When and Where Do Police Use Lethal Force?

In promoting public safety and order, and responding to perceived threats against them or others, police officers sometimes harm civilians, using lethal force, inclusive of shootings. Moments of lethal force by the police remind us of the power, authority, and discretion policymakers and the public grant the police for law enforcement and public security. Those moments also raise questions about the frequency, causes, and consequences of lethal force by the police. Neither policymakers nor the public, however, know how often police officers use lethal force, particularly how often they shoot civilians. Media coverage, crowdsourcing, and government reports of police shootings paint an incomplete picture of lethal force in U.S. policing. It often excludes, for example, the majority of police shootings---non-fatal shootings. Furthermore, policymakers and the public know little about the civic and communal effects of police shootings. Accordingly, policymakers and the public need more data about incidents of police harm of civilians. They also need data-driven assessments of whether police harm of civilians negatively affects civic life, inclusive of public trust and participation. Collecting, cataloging, storing, and sharing comprehensive data about police shootings, fatal and non-fatal, is necessary. Higher-quality data and analyses may contribute to reducing police harm of civilians and bettering relationships between police and communities they are to serve and protect without bias.

With generous support from the National Science Foundation, we are collecting data on shootings of civilians by police in the U.S. for the period 2000-2019. The primary sources of data will be the police departments of the 285 largest cities (i.e., cities of at least 100,000 residents as of the 2010 Census). We employ each city’s and/or their state’s “freedom of information” statutes to request public records of every instance of a police officer involved in a shooting of a civilian, both fatal and non-fatal as well as the dates, times, and locations of the officer-involved shootings, along with information about the demographics of the officers and civilians. As a supplement, we are collecting newspaper stories about the officer-involved shootings in the sample cities and coding code them to assess media coverage and content of the shootings. We will use the data they collect to build a public repository for aggregating, hosting, and disseminating data about police shootings. Additionally, we will produce a descriptive analysis of lethal force by police. Finally, we will conduct multivariate analyses to identify whether lethal force by police harms civic engagement, including the propensity of citizen-initiated contact for emergency (911) and non-emergency (311) services from municipalities. Evaluating whether lethal use of force by the police, be it fatal or non-fatal, decreases citizen-initiated contact with local governments will inform theoretical, empirical, and public understandings of police-civilian interactions. The data, inclusive of its public dissemination, and analyses of it will better illuminate the degree to which police use lethal force and suggest how to better balance police discretion to use lethal force for public safety and order while fostering or maintaining public trust in the police, particularly by communities of color.

Financial support from this project comes from the National Science Foundation and Emory University.