[29]

An implicit racial bias refers to unintentional judgments a person makes of a group (e.g. good/bad) of a certain ethnicity. So a person who shows implicit racial bias might not be aware of it. Police officers have been found to show a racial bias against black people in the decision to shoot.[30]

In one of the studies, researchers investigated how stereotypes affected police officers' decisions to shoot. They used a video game and exposed their participants to pictures of either Whites or Non-Whites who were armed or unarmed. During this video game, the participants were asked to choose between "shoot" or "don't shoot" as quickly as possible. The results were that the participants shot armed black people faster than armed white people and chose "don't shoot" faster for unarmed white than unarmed black persons.

The authors explained those findings by the activation of stereotype thinking which lead white people to associate black people with danger. Because of this stereotype, the participants expected blacks to carry a gun and therefore were quicker to make the "shooting" decision.[24] Other studies have found similar results.[31][32] The time pressure to make a decision in decisions to shoot might magnify the effects of racial bias.[33] However, more recent research indicates that despite scoring moderately high on an Implicit Association Test, police officers are less likely to shoot black people in a video simulation[34]

The American police officers live and work in a society full of prejudices against minorities. In addition, police officers usually deal with high crime rates in minority neighborhoods. These experiences reinforce their existing prejudices by ignoring that most people with a non-white ethnic background don't become criminals. This leads to discrimination against minorities. Other factors that lead to discrimination by the police are institutionalized language barriers between police and some ethnic groups, experiences with disrespectful or hostile residents in certain minority neighborhoods and low punishment for police officers who misbehave towards minorities.

Those prejudices by the police are of course being noticed by the groups of minorities. So in return, the groups believe that the officers have prejudices against them. This might lead to the findings that Non-Whites are more likely to behave disrespectfully or to insult officers.

To sum up, there may exist a mutual influence between the prejudices that police officers have against minorities and the prejudices that minorities have against officers.[28]

• Disruptive actions by the police like stopping and questioning citizens on the street are more common in minority neighborhoods
• More cases of Non-Whites are being dropped than of Whites. This may be because the reasons for arresting them were too weak or unjustified in the first place.