23 ms·

Bayesian Analysis of Racial Bias in Police Shootings in the United States

256 points by hunglee2 10y ago

RodericDay 10y ago
> There is no relationship between county-level racial bias in police shootings and crime rates (even race-specific crime rates), meaning that the racial bias observed in police shootings in this data set is not explainable as a response to local-level crime rates.
- GuiA 10y ago
  Edit: misunderstood what was posted, please disregard below comment. Not removing body for reference. See mrow84's comment if like me you are still waking up. --- Downvoted you for picking one sentence in the abstract that misrepresents the whole set of conclusions when taken in isolation. HNers who are going to the comments first, please read at least the abstract to get a sense for the nuanced results. Example: The results provide evidence of a significant bias in the killing of unarmed black Americans relative to unarmed white Americans, in that the probability of being {black, unarmed, and shot by police} is about 3.49 times the probability of being {white, unarmed, and shot by police} on average.
  - mrow84 10y ago
    I understood that quote as meaning that you couldn't attempt to explain away the racial bias by saying that black people lived in higher-crime areas, and thus were more likely to be shot as a consequence of more intense policing. Perhaps I misunderstood?
  - weberc2 10y ago
    How does that misrepresent the whole set of conclusions? It seems to simply explain that the 3.49X probability isn't explainable by localized crime rates...
  - _benedict 10y ago
    The sentence quoted by OP misrepresents nothing; it supports the idea that this discrepancy is caused by racism.
  - williadc 10y ago
    It is not clear to me how the parent comment is misrepresenting the conclusions of the article. I interpret that sentence to say "The difference between the shooting of unarmed blacks and whites cannot be explained by differences in crime rates," which makes racism a more likely culprit.
  - paviva 10y ago
    OP's quote : > the racial bias observed in police shootings in this data set is not explainable as a response to local-level crime rates actually means that there is racial prejudice, and it cannot be explained away by a higher crime-rate among blacks at the local level. I would give him the benefit of doubt, and suggest he selected the quote to say just that.
    - weberc2 10y ago
      It doesn't mean that there is racial prejudice; it only means that this particular variable doesn't explain away the gap. This does survey does nothing to say how much of the gap (if any) can be attributed to racial prejudice.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - SCAQTony 10y ago
    The observed distribution was just two races. The study never included hispanics, asians, pacific islanders, etc. etc. I suspect the contrast between african descent and hispanic descent would be surprising.
    - louden 10y ago
      Hispanics were in the study (see the Research Objectives) and have similar results to blacks. They just were not called out in the abstract.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
  - spaceheeder 10y ago
    Logged in for the first time in ages to say the thing that several people have already told you more eloquently than I can -- the top-level commenter was not misrepresenting the conclusions of the paper. The meaning of the quote was not ambiguous to me; they were saying that a 3.49x multiplier to the probability of being {black, unarmed, and shot by police} is not explained away by any apparent local multiplier to the probability of {high black population, high rates of violent crime}.
jim-greer 10y ago
This analysis is based on crowd-sourced data on shootings. I'm not saying that makes it invalid, but I'd need to know more about the dataset before trusting the results. It seems hard to have it be complete. The official FBI data has the same problem. We need to require local departments to report all shootings in a standardized way. Edit: the author acknowledges the incompleteness of the data in the conclusions section. Oddly, he doesn't think that's likely to affect the mean "since the sample used herein is a large and random subset of the to-be-completed data set". That doesn't really make sense to me. How would random sampling of incomplete data improve the results? http://regressing.deadspin.com/deadspin-police-shooting-database-update-were-still-go-1627414202 http://regressing.deadspin.com/deadspin-police-shooting-data...
- twinkletwinkle 10y ago
  "How would random sampling of incomplete data improve the results?" It doesn't. The author means there is some actual population of shootings, and this dataset is a random sample of them. Since there are no systematic biases in the collection of the data, ie, it's not the case that the shooting of a black is more likely to be recorded than that of a white, the random sampling of the full set is sufficient. That's an assumption, of course, but given that assumption the rest works. It doesn't improve the results, it just doesn't harm them.
  - jim-greer 10y ago
    I'm not sure that's what he's saying: "the sample used herein is a large and random subset of the to-be-completed data set". I read that as meaning database is to-be-completed, and he's sampling from that.
  - Bartweiss 10y ago
    What seems to be missing to me is any support for the "random sampling" claim. My starting assumption is that reports on police shootings would be full of systematic biases running in all sorts of directions. Without some actual argument that this data isn't horribly biased by exactly the issues it's trying to investigate, I'm not sure what worth to give it.
lettergram 10y ago
What I think is more horrifying, is the use of deadly force in general. For example, based on a quick Google search, 41 police were killed by shooters last year, while roughly 1,000 civilians were killed. Police should not be using deadly force unless necessary, 41:1000 seems like some pretty bias reactions on the side of police. The reason different races are shot at different rates can be based on anything including racism, likely hood to commit an offense, which race is more likely to have mental disease, whether or not it's more difficult to identify facial structure. Blaming race outright is kind of silly, it's trying to simplify a multi dimensional problem that needs all of it's dimensions to reach a conclusion.
- ksdale 10y ago
  I'm not sure what the "right" number is, but you would expect that someone trained to use a weapon would "win" in the majority, if not the vast majority of cases. The ideal ratio would be zero police deaths compared to a much smaller and truly unavoidable number of civilian deaths, but even in that ideal case, the ratio would be incredibly skewed toward civilian deaths, so perhaps this number doesn't tell us much.
- andreyk 10y ago
  Yet it should be noted of the 1000 only 102 (by one count http://mappingpoliceviolence.org/unarmed/ http://mappingpoliceviolence.org/unarmed/) were unarmed, and in at least some of the cases were still acting violently (aggressively trying to reach for the cop's weapon). For instance: "Deputies say Browning, 30, fled when they were attempting to arrest him for a DUI. They claim he put deputies in a "bear hug" and reached for a firearm before being shot by deputies." Is use of deadly force not necessary here? I am not sure, depends on the actual details of the encountered. It seems use of deadly force is inevitable, so the best we can do is try to quantify how often it gets misused and try to lower that amount.
  - adamors 10y ago
    Very frequently police claim the deadly force was inevitable until a video surfaces that completely denies that. Take every police account of a shooting with a bag of salt.
rexpop 10y ago
> Higher Quality Covariate Data is Needed. > Ecological regression on county-level characteristics is plagued by difficulties theoretically [39, 51]; issues with data quality make it even harder to use county-level data. In the analysis of county-level predictors of racial bias in police shootings conducted in this paper, some of the data were low quality. Notably, the crime data may be biased by the reporting practices of the police, and Florida, Alabama, and Illinois failed to fully release data, which led to the use Bayesian imputation for counties in these states. I'd like to see BLM take this on as their a demand during their next direct action: better data for Cody Ross @ the Department of Anthropology, University of California, Davis
- mdjeu 10y ago
  Yes, better data is needed. I feel weird being a skeptic of this study, because I personally believe law enforcement in the US is out of control, but... In this area, there's so many important factors relating to the nature of the events, that "armed" versus "unarmed" and race are insufficient to get a good estimate of what's going on. If someone is unarmed but posing a threat to an officer (e.g., by reaching for their gun), and that threatening behavior varies by race, it's not bias, but racial differences in criminal behavior. To be clear, the whole law enforcement system seems abundantly racist to me in all sorts of ways, but to me studies like this only become fodder for criticism. Maybe the problem is that the data isn't detailed enough, though, and this is the best that could be done. If so, the solution is better-quality data.
- jessedhillon 10y ago
  I'm skeptical of any socio-political movement demanding more science -- not because more science isn't needed, but that I doubt the movement would avow and abide by results which are contradictory to their vision. This isn't a criticism, per se -- just recognizing that BLM and other movements are driven by experience, and one of the key claims of the victims of those experiences is that their suffering is invisible. Therefore, any study which invalidates that experience would serve as further proof of the invisibility of their suffering. Again, this isn't meant to single out or criticize BLM.
  - 10y ago
bdcravens 10y ago
I'm sure you didn't mean it as such, but this comes off with the same air as the "all lives matter" claimants.
- DiabloD3 10y ago
  I'm not sure you didn't mean it as such, but don't all lives actually matter?
  - moo 10y ago
    They don't matter equally. Should they matter equally? Yes. Saying all lives matter obfuscates that they don't matter equally.
    - CWuestefeld 10y ago
      You're assuming that they don't matter equally. That may be true, but it's dangerous to start off by simply assuming the validity of your thesis. Moreover, it assumes that the way in which they don't matter equally is based only on racial lines. I'm far from convinced that's completely true. It appears that's some of it, but the fact is that police kill lots of innocent whites, hispanics, and asians as well. That being the case, wouldn't it make more sense to look more broadly at where the disparities are, rather than simply assuming that it's all racial while refusing to entertain any other possibility?
  - jamesroseman 10y ago
    Of course all lives matter. But if racial identities were homes, there are a few on fire in the United States and it doesn't make much sense to call the fire department for every house when a few urgently need the attention more. Is that fair?
    - mhuffman 10y ago
      Black people are not actively being targeted by anyone but other black people. Is that fair?
akud 10y ago
> the probability of being {black, unarmed, and shot by police} is about 3.49 times the probability of being {white, unarmed, and shot by police} on average What they really need to do is factor in the probability of encounters with police gI've race. That is, we want to know, out of all encounters with police, are they more likely to be fatal if the victim is black? Without factoring in the rate of police encounters, the conclusion could just be indicating that black people are more likely to encounter the police, which is a problem in itself but is slightly different. That would point more to socioeconomic factors determining the rate of policing in neighborhoods, rather than police racism.
- holdenk 10y ago
  I'm not sure I agree with you - having a higher encounters rate need not be limited to simple neighborhood selection for policing (although there is likely bias there too) - rather simply choosing who to interact with may exhibit bias (e.g. is the police officer more likely to have an encounter with a black person even in a predominantly white neighborhood)?
  - CWuestefeld 10y ago
    I'd have to agree with the GP. To your point, a bias in the encounter rate (assuming it exists) is a significant problem, and one that would need to be addressed. But it's also a distinct problem, and there's no reason to believe that the violence problem and the disproportionate-encounter problem would be amenable to the same solution.
    - loco5niner 10y ago
      Just to clarify... GP = GrandParent (comment) = akud's comment ?
      - CWuestefeld 10y ago
        Yes, sorry if I was cryptic.
grb423 10y ago
I wish left, right and center could come together just this once to urge young black men to not fight with police. If you feel their authority is unjustified or they are punks then you really need to handle that politically. The police are duly authorized by the state however flawed and racist that state may be, to use deadly force. The are armed with government-issued, free firearms. Fighting with them leads to your death. If that isn't your goal, i.e., martyrdom for political gain then it's a bad idea. Lets urge the young black men to submit to lawful orders and take issue later in a court of law.
- danso 10y ago
  > Lets urge the young black men to submit to lawful orders and take issue later in a court of law. How much experience have you had with the justice system? can you describe the resources you used to handle grviences with it on a political basis?
- troncheadle 10y ago
  > I wish left, right and center could come together just this once to urge young black men to not fight with police. I don't understand why you are saying this like young black men are chomping at the bit to fight with police, or like there are people advocating that young black men pick fights with cops. What are you on about here?? > Lets urge the young black men to submit to lawful orders and take issue later in a court of law. What we saw, twice, this week, was young black men submitting to lawful orders and being killed for it. How about we urge cops to stop extrajudicial killings? How about we urge the federal government to define an escalation strategy for police that doesn't violate international law? Your insistence in making 'young black men' the problem here paints you as racist, whether or not you think you are.
  - CWuestefeld 10y ago
    > Your insistence in making 'young black men' the problem here paints you as racist, whether or not you think you are. I agree. But at the same time, doesn't the insistence to frame the problem as one of violence specifically against blacks - as opposed to one of those in power misusing force against anyone they're supposed to be "serving and protecting" - make the whole discussion racist?
snowwrestler 10y ago
Some of the comments here are pointing out the questions about data quality etc. that affect a study like this. And those are real concerns, and obviously analytical studies could only be improved if they had better data to work with. But let's not make the mistake of looking at this study only in isolation. It is a recent addition to a large collection of observations and evidence that support a theory that personal racial bias affects American policing. The evidence includes other studies, criminal investigations, criminal cases, federal investigations and reform agreements with police departments like Cleveland and Seattle, videos and photos of violent police encounters, and of course decades of stories and statements from minority communities about how the police treats them. The last one is important because it gets at trust, which is the heart of the issue. Minority communities, many of them, do not trust the police to protect them in the same way they protect whiter/richer communities, and they have stories that explain why not. If you are depending solely on data-driven studies to inform your opinion on racial bias in policing, then you're implicitly saying that you distrust or reject what minority people and communities say. Why is that? It's worth thinking about IMO. Which brings us back to the data. Why is it so lacking? You can't answer that question without coming back around to bias, because until recently, it was the police forces themselves who supplied the data, or not, or only part of the data. So discounting the bias reported in this study because of data problems is getting toward begging the question, logically speaking. The essential question, when it comes to whether you agree that racial bias affects policing, is: what level of evidence will convince you?
- specialist 10y ago
  The value of studies like this, for future, is the ability to determine if mitigation, correctional measures are working. "what level of evidence will convince you?" We need to learn to ask this more frequently, upfront. Persuasion doesn't work. Finding your tribe and organizing does.
  - millermp12 10y ago
    "Finding your tribe and organizing does" Sounds racist. Unless you're not white.
vessenes 10y ago
Analyses like these are always helpful, and often raise lots of questions, maybe even more questions than they answer. As the parent of a black child, I have a personal interest in this data -- the statistic that some counties have 20x higher risks for unarmed blacks is pretty terrible. In my mind, I tend to assume that criminals, active or former are more likely to be shot at than non-criminals, whether or not they are armed. I'd really like to see the data normalized against prior convictions or in-process-of-a-crime stats; that would help me understand: 1. Is the effect magnified or dampened by some sort of differences in black and white criminality in these areas? 2. Are these shootings happening while people mostly commission crimes, or are they, a-la Minnesota this week, something that appears to be just wholesale adrenaline-based killings by police officers?
- ams6110 10y ago
  I looked for (but did not find) the researcher's definition of "armed." E.g. is that any weapon, such as a knife, club, tire iron, etc? Or just a firearm? One thing to understand is that police are trained to take defensive action against an aggressive individual who is within a certain distance. Within that circle, an unarmed individual can reach and overpower an officer before he can draw his weapon. So even if you are unarmed, if are acting aggressively and you approach an officer you are likely to get shot or at least tased/pepper sprayed. If you ignore an order to stop where you are and put your hands up, and you continue to approach you are likely to get shot. Now, at least on the surface this does not appear to be exactly the situation in the recent Minnesota case. But we only know what's in the media, and the media likes to sensationalize and report half the story. That said, if a cop has his weapon drawn on you, do not move. Do not twitch. Keep both hands in view. Do not do anything that you are not explicitly asked to do.
  - empath75 10y ago
    This might be good advice, but it's terrible that we live in a country where this is good advice.
    - falsestprophet 10y ago
JusticeJuice 10y ago
Factors increasing police shootings - Large metropolitan counties - Low median incomes - High financial inequality - Sizeable portion of black residents. Factors which did not affect police shootings - Local level crime rates - Race specific crime rates Crazy takeaways - A black unarmed individual 3.49x more likely to be shot than a white unarmed individual on average across america. - Some counties showing 20x more likely I'm interested to see this data in relationship to gun accessibility and gun ownership stats. Would less access to firearms affect police shootings? Is there a racial connection to gun ownership and carrying? I'm not american and the idea of civilians with guns seems just so crazy to me.
- bluedino 10y ago
  Facts that you don't much analysis to see: (CDC) - From 1999-2011, 2,151 whites died as a result of being shot by police compared to just 1,130 blacks. (DOJ) In 2013 black criminals carried out 38% of murders, compared to 31.1% for whites (despite blacks being only 13% of the population and black males 18-35 being 3%)
  - kmkemp 10y ago
    "From 1999-2011, 2,151 whites died as a result of being shot by police compared to just 1,130 blacks." That is meaningless without adjusting for population sizes. "In 2013 black criminals carried out 38% of murders, compared to 31.1% for whites" I think what you mean to say is that blacks were convicted of 38% of murders compared to 31.1% for whites. I'm not saying that judicial injustice is enough to close a gap that wide, but you shouldn't present those facts without context.
    - kmkemp 10y ago
      Thanks for the downvotes with no explanation. Did you know that blacks and hispanics make up about 59% of the prison population compared to 32% for non-hispanic whites (a ratio of 1.84), but yet the Innocence Project has exonerated (as of 2010) 172 black and hispanic persons compared to 82 whites (a ratio of 2.1)? Unless my math is wrong, that is about a 14% discrepancy.
chvid 10y ago
Two concerns I don't see addressed in the study: 1. Whether suspect is unarmed is only known for certain after the incident. 2. Differences in levels of crimes by race.
- 21echoes 10y ago
  re: 2, this is covered quite clearly in the abstract: "There is no relationship between county-level racial bias in police shootings and crime rates (even race-specific crime rates), meaning that the racial bias observed in police shootings in this data set is not explainable as a response to local-level crime rates."
  - chvid 10y ago
    Why does it have to be explained at "county-level"?
    - 21echoes 10y ago
      If it's true at the county-level, it's true at the national level (which is also stated in the abstract). By specifying it's additionally true at the county level, it makes a much stronger claim -- that high racial bias does not exist only in high-crime areas, and as such, racial bias is not explainable by crime rates.
      - deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
- dragonwriter 10y ago
  > Whether suspect is unarmed is only known for certain after the incident. Not even then, really; this can be manipulated in either direction after the incident, and there are enough incidents where its become known that it has been that one should not assume that this is even certainly known after the fact in general.
enraged_camel 10y ago
Relevant part: Across almost all counties, individuals who were armed and shot by police had a much higher probability of being black or hispanic than being white. Likewise, across almost all counties, individuals who were unarmed and shot by police had a much higher probability of being black or hispanic than being white. Tragically, across a large proportion of counties, individuals who were shot by police had a higher median probability of being unarmed black individuals than being armed white individuals. While this pattern could be explained by reduced levels of crime being committed by armed white individuals, it still raises a question as to why there exists such a high rate of police shooting of unarmed black individuals.
andreyk 10y ago
Exciting to see the R files used to create this are attached and usable by anyone, so this measure can be tracked across time. As much as I can appreciate the benefit of having stories of individual cases of police misuse of deadly force for galvanizing activism and attempts at reform, I am not a big fan of emotional rhetoric as the main justification for a given policy stance. Relatively objective measures of how problematic the situation truly is seem far more practical to me, along with campaigns such as http://www.joincampaignzero.org/ http://www.joincampaignzero.org/. I am no statistics expert, so just curious, anyone here knowledgeable enough to read into the technical details and comment on how good the study quality seems to be?
- louden 10y ago
  The methodology they used seems very good and the fact that they share the code is excellent. However, in a study like this, data quality is likely going to be a problem. Collecting good data about the shootings themselves is incredibly difficult considering we have 18,000+ police jurisdictions in the United States and even mundane things like reporting can very between them. Furthermore, the chaos of the situation may make data quality suffer. Unfortunately, the best we can do is announce the limitations of the studies, as the authors did.
chris_va 10y ago
Finally, analysis of police shooting data as a function of county-level predictors suggests that racial bias in police shootings is most likely to emerge in police departments in larger metropolitan counties with low median incomes and a sizable portion of black residents, especially when there is high financial inequality in that county. There is no relationship between county-level racial bias in police shootings and crime rates (even race-specific crime rates), meaning that the racial bias observed in police shootings in this data set is not explainable as a response to local-level crime rates. With the disclaimer that the conclusion might still be correct, I think looking at the county level is completely absurd. You leave yourself open to the Simpson's Paradox at a neighborhood level. For argument's sake, let's say that the majority of police shootings happen in poor neighborhoods. Let's also assume, sadly, that the ratio of black/white people in poor neighborhoods is high. Their analysis would imply that their is a racial bias to the shooting, when in fact, the racial bias could be entirely explained by the demographics. Or it might not, but doing it at a county level completely washes out all useful signal.
- apathy 10y ago
  So add a per-county term to both fixed and random effects and see if that fits substantially better. This isn't rocket surgery. Simpson's paradox can be straightforwardly addressed if the stratifying or confounding factor can be identified, and here that is clearly the cases. It appears that the authors did in fact address this.
  - chris_va 10y ago
    If I understand what you saying (apologies if not, it has been a while since I did modelling), that would only give a better fit if the level of segregation/crime was consistent between counties and not already taken into account by their other variables (like inequality). Or the paradox segments were at a county level instead of locally. If be happier if they just got the police records for all 721 cases, and did a more local analysis. Let me know if I'm missing something (I probably am).
    - 10y ago
JoeAltmaier 10y ago
I didn't understand it all. For instance, they admit some results may be due to more interactions with one population or another. I would have assumed to be useful, we'd want it normalized by population or total interactions by group, right? Else this all becomes just a heatmap of population.
- ArkyBeagle 10y ago
  It's particularly a heatmap of ... certain demograhics as outlined in the article.
advisedwang 10y ago
They talk about comparing probability of {black, unarmed, and shot by police} vs {white, unarmed, and shot by police}. Is this not meaningless without adjusting for relative frequency of black vs white in the community? Shouldn't we be comparing P(shot by police|white & unarmed) vs P(shot by police|black & unarmed)? Am I missing something from their methodology?
- DiabloD3 10y ago
  Unarmed doesn't even really help here. Cops in certain areas have serious problems with ham sandwiching suspects.
  - iamdave 10y ago
    ham sandwiching This idiom is new to me, care to elaborate? I've definitely had my fair share of "why was I even approached in the first place" with police officers, in Austin Texas-the part of Texas everyone and their mother swears is liberal, progressive and not at all like the rest of Texas. If that's what you mean. It probably didn't help that I was walking down the street from the gas station at 1 in the morning in an area that was established as "Exclusively for white people" (http://kxan.com/2015/08/20/exclusively-for-white-people-a-history-of-segregation-in-austin-neighborhoods/ http://kxan.com/2015/08/20/exclusively-for-white-people-a-hi...) as a black man-a neighborhood that still to this day is almost entirely white....still watching a cop pass me going down the road, whip a u-turn, come back and stop me just to ask "Where are you going?" Or the time an officer stopped me on my way to a UT football game and before even asking to see my license or registration asked who I stole my Honda Civic from. Armed only with tickets and a case of beer for tailgating.
    - codemogul 10y ago
      A "ham sandwich" is evidence, often a handgun, placed at a crime scene by law enforcement. See: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/law-disorder/blog/2011/07/former-detective-describes-cover-up-ham-sandwich.html http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/law-disorder/blog/20...
nickbauman 10y ago
US 2015 Fundamentals: Number of gun deaths: ~13,000 Number of police officers killed: ~50 Number of civilians killed by police: ~1200 Number of white civilians killed: ~500 Number of black civilians killed: ~330 Percentage of blacks in the population: ~13 We have a large death-by-gun problem in the US as compared to the rest of the OECD.
- knz 10y ago
  Absolute numbers are useless. The US population is significantly larger than many OECD countries. Assuming a large number of those deaths are suicides - the suicide rate per capita should be factored in as well.
  - nickbauman 10y ago
    "Useless"? I think that's hyperbole.
    - knz 10y ago
      Per capita is a far more useful measure. I'm tired of seeing the media pushing the total number for various issues and ignoring the fact that the US has 320 million residents.
      - stvswn 10y ago
        right, and lets stop saying "gun deaths" and trick people into thinking we mean "murders." There are twice as many suicides as homicides in this country, but we're only about average in per-capita suicide compared to the world. We do have more murders than other rich countries, including more murders with guns. But we also have more per capita murders with just about any weapon, as well as more per capita violence of all kinds. We have a violence problem, sure. We kind of always have had a violence problem, we've always been a violent people. I'm not shrugging it off, it's just a fact. It's worth remembering, though, that the murder rate is at a historic low. A 40 year low.
aestetix 10y ago
A few points: 1. "In contrast to previous work that relied on the FBI’s Supplemental Homicide Reports that were constructed from self-reported cases of police-involved homicide, this data set is less likely to be biased by police reporting practices." I'm very interested to see if the full article (which is timing out so I can't check) goes into detail on what the reporting practices are, how they are biased, and how this data set solves those biases. 2. I'm curious how this data compares to the Guardian's study: http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2015/jun/01/about-the-counted http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2015/jun/0... In particular, this database shows that in 2015, while the "per million" count of blacks killed was 7.27 (and for whites was 2.93), the "in total" count was 306 for blacks and 581 for whites. The statistics in 2016 so far are not much better: 3.23/1.41 respectively per million, and 136/279 in total. Ideally this number would be 0 for all counts, but we don't live in that world. 3. This report was published at the end of 2015, and unfortunately we have seen a massive spike in killings since then. Further, their dataset (according to the title) is only from 2011 to 2014. Is anyone working on a follow-up study using more recent data?
etendue 10y ago
[deleted] This article is attracting some distasteful comments, generally seems to be headed in a bad direction, and I want no association with it.
- kmkemp 10y ago
  I took at as them normalizing for a known risk factor. In other words, if white people are armed at a higher percentage than blacks, they wouldn't want that to skew the statistics.
bmmayer1 10y ago
It seems the question we should be concerned with should not be 'is there racial bias in policing', to which the answer would surely always be 'yes' because there's one bias or another in everything human and police are human. The question we should be concerned with should be: 'How is policing/governance structured in a way that enables or encourages people to act upon their biases to detrimental results?' The distinction is important because eliminating bias/whateverism will never happen, but making it possible for the justice system to operate fairly given the biases of its constituent members should be a desired outcome.
- mindslight 10y ago
  Exactly! Furthermore, is the goal to make sure that all races will be shot equally or is it to achieve justice for all victims of overaggressive police?
- gozur88 10y ago
  >The question we should be concerned with should be: 'How is policing/governance structured in a way that enables or encourages people to act upon their biases to detrimental results?' That begs the question, though, of whether the structure is actually set up in such a way. Blacks in the US commit murder at a rate eight times that of whites. Wouldn't you expect them to be shot comparatively more often by police? I don't think it's reasonable to take a handful of incidents where police were clearly in the wrong and then try to extrapolate that based on statistics relating to incidents in which we have no reason to believe that's the case.
  - thenewwazoo 10y ago
    > There is no relationship between county-level racial bias in police shootings and crime rates (even race-specific crime rates), meaning that the racial bias observed in police shootings in this data set is not explainable as a response to local-level crime rates.
    - gozur88 10y ago
      I'm not sure that addresses the point.
siegecraft 10y ago
I feel like this problem gets framed as a racial one, which it might be, but never as a class one, which it also might be. Adding another factor to the data of "net worth" (a convenient proxy for class) could provide interesting analysis.
jxramos 10y ago
Just read this CityJournal post by Heather MacDonald this morning on the way to work. Search the article for the word "percent" and you'll hit all sorts of provocative stats not commonly heard in the media about shootings and race and police. http://www.city-journal.org/html/chicago-brink-14605.html http://www.city-journal.org/html/chicago-brink-14605.html
nomat 10y ago
Would love to see socioeconomic status included in the analysis as well.
jomamaxx 10y ago
The research is almost useless. Different ethnic groups commit crimes at different rates - even if their is bias in apprehension/monitoring. The question they should try to answer is: 'Among interactions with police, how much more or less likely are people to be shot'. This way, we can ignore the possibility that cops are unfairly focusing more on blacks, and isolate and at least assess how much more likely someone is to die. It seems that academia even has a problem with trying to get at the truth and heart of the matter.
omonra 10y ago
I actually did a similar kind of back of the napkin + Google exercise the other night, here is what I wrote down: --- Recent MN incident is definitely horrible and seems unequivocally wrong, no questions about it. It's very sad. It's worse than Garner and totally different scale than other high-profile cases of late. It's the sort of incident that definitely supports claims made by BLM (as previous ones have not, at least to me). The clear racial implications prompted me to look at the overall country-wide figures to see if the actual stats for last few years reflect the narrative promulgated in the news (black people are disproportionately killed by the police). 1. "... roughly 49 percent of those killed by officers from May 2013 to April 2015 were white, while 30 percent were black. He also found that 19 percent were Hispanic." (http://www.washingtontimes.com/…/police-kill-more-whites-t…/ http://www.washingtontimes.com/…/police-kill-more-whites-t…/) 2. "There were 511 officers killed in felonious incidents and 540 offenders from 2004 to 2013, according to FBI reports. Among the total offenders, 52 percent were white, and 43 percent were black." The ratio of african-americans among cop killers (43% of all incidents) to those who are killed by cops (30% of all incidents) is 1.43 - which does not bear out the claim that they are unfairly targeted as a group (of course this doesn't absolve the individual cops who wrongfully kill innocent people). The one obvious problem with this analysis is that the set of people who kill cops vs are killed by them are non-overlapping - but when country-wide stats over a few years are considered the numbers would sort themselves out (ie random white guy killed by mistake simply doesn't make the national news). I'm sorry if this analysis is unpleasant and welcome criticism of why it could be wrong.
- dragonwriter 10y ago
  > I'm sorry if this analysis is unpleasant and welcome criticism of why it could be wrong. Not so much wrong as irrelevant to the main issue of concern. The issue isn't so much whether black people are more likely to be killed by cops, but whether they are more likely to be wrongfully killed by cops (and secondarily, whether absent activism by BLM, etc., there is less accountability for such wrongful killings. [0]) Unfortunately, actually analyzing this question is messy, because you can't grab quick-and-easy figures for it, and the fundamental base facts -- whether individual shootings are wrongful -- are often contested. The easy to analyze questions are poor proxies for the question of interest. [0] Actually, accountability is the primary reason for BLM existing, and its not limited to police-involved killings (in fact, the triggering incident was the Trayvon Martin killing, which was not a police-involved killings, its just that the first incidents BLM was noted for responding to after it got going were police-involved, which set the perception that BLM was primarily about police shootings.)
JumpCrisscross 10y ago
Their abstract claim is pretty strong but doesn't seem backed up by their data. Looking at Table 2, when they throw in additional controls, it wipes out their claimed racial effect.
NetTechM 10y ago
This seems like a really badly done study for multiple reasons. One, as a Hispanic, I would expect there to be a huge jump in numbers of Hispanics being killed in obvious places, Texas, California, Miami, new York. Half of the data is extremely slanted, there is no way that there are even a 10th the amount of anyone else being killed in some of those places (Miami) and yet the numbers are skewed to the point of hilarity towards the other races even in obvious places.
davidsky1 10y ago
There is a lot of discussion going on below. The following research addresses it. Pretty much, looking at the rate at which blacks are shot is a naive statistical method which has generated a lot of bogus beliefs. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/12/upshot/surprising-new-evidence-shows-bias-in-police-use-of-force-but-not-in-shootings.html http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/12/upshot/surprising-new-evid... Surprising New Evidence Shows Bias in Police Use of Force but Not in Shootings No bias found during shooting simulations http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/02/us/02police.html http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/02/us/02police.html counter-bias found during police shootings. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/true-crime/wp/2016/04/27/this-study-found-race-matters-in-police-shootings-but-the-results-may-surprise-you/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/true-crime/wp/2016/04/27... Enjoy.
davidsky1 10y ago
There is a lot of discussion going on below. The following research addresses it. Pretty much, looking at the rate at which blacks are shot is a naive statistical method which has generated a lot of bogus beliefs. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/12/upshot/surprising-new-evidence-shows-bias-in-police-use-of-force-but-not-in-shootings.html http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/12/upshot/surprising-new-evid...

256 points by hunglee2 10y ago

> There is no relationship between county-level racial bias in police shootings and crime rates (even race-specific crime rates), meaning that the racial bias observed in police shootings in this data set is not explainable as a response to local-level crime rates.

GuiA 10y ago
Edit: misunderstood what was posted, please disregard below comment. Not removing body for reference. See mrow84's comment if like me you are still waking up. --- Downvoted you for picking one sentence in the abstract that misrepresents the whole set of conclusions when taken in isolation. HNers who are going to the comments first, please read at least the abstract to get a sense for the nuanced results. Example: The results provide evidence of a significant bias in the killing of unarmed black Americans relative to unarmed white Americans, in that the probability of being {black, unarmed, and shot by police} is about 3.49 times the probability of being {white, unarmed, and shot by police} on average.
- mrow84 10y ago
  I understood that quote as meaning that you couldn't attempt to explain away the racial bias by saying that black people lived in higher-crime areas, and thus were more likely to be shot as a consequence of more intense policing. Perhaps I misunderstood?
- weberc2 10y ago
  How does that misrepresent the whole set of conclusions? It seems to simply explain that the 3.49X probability isn't explainable by localized crime rates...
- _benedict 10y ago
  The sentence quoted by OP misrepresents nothing; it supports the idea that this discrepancy is caused by racism.
- williadc 10y ago
  It is not clear to me how the parent comment is misrepresenting the conclusions of the article. I interpret that sentence to say "The difference between the shooting of unarmed blacks and whites cannot be explained by differences in crime rates," which makes racism a more likely culprit.
- paviva 10y ago
  OP's quote : > the racial bias observed in police shootings in this data set is not explainable as a response to local-level crime rates actually means that there is racial prejudice, and it cannot be explained away by a higher crime-rate among blacks at the local level. I would give him the benefit of doubt, and suggest he selected the quote to say just that.
  - weberc2 10y ago
    It doesn't mean that there is racial prejudice; it only means that this particular variable doesn't explain away the gap. This does survey does nothing to say how much of the gap (if any) can be attributed to racial prejudice.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- SCAQTony 10y ago
  The observed distribution was just two races. The study never included hispanics, asians, pacific islanders, etc. etc. I suspect the contrast between african descent and hispanic descent would be surprising.
  - louden 10y ago
    Hispanics were in the study (see the Research Objectives) and have similar results to blacks. They just were not called out in the abstract.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
- spaceheeder 10y ago
  Logged in for the first time in ages to say the thing that several people have already told you more eloquently than I can -- the top-level commenter was not misrepresenting the conclusions of the paper. The meaning of the quote was not ambiguous to me; they were saying that a 3.49x multiplier to the probability of being {black, unarmed, and shot by police} is not explained away by any apparent local multiplier to the probability of {high black population, high rates of violent crime}.

jim-greer 10y ago

This analysis is based on crowd-sourced data on shootings. I'm not saying that makes it invalid, but I'd need to know more about the dataset before trusting the results. It seems hard to have it be complete. The official FBI data has the same problem. We need to require local departments to report all shootings in a standardized way. Edit: the author acknowledges the incompleteness of the data in the conclusions section. Oddly, he doesn't think that's likely to affect the mean "since the sample used herein is a large and random subset of the to-be-completed data set". That doesn't really make sense to me. How would random sampling of incomplete data improve the results? http://regressing.deadspin.com/deadspin-police-shooting-database-update-were-still-go-1627414202 http://regressing.deadspin.com/deadspin-police-shooting-data...

twinkletwinkle 10y ago
"How would random sampling of incomplete data improve the results?" It doesn't. The author means there is some actual population of shootings, and this dataset is a random sample of them. Since there are no systematic biases in the collection of the data, ie, it's not the case that the shooting of a black is more likely to be recorded than that of a white, the random sampling of the full set is sufficient. That's an assumption, of course, but given that assumption the rest works. It doesn't improve the results, it just doesn't harm them.
- jim-greer 10y ago
  I'm not sure that's what he's saying: "the sample used herein is a large and random subset of the to-be-completed data set". I read that as meaning database is to-be-completed, and he's sampling from that.
- Bartweiss 10y ago
  What seems to be missing to me is any support for the "random sampling" claim. My starting assumption is that reports on police shootings would be full of systematic biases running in all sorts of directions. Without some actual argument that this data isn't horribly biased by exactly the issues it's trying to investigate, I'm not sure what worth to give it.

lettergram 10y ago

What I think is more horrifying, is the use of deadly force in general. For example, based on a quick Google search, 41 police were killed by shooters last year, while roughly 1,000 civilians were killed. Police should not be using deadly force unless necessary, 41:1000 seems like some pretty bias reactions on the side of police. The reason different races are shot at different rates can be based on anything including racism, likely hood to commit an offense, which race is more likely to have mental disease, whether or not it's more difficult to identify facial structure. Blaming race outright is kind of silly, it's trying to simplify a multi dimensional problem that needs all of it's dimensions to reach a conclusion.

ksdale 10y ago
I'm not sure what the "right" number is, but you would expect that someone trained to use a weapon would "win" in the majority, if not the vast majority of cases. The ideal ratio would be zero police deaths compared to a much smaller and truly unavoidable number of civilian deaths, but even in that ideal case, the ratio would be incredibly skewed toward civilian deaths, so perhaps this number doesn't tell us much.
andreyk 10y ago
Yet it should be noted of the 1000 only 102 (by one count http://mappingpoliceviolence.org/unarmed/ http://mappingpoliceviolence.org/unarmed/) were unarmed, and in at least some of the cases were still acting violently (aggressively trying to reach for the cop's weapon). For instance: "Deputies say Browning, 30, fled when they were attempting to arrest him for a DUI. They claim he put deputies in a "bear hug" and reached for a firearm before being shot by deputies." Is use of deadly force not necessary here? I am not sure, depends on the actual details of the encountered. It seems use of deadly force is inevitable, so the best we can do is try to quantify how often it gets misused and try to lower that amount.
- adamors 10y ago
  Very frequently police claim the deadly force was inevitable until a video surfaces that completely denies that. Take every police account of a shooting with a bag of salt.

rexpop 10y ago

> Higher Quality Covariate Data is Needed. > Ecological regression on county-level characteristics is plagued by difficulties theoretically [39, 51]; issues with data quality make it even harder to use county-level data. In the analysis of county-level predictors of racial bias in police shootings conducted in this paper, some of the data were low quality. Notably, the crime data may be biased by the reporting practices of the police, and Florida, Alabama, and Illinois failed to fully release data, which led to the use Bayesian imputation for counties in these states. I'd like to see BLM take this on as their a demand during their next direct action: better data for Cody Ross @ the Department of Anthropology, University of California, Davis

mdjeu 10y ago
Yes, better data is needed. I feel weird being a skeptic of this study, because I personally believe law enforcement in the US is out of control, but... In this area, there's so many important factors relating to the nature of the events, that "armed" versus "unarmed" and race are insufficient to get a good estimate of what's going on. If someone is unarmed but posing a threat to an officer (e.g., by reaching for their gun), and that threatening behavior varies by race, it's not bias, but racial differences in criminal behavior. To be clear, the whole law enforcement system seems abundantly racist to me in all sorts of ways, but to me studies like this only become fodder for criticism. Maybe the problem is that the data isn't detailed enough, though, and this is the best that could be done. If so, the solution is better-quality data.
jessedhillon 10y ago
I'm skeptical of any socio-political movement demanding more science -- not because more science isn't needed, but that I doubt the movement would avow and abide by results which are contradictory to their vision. This isn't a criticism, per se -- just recognizing that BLM and other movements are driven by experience, and one of the key claims of the victims of those experiences is that their suffering is invisible. Therefore, any study which invalidates that experience would serve as further proof of the invisibility of their suffering. Again, this isn't meant to single out or criticize BLM.
- 10y ago

bdcravens 10y ago

I'm sure you didn't mean it as such, but this comes off with the same air as the "all lives matter" claimants.

DiabloD3 10y ago
I'm not sure you didn't mean it as such, but don't all lives actually matter?
- moo 10y ago
  They don't matter equally. Should they matter equally? Yes. Saying all lives matter obfuscates that they don't matter equally.
  - CWuestefeld 10y ago
    You're assuming that they don't matter equally. That may be true, but it's dangerous to start off by simply assuming the validity of your thesis. Moreover, it assumes that the way in which they don't matter equally is based only on racial lines. I'm far from convinced that's completely true. It appears that's some of it, but the fact is that police kill lots of innocent whites, hispanics, and asians as well. That being the case, wouldn't it make more sense to look more broadly at where the disparities are, rather than simply assuming that it's all racial while refusing to entertain any other possibility?
- jamesroseman 10y ago
  Of course all lives matter. But if racial identities were homes, there are a few on fire in the United States and it doesn't make much sense to call the fire department for every house when a few urgently need the attention more. Is that fair?
  - mhuffman 10y ago
    Black people are not actively being targeted by anyone but other black people. Is that fair?

akud 10y ago

> the probability of being {black, unarmed, and shot by police} is about 3.49 times the probability of being {white, unarmed, and shot by police} on average What they really need to do is factor in the probability of encounters with police gI've race. That is, we want to know, out of all encounters with police, are they more likely to be fatal if the victim is black? Without factoring in the rate of police encounters, the conclusion could just be indicating that black people are more likely to encounter the police, which is a problem in itself but is slightly different. That would point more to socioeconomic factors determining the rate of policing in neighborhoods, rather than police racism.

holdenk 10y ago
I'm not sure I agree with you - having a higher encounters rate need not be limited to simple neighborhood selection for policing (although there is likely bias there too) - rather simply choosing who to interact with may exhibit bias (e.g. is the police officer more likely to have an encounter with a black person even in a predominantly white neighborhood)?
- CWuestefeld 10y ago
  I'd have to agree with the GP. To your point, a bias in the encounter rate (assuming it exists) is a significant problem, and one that would need to be addressed. But it's also a distinct problem, and there's no reason to believe that the violence problem and the disproportionate-encounter problem would be amenable to the same solution.
  - loco5niner 10y ago
    Just to clarify... GP = GrandParent (comment) = akud's comment ?
    - CWuestefeld 10y ago
      Yes, sorry if I was cryptic.

grb423 10y ago

I wish left, right and center could come together just this once to urge young black men to not fight with police. If you feel their authority is unjustified or they are punks then you really need to handle that politically. The police are duly authorized by the state however flawed and racist that state may be, to use deadly force. The are armed with government-issued, free firearms. Fighting with them leads to your death. If that isn't your goal, i.e., martyrdom for political gain then it's a bad idea. Lets urge the young black men to submit to lawful orders and take issue later in a court of law.

danso 10y ago
> Lets urge the young black men to submit to lawful orders and take issue later in a court of law. How much experience have you had with the justice system? can you describe the resources you used to handle grviences with it on a political basis?
troncheadle 10y ago
> I wish left, right and center could come together just this once to urge young black men to not fight with police. I don't understand why you are saying this like young black men are chomping at the bit to fight with police, or like there are people advocating that young black men pick fights with cops. What are you on about here?? > Lets urge the young black men to submit to lawful orders and take issue later in a court of law. What we saw, twice, this week, was young black men submitting to lawful orders and being killed for it. How about we urge cops to stop extrajudicial killings? How about we urge the federal government to define an escalation strategy for police that doesn't violate international law? Your insistence in making 'young black men' the problem here paints you as racist, whether or not you think you are.
- CWuestefeld 10y ago
  > Your insistence in making 'young black men' the problem here paints you as racist, whether or not you think you are. I agree. But at the same time, doesn't the insistence to frame the problem as one of violence specifically against blacks - as opposed to one of those in power misusing force against anyone they're supposed to be "serving and protecting" - make the whole discussion racist?

snowwrestler 10y ago

Some of the comments here are pointing out the questions about data quality etc. that affect a study like this. And those are real concerns, and obviously analytical studies could only be improved if they had better data to work with. But let's not make the mistake of looking at this study only in isolation. It is a recent addition to a large collection of observations and evidence that support a theory that personal racial bias affects American policing. The evidence includes other studies, criminal investigations, criminal cases, federal investigations and reform agreements with police departments like Cleveland and Seattle, videos and photos of violent police encounters, and of course decades of stories and statements from minority communities about how the police treats them. The last one is important because it gets at trust, which is the heart of the issue. Minority communities, many of them, do not trust the police to protect them in the same way they protect whiter/richer communities, and they have stories that explain why not. If you are depending solely on data-driven studies to inform your opinion on racial bias in policing, then you're implicitly saying that you distrust or reject what minority people and communities say. Why is that? It's worth thinking about IMO. Which brings us back to the data. Why is it so lacking? You can't answer that question without coming back around to bias, because until recently, it was the police forces themselves who supplied the data, or not, or only part of the data. So discounting the bias reported in this study because of data problems is getting toward begging the question, logically speaking. The essential question, when it comes to whether you agree that racial bias affects policing, is: what level of evidence will convince you?

specialist 10y ago
The value of studies like this, for future, is the ability to determine if mitigation, correctional measures are working. "what level of evidence will convince you?" We need to learn to ask this more frequently, upfront. Persuasion doesn't work. Finding your tribe and organizing does.
- millermp12 10y ago
  "Finding your tribe and organizing does" Sounds racist. Unless you're not white.

vessenes 10y ago

Analyses like these are always helpful, and often raise lots of questions, maybe even more questions than they answer. As the parent of a black child, I have a personal interest in this data -- the statistic that some counties have 20x higher risks for unarmed blacks is pretty terrible. In my mind, I tend to assume that criminals, active or former are more likely to be shot at than non-criminals, whether or not they are armed. I'd really like to see the data normalized against prior convictions or in-process-of-a-crime stats; that would help me understand: 1. Is the effect magnified or dampened by some sort of differences in black and white criminality in these areas? 2. Are these shootings happening while people mostly commission crimes, or are they, a-la Minnesota this week, something that appears to be just wholesale adrenaline-based killings by police officers?

ams6110 10y ago
I looked for (but did not find) the researcher's definition of "armed." E.g. is that any weapon, such as a knife, club, tire iron, etc? Or just a firearm? One thing to understand is that police are trained to take defensive action against an aggressive individual who is within a certain distance. Within that circle, an unarmed individual can reach and overpower an officer before he can draw his weapon. So even if you are unarmed, if are acting aggressively and you approach an officer you are likely to get shot or at least tased/pepper sprayed. If you ignore an order to stop where you are and put your hands up, and you continue to approach you are likely to get shot. Now, at least on the surface this does not appear to be exactly the situation in the recent Minnesota case. But we only know what's in the media, and the media likes to sensationalize and report half the story. That said, if a cop has his weapon drawn on you, do not move. Do not twitch. Keep both hands in view. Do not do anything that you are not explicitly asked to do.
- empath75 10y ago
  This might be good advice, but it's terrible that we live in a country where this is good advice.
  - falsestprophet 10y ago

JusticeJuice 10y ago

Factors increasing police shootings - Large metropolitan counties - Low median incomes - High financial inequality - Sizeable portion of black residents. Factors which did not affect police shootings - Local level crime rates - Race specific crime rates Crazy takeaways - A black unarmed individual 3.49x more likely to be shot than a white unarmed individual on average across america. - Some counties showing 20x more likely I'm interested to see this data in relationship to gun accessibility and gun ownership stats. Would less access to firearms affect police shootings? Is there a racial connection to gun ownership and carrying? I'm not american and the idea of civilians with guns seems just so crazy to me.

bluedino 10y ago
Facts that you don't much analysis to see: (CDC) - From 1999-2011, 2,151 whites died as a result of being shot by police compared to just 1,130 blacks. (DOJ) In 2013 black criminals carried out 38% of murders, compared to 31.1% for whites (despite blacks being only 13% of the population and black males 18-35 being 3%)
- kmkemp 10y ago
  "From 1999-2011, 2,151 whites died as a result of being shot by police compared to just 1,130 blacks." That is meaningless without adjusting for population sizes. "In 2013 black criminals carried out 38% of murders, compared to 31.1% for whites" I think what you mean to say is that blacks were convicted of 38% of murders compared to 31.1% for whites. I'm not saying that judicial injustice is enough to close a gap that wide, but you shouldn't present those facts without context.
  - kmkemp 10y ago
    Thanks for the downvotes with no explanation. Did you know that blacks and hispanics make up about 59% of the prison population compared to 32% for non-hispanic whites (a ratio of 1.84), but yet the Innocence Project has exonerated (as of 2010) 172 black and hispanic persons compared to 82 whites (a ratio of 2.1)? Unless my math is wrong, that is about a 14% discrepancy.

chvid 10y ago

Two concerns I don't see addressed in the study: 1. Whether suspect is unarmed is only known for certain after the incident. 2. Differences in levels of crimes by race.

21echoes 10y ago
re: 2, this is covered quite clearly in the abstract: "There is no relationship between county-level racial bias in police shootings and crime rates (even race-specific crime rates), meaning that the racial bias observed in police shootings in this data set is not explainable as a response to local-level crime rates."
- chvid 10y ago
  Why does it have to be explained at "county-level"?
  - 21echoes 10y ago
    If it's true at the county-level, it's true at the national level (which is also stated in the abstract). By specifying it's additionally true at the county level, it makes a much stronger claim -- that high racial bias does not exist only in high-crime areas, and as such, racial bias is not explainable by crime rates.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
dragonwriter 10y ago
> Whether suspect is unarmed is only known for certain after the incident. Not even then, really; this can be manipulated in either direction after the incident, and there are enough incidents where its become known that it has been that one should not assume that this is even certainly known after the fact in general.

enraged_camel 10y ago

Relevant part: Across almost all counties, individuals who were armed and shot by police had a much higher probability of being black or hispanic than being white. Likewise, across almost all counties, individuals who were unarmed and shot by police had a much higher probability of being black or hispanic than being white. Tragically, across a large proportion of counties, individuals who were shot by police had a higher median probability of being unarmed black individuals than being armed white individuals. While this pattern could be explained by reduced levels of crime being committed by armed white individuals, it still raises a question as to why there exists such a high rate of police shooting of unarmed black individuals.

andreyk 10y ago

Exciting to see the R files used to create this are attached and usable by anyone, so this measure can be tracked across time. As much as I can appreciate the benefit of having stories of individual cases of police misuse of deadly force for galvanizing activism and attempts at reform, I am not a big fan of emotional rhetoric as the main justification for a given policy stance. Relatively objective measures of how problematic the situation truly is seem far more practical to me, along with campaigns such as http://www.joincampaignzero.org/ http://www.joincampaignzero.org/. I am no statistics expert, so just curious, anyone here knowledgeable enough to read into the technical details and comment on how good the study quality seems to be?

louden 10y ago
The methodology they used seems very good and the fact that they share the code is excellent. However, in a study like this, data quality is likely going to be a problem. Collecting good data about the shootings themselves is incredibly difficult considering we have 18,000+ police jurisdictions in the United States and even mundane things like reporting can very between them. Furthermore, the chaos of the situation may make data quality suffer. Unfortunately, the best we can do is announce the limitations of the studies, as the authors did.

chris_va 10y ago

Finally, analysis of police shooting data as a function of county-level predictors suggests that racial bias in police shootings is most likely to emerge in police departments in larger metropolitan counties with low median incomes and a sizable portion of black residents, especially when there is high financial inequality in that county. There is no relationship between county-level racial bias in police shootings and crime rates (even race-specific crime rates), meaning that the racial bias observed in police shootings in this data set is not explainable as a response to local-level crime rates. With the disclaimer that the conclusion might still be correct, I think looking at the county level is completely absurd. You leave yourself open to the Simpson's Paradox at a neighborhood level. For argument's sake, let's say that the majority of police shootings happen in poor neighborhoods. Let's also assume, sadly, that the ratio of black/white people in poor neighborhoods is high. Their analysis would imply that their is a racial bias to the shooting, when in fact, the racial bias could be entirely explained by the demographics. Or it might not, but doing it at a county level completely washes out all useful signal.

apathy 10y ago
So add a per-county term to both fixed and random effects and see if that fits substantially better. This isn't rocket surgery. Simpson's paradox can be straightforwardly addressed if the stratifying or confounding factor can be identified, and here that is clearly the cases. It appears that the authors did in fact address this.
- chris_va 10y ago
  If I understand what you saying (apologies if not, it has been a while since I did modelling), that would only give a better fit if the level of segregation/crime was consistent between counties and not already taken into account by their other variables (like inequality). Or the paradox segments were at a county level instead of locally. If be happier if they just got the police records for all 721 cases, and did a more local analysis. Let me know if I'm missing something (I probably am).
  - 10y ago

JoeAltmaier 10y ago

I didn't understand it all. For instance, they admit some results may be due to more interactions with one population or another. I would have assumed to be useful, we'd want it normalized by population or total interactions by group, right? Else this all becomes just a heatmap of population.

ArkyBeagle 10y ago
It's particularly a heatmap of ... certain demograhics as outlined in the article.

advisedwang 10y ago

They talk about comparing probability of {black, unarmed, and shot by police} vs {white, unarmed, and shot by police}. Is this not meaningless without adjusting for relative frequency of black vs white in the community? Shouldn't we be comparing P(shot by police|white & unarmed) vs P(shot by police|black & unarmed)? Am I missing something from their methodology?

DiabloD3 10y ago
Unarmed doesn't even really help here. Cops in certain areas have serious problems with ham sandwiching suspects.
- iamdave 10y ago
  ham sandwiching This idiom is new to me, care to elaborate? I've definitely had my fair share of "why was I even approached in the first place" with police officers, in Austin Texas-the part of Texas everyone and their mother swears is liberal, progressive and not at all like the rest of Texas. If that's what you mean. It probably didn't help that I was walking down the street from the gas station at 1 in the morning in an area that was established as "Exclusively for white people" (http://kxan.com/2015/08/20/exclusively-for-white-people-a-history-of-segregation-in-austin-neighborhoods/ http://kxan.com/2015/08/20/exclusively-for-white-people-a-hi...) as a black man-a neighborhood that still to this day is almost entirely white....still watching a cop pass me going down the road, whip a u-turn, come back and stop me just to ask "Where are you going?" Or the time an officer stopped me on my way to a UT football game and before even asking to see my license or registration asked who I stole my Honda Civic from. Armed only with tickets and a case of beer for tailgating.
  - codemogul 10y ago
    A "ham sandwich" is evidence, often a handgun, placed at a crime scene by law enforcement. See: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/law-disorder/blog/2011/07/former-detective-describes-cover-up-ham-sandwich.html http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/law-disorder/blog/20...

nickbauman 10y ago

US 2015 Fundamentals: Number of gun deaths: ~13,000 Number of police officers killed: ~50 Number of civilians killed by police: ~1200 Number of white civilians killed: ~500 Number of black civilians killed: ~330 Percentage of blacks in the population: ~13 We have a large death-by-gun problem in the US as compared to the rest of the OECD.

knz 10y ago
Absolute numbers are useless. The US population is significantly larger than many OECD countries. Assuming a large number of those deaths are suicides - the suicide rate per capita should be factored in as well.
- nickbauman 10y ago
  "Useless"? I think that's hyperbole.
  - knz 10y ago
    Per capita is a far more useful measure. I'm tired of seeing the media pushing the total number for various issues and ignoring the fact that the US has 320 million residents.
    - stvswn 10y ago
      right, and lets stop saying "gun deaths" and trick people into thinking we mean "murders." There are twice as many suicides as homicides in this country, but we're only about average in per-capita suicide compared to the world. We do have more murders than other rich countries, including more murders with guns. But we also have more per capita murders with just about any weapon, as well as more per capita violence of all kinds. We have a violence problem, sure. We kind of always have had a violence problem, we've always been a violent people. I'm not shrugging it off, it's just a fact. It's worth remembering, though, that the murder rate is at a historic low. A 40 year low.

aestetix 10y ago

A few points: 1. "In contrast to previous work that relied on the FBI’s Supplemental Homicide Reports that were constructed from self-reported cases of police-involved homicide, this data set is less likely to be biased by police reporting practices." I'm very interested to see if the full article (which is timing out so I can't check) goes into detail on what the reporting practices are, how they are biased, and how this data set solves those biases. 2. I'm curious how this data compares to the Guardian's study: http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2015/jun/01/about-the-counted http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2015/jun/0... In particular, this database shows that in 2015, while the "per million" count of blacks killed was 7.27 (and for whites was 2.93), the "in total" count was 306 for blacks and 581 for whites. The statistics in 2016 so far are not much better: 3.23/1.41 respectively per million, and 136/279 in total. Ideally this number would be 0 for all counts, but we don't live in that world. 3. This report was published at the end of 2015, and unfortunately we have seen a massive spike in killings since then. Further, their dataset (according to the title) is only from 2011 to 2014. Is anyone working on a follow-up study using more recent data?

etendue 10y ago

[deleted] This article is attracting some distasteful comments, generally seems to be headed in a bad direction, and I want no association with it.

kmkemp 10y ago
I took at as them normalizing for a known risk factor. In other words, if white people are armed at a higher percentage than blacks, they wouldn't want that to skew the statistics.

bmmayer1 10y ago

It seems the question we should be concerned with should not be 'is there racial bias in policing', to which the answer would surely always be 'yes' because there's one bias or another in everything human and police are human. The question we should be concerned with should be: 'How is policing/governance structured in a way that enables or encourages people to act upon their biases to detrimental results?' The distinction is important because eliminating bias/whateverism will never happen, but making it possible for the justice system to operate fairly given the biases of its constituent members should be a desired outcome.

mindslight 10y ago
Exactly! Furthermore, is the goal to make sure that all races will be shot equally or is it to achieve justice for all victims of overaggressive police?
gozur88 10y ago
>The question we should be concerned with should be: 'How is policing/governance structured in a way that enables or encourages people to act upon their biases to detrimental results?' That begs the question, though, of whether the structure is actually set up in such a way. Blacks in the US commit murder at a rate eight times that of whites. Wouldn't you expect them to be shot comparatively more often by police? I don't think it's reasonable to take a handful of incidents where police were clearly in the wrong and then try to extrapolate that based on statistics relating to incidents in which we have no reason to believe that's the case.
- thenewwazoo 10y ago
  > There is no relationship between county-level racial bias in police shootings and crime rates (even race-specific crime rates), meaning that the racial bias observed in police shootings in this data set is not explainable as a response to local-level crime rates.
  - gozur88 10y ago
    I'm not sure that addresses the point.

siegecraft 10y ago

I feel like this problem gets framed as a racial one, which it might be, but never as a class one, which it also might be. Adding another factor to the data of "net worth" (a convenient proxy for class) could provide interesting analysis.

jxramos 10y ago

Just read this CityJournal post by Heather MacDonald this morning on the way to work. Search the article for the word "percent" and you'll hit all sorts of provocative stats not commonly heard in the media about shootings and race and police. http://www.city-journal.org/html/chicago-brink-14605.html http://www.city-journal.org/html/chicago-brink-14605.html

nomat 10y ago

Would love to see socioeconomic status included in the analysis as well.

jomamaxx 10y ago

The research is almost useless. Different ethnic groups commit crimes at different rates - even if their is bias in apprehension/monitoring. The question they should try to answer is: 'Among interactions with police, how much more or less likely are people to be shot'. This way, we can ignore the possibility that cops are unfairly focusing more on blacks, and isolate and at least assess how much more likely someone is to die. It seems that academia even has a problem with trying to get at the truth and heart of the matter.

omonra 10y ago

I actually did a similar kind of back of the napkin + Google exercise the other night, here is what I wrote down: --- Recent MN incident is definitely horrible and seems unequivocally wrong, no questions about it. It's very sad. It's worse than Garner and totally different scale than other high-profile cases of late. It's the sort of incident that definitely supports claims made by BLM (as previous ones have not, at least to me). The clear racial implications prompted me to look at the overall country-wide figures to see if the actual stats for last few years reflect the narrative promulgated in the news (black people are disproportionately killed by the police). 1. "... roughly 49 percent of those killed by officers from May 2013 to April 2015 were white, while 30 percent were black. He also found that 19 percent were Hispanic." (http://www.washingtontimes.com/…/police-kill-more-whites-t…/ http://www.washingtontimes.com/…/police-kill-more-whites-t…/) 2. "There were 511 officers killed in felonious incidents and 540 offenders from 2004 to 2013, according to FBI reports. Among the total offenders, 52 percent were white, and 43 percent were black." The ratio of african-americans among cop killers (43% of all incidents) to those who are killed by cops (30% of all incidents) is 1.43 - which does not bear out the claim that they are unfairly targeted as a group (of course this doesn't absolve the individual cops who wrongfully kill innocent people). The one obvious problem with this analysis is that the set of people who kill cops vs are killed by them are non-overlapping - but when country-wide stats over a few years are considered the numbers would sort themselves out (ie random white guy killed by mistake simply doesn't make the national news). I'm sorry if this analysis is unpleasant and welcome criticism of why it could be wrong.

dragonwriter 10y ago
> I'm sorry if this analysis is unpleasant and welcome criticism of why it could be wrong. Not so much wrong as irrelevant to the main issue of concern. The issue isn't so much whether black people are more likely to be killed by cops, but whether they are more likely to be wrongfully killed by cops (and secondarily, whether absent activism by BLM, etc., there is less accountability for such wrongful killings. [0]) Unfortunately, actually analyzing this question is messy, because you can't grab quick-and-easy figures for it, and the fundamental base facts -- whether individual shootings are wrongful -- are often contested. The easy to analyze questions are poor proxies for the question of interest. [0] Actually, accountability is the primary reason for BLM existing, and its not limited to police-involved killings (in fact, the triggering incident was the Trayvon Martin killing, which was not a police-involved killings, its just that the first incidents BLM was noted for responding to after it got going were police-involved, which set the perception that BLM was primarily about police shootings.)

JumpCrisscross 10y ago

Their abstract claim is pretty strong but doesn't seem backed up by their data. Looking at Table 2, when they throw in additional controls, it wipes out their claimed racial effect.

NetTechM 10y ago

This seems like a really badly done study for multiple reasons. One, as a Hispanic, I would expect there to be a huge jump in numbers of Hispanics being killed in obvious places, Texas, California, Miami, new York. Half of the data is extremely slanted, there is no way that there are even a 10th the amount of anyone else being killed in some of those places (Miami) and yet the numbers are skewed to the point of hilarity towards the other races even in obvious places.

davidsky1 10y ago

There is a lot of discussion going on below. The following research addresses it. Pretty much, looking at the rate at which blacks are shot is a naive statistical method which has generated a lot of bogus beliefs. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/12/upshot/surprising-new-evidence-shows-bias-in-police-use-of-force-but-not-in-shootings.html http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/12/upshot/surprising-new-evid... Surprising New Evidence Shows Bias in Police Use of Force but Not in Shootings No bias found during shooting simulations http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/02/us/02police.html http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/02/us/02police.html counter-bias found during police shootings. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/true-crime/wp/2016/04/27/this-study-found-race-matters-in-police-shootings-but-the-results-may-surprise-you/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/true-crime/wp/2016/04/27... Enjoy.

davidsky1 10y ago