Are Police Racially Biased in the Decision to Shoot?

Racial disparities in police use of force are common in the United States and may be widest for Black Americans relative to other racial groups. Determining racial bias as the cause of such disparities is difficult due to a lack of systematic use of force data and inferential challenges to discovering and estimating racial bias by police officers. Our theoretical model predicts that in less dangerous situations, racially biased police will be more likely to use force against Black civilians than against White civilians. The model implies different fatality rates among White and Black civilians shot by the police, which we empirically evaluate with original data for all officer-involved shootings of civilians from 2005-2017 in nine local police jurisdictions in the U.S. The model and test permit us to begin to credibly assess civilian fatality rates, conditional upon civilians being shot by the police. Our theoretical implication and empirical findings also provide an estimated lower bound on the number of black civilians shot, who would not have been shot had they been white.