By Geoffrey Carney-Knisely , Marquianna Griffin , Alaxandria Crawford , Kamesha Spates and Parvati Singh

The suicide rate for Black youth has increased by 60% between 2007 and 2020. Direct or vicarious racial trauma experienced through exposure to police brutality may underlie these concerning trends.MethodsWe obtained nationally aggregated monthly counts of suicides for non-Hispanic Black and White youth (age ≤ 24 years) and adults (age > 24 years) from the National Mortality Vital Statistics restricted-use data files provided by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, from 2013 to 2019. Monthly counts of Black youth suicides constituted our main outcome. We defined our exposure as the monthly counts of police killings of unarmed Black persons over 84 months (2013 to 2019), retrieved from the Mapping Police Violence database. We used ARIMA (AutoRegressive Integrated Moving Average) time-series analyses to examine whether Black youth suicides increased within 0 to 3 months following police killings of unarmed Black persons, controlling for autocorrelation and corresponding series of white youth suicides.ResultsSuicides among Black youth increase by ~1 count within three months following an increase in police killings of unarmed Black persons (coefficient=0.95,p<0.05), which approximates to about 267 suicides among Black youth over our study period. The observed increase in suicides concentrates among Black male youth.

Annals of Epidemiology. Volume 94, June 2024, Pages 91-99. June 2024.

By Deepak Premkumar

After a spate of protests touched off by high-profile incidents of police use of force, there has been a renewed focus on whether public scrutiny shapes policing behavior, otherwise known as the Ferguson Effect. This question has gained additional urgency as the country grapples with increases in murders. This paper provides the first national analysis showing that after police killings that generate significant public attention and scrutiny, officers reduce effort and crime increases. The effects differ by offense type: Reduced police effort yields persistently fewer arrests for low-level offenses (e.g., marijuana possession) but limited changes in arrests for violent or more serious property crimes. I show that decreased interaction with civilians through police stops may be driving the results. However, the increase in offending is driven by murders and robberies, imposing significant crime costs on affected municipalities. The effects only occur after there is broad community awareness of the incident. These findings are robust to numerous changes in empirical specification, transformations of the dependent variable, and varying levels of fixed effects that control for changes in state law and treatment spillovers. I also present evidence that suggests these effects are not driven by a pattern-or-practice investigation or a court-mandated monitoring agreement. To distinguish between the potential effects that may simultaneously impact arrest levels following a high-profile police killing, I develop a theoretical model that provides empirically testable predictions for each mechanism. I find that the reduction in low-level arrests corroborates public scrutiny as the causal channel. Finally, I provide evidence that the increase in offending is driven by both a response to the reduction in policing effort and a reaction to the police killing itself, suggesting that measures to reduce use of force should be prioritized.\

Unpublished paper, 2019, revised 2022. 132p.

By Emilee Green, Brian Kuczynski, Morgan McGuirk and Jessica A. Reichert

Repeated and deadly encounters between law enforcement officers and Black Americans have given way to mounting calls for police reform. Reformers have proposed reallocating funds from policing to communities and social services, rethinking police use of force policies, and improving measures for officer accountability. This literature review briefly describes the impetus for police reform, reviews proposed police reforms, and examines available research on the effectiveness of police reforms. Overall, research indicates police agencies should not only focus on reducing crime, but also protecting and fostering the relationship between the public and police.

Chicago: Illinois 2022. 20p.

By Jeffrey A. Fagan and Alexis D. Campbell

Police officers in the United States have killed over 1000 civilians each year since 2013. The constitutional landscape that regulates these encounters defaults to the judgments of the reasonable police officer at the time of a civilian encounter based on the officer’s assessment of whether threats to their safety or the safety of others requires deadly force. As many of these killings have begun to occur under similar circumstances, scholars have renewed a contentious debate on whether police disproportionately use deadly force against African Americans and other nonwhite civilians and whether such killings reflect racial bias. We analyze data on 3933 killings to examine this intersection of race and reasonableness in police killings. First, we describe the objective circumstances and interactions of police killings and map those event characteristics to the elements of reasonableness articulated in case law. Second, we assess whether inherently vague constitutional regulation of lethal force is applied differently by officers depending on the civilian’s race, giving rise to a disproportionate rate of deaths among racial and ethnic minority groups. We then assess the prospects for remediation of racialized police killings by testing the effects of an existing evidence-based training curricula designed to reduce police use of deadly force towards persons experiencing mental illness. We find that, across several circumstances of police killings and their objective reasonableness, Black suspects are more than twice as likely to be killed by police than are persons of other racial or ethnic groups; even when there are no other obvious circumstances during the encounter that would make the use of deadly force reasonable. Police killings of Latinx civilians are higher compared to whites and other racial or ethnic groups in some but not all circumstances. We find no evidence that enhanced police training focused on mental health crises can reduce the incidence of fatal police shootings of persons in mental health crisis or racial and ethnic disparities generally in police killings. Our findings suggest that the standards in constitutional case law fail to anticipate the circumstances of fatal police shootings and are therefore seemingly irrelevant in preventing racial disparities in police fatal police shootings. In light of this constitutional landscape, we argue that the ineffectiveness of enhanced police training to reduce shootings overall and racial disparity within these shootings may reflect the absence of race-specific components in their curricula. We suggest that the addition of training components that specifically address the role of race in officers’ perceptions of risk and their decision-making in potentially dangerous interactions with citizens may remediate both the incidence of police shootings and their apparent racial and ethnic disparity.

BOSTON UNIVERSITY LAW REVIEW [Vol. 100:951 2020.

By Amy Nivette,Christof Nägel &Emily Gilbert

High-profile incidents of police misconduct can have serious conse-quences for public trust in the police. A recent study in the British Journal of Political Science found that Eric Garner’s death in NYC led to more negative attitudes towards the police in London among Black residents compared to White and Asian residents. The current study aimed to replicate this transnational effect by assessing the impact of George Floyd’s death on Londoners’ perceptions of police. Using the same data and methodological approach, we did not replicate the immediate effect on Black Londoners’ attitudes. We did find that attitudes across ethnic groups became more negative when using a wider temporal bandwidth. However, we discovered violations to the excludability assumption, meaning we cannot be certain that the effect is solely due to the murder of George Floyd, or at least partly due to different dynamics, like the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and the accompanying policies. This means that while it is possible that police killings in other contexts play a role in shaping attitudes towards local police, these effects are difficult to disentangle from other global and local factors. misconduct can reduce trust and confidence in the police among the wider public (Kochel, 2019; Nägel & Lutter, 2021; Reny & Newman, 2021).

Police Practice and Research, 2023.

By Paul J. Hirschfield

Police in the United States stand out in the developed world for their reliance on deadly force. Other nations in the Americas, however, feature higher or similar levels of fatal police violence (FPV). Cross-national comparative analyses can help identify stable and malleable factors that distinguish high-FPV from low-FPV countries. Two factors that clearly stand out among high-FPV nations are elevated rates of gun violence—which fosters a preoccupation with danger and wide latitude to use preemptive force—and ethnoracial inequality and discord. The latter seems to be tied to another fundamental difference between the United States and most other developed nations—the “radically decentralized structure of U.S. policing” (Bayley & Stenning 2016). Hyperlocalism limits the influence of external oversight, along with expertise and resources for effective training, policy implementation, and accountability. However, elevated rates of FPV among some Latin American countries with relatively centralized policing demonstrate that decentralization is not a necessary condition for high FPV. Likewise, relatively low FPV in Spain and Chile suggests that achieving low FPV is also possible without the extensive resources and training that appear to suppress FPV in wealthy Northern European nations.

Annu. Rev. Criminol. 2023. 6:471–98

By Brenden Beck

Between 2016 and 2021, more than 400 unarmed people were killed by police during traffic stops. In addition, metropolitan areas that rely more on revenue from fines and fees experience more police killings. This study analyzed over 2,700 U.S. municipalities from 2009 to 2018 to describe the type of municipalities that collect the most money in monetary sanctions and investigate whether killings by police are more frequent in places that rely on fines and fees revenue. The author found that suburbs with larger Black populations rely the most on revenue from monetary sanctions and that municipalities that rely on such revenue have more police killings. This suggests municipalities’ fiscal landscape not only influences police contact with the public but also influences police violence. 

RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences February 2023, 9 (2) 161-181

By The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, Washington Advisory Committee

The Washington Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights submits this briefing report regarding barriers to accountability for use of excessive force by law enforcement officers. The Committee submits this report as part of its responsibility to study and report on civil-rights issues in the state. The contents of this report are primarily based on testimony the Committee heard during public meetings held via video-conference from March to June 2021

Washington, DC: USCCR, 2022. 32p.-

By Meagan Cahill, Melissa M. Labriola, Jirka Taylor

In this report, RAND Corporation researchers summarize what is currently known about killings committed by police officers in the United States and identify existing evidence about various ways to prevent these killings. A relatively large body of research on these topics exists, but these studies often suffer from methodological shortcomings, largely stemming from the dearth of available data. Recognizing the need for more-rigorous work to guide efforts to reform police — and, more specifically, to reduce police killings — the authors present work focused on the development of a research agenda, or a road map, to reduce police killings. The report, based on an extensive literature review as well as interviews with policing experts, contains a series of recommendations for areas in which research efforts may be most effective in helping inform policy-making and decision-making aimed at reducing police killings.

The authors identified six focus areas — foundational issues (such as racial inequities, police culture, and police unions), data and reporting, training, policies, technology, and consequences for officers. Reviewing the priority research topics in each focus area, similar themes emerged, especially around the need for more-extensive and more-systematic data collection and around the use of agency policies to better govern a range of operations related to police violence, such as data collection and reporting and technology.

• More.....

  In this report, the authors use the terms police killings, police violence, and police shootings to describe these types of police behaviors, whether wrongful or not. The authors identify specific instances of these behaviors as misconduct, illegality, wrongful, or excessive when those descriptions apply.

Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2021. 80p.

By Jyoti Belur

Extrajudicial executions by law enforcement officers have blighted parts of the world for generations, but criminological coverage has been superficial and selective. It has often been presented as a problem specific to countries associated with military rule, dictatorial regimes and colonial heritage. Permission to Shoot?: Police Use of Deadly Force in Democracies brings a new dimension to the problem of police abuse of deadly force by concentrating on the social and political settings in India and the United States, both large democracies and vibrant superpowers. The research in the book is based on primary sources—interviews with police officers of varying ranks: with those who are involved in the killings; with those who facilitate such operations, and with those who are mute spectators. The book deals with universal, fundamental themes such as: • Why is it that in a democratic country the abuse of police powers can appear to be overtly and tacitly encouraged? • What motivational techniques and justifications are used to override social norms governing moral conduct, centring on the sector of society mandated to use deadly force against civilians? • What makes ordinary, decent human beings do horrible things? Permission to Shoot? seeks to provide broad guidelines and recommendations for reforms in policing policy and practice. The research peels back the opaque communication that often surrounds this issue, but more than that it shows how that kind of communication acts to support the practice itself.

New York: Springer, 2010. 226p.

By Desmond Ang, Panka Bencsik, Jesse Bruhn and Ellora Derenoncourt

How do high-profile acts of police brutality affect public trust and cooperation with law enforcement? To investigate this question, we develop a new measure of civilian crime reporting that isolates changes in community engagement with police from underlying changes in crime: the ratio of police-related 911 calls to gunshots detected by ShotSpotter technology. Examining detailed data from eight major American cities, we show a sharp drop in both the call-to-shot ratio and 911 call volume immediately after the police murder of George Floyd in May 2020. Notably, reporting rates decreased significantly in both non-white and white neighborhoods across the country. These effects persist for several months, and we find little evidence that they were reversed by the conviction of Floyd’s murderer. Together, the results illustrate how acts of police violence may destroy a key input into effective law enforcement and public safety: civilian engagement and reporting.

Cambridge, MA: Working paper, Harvard Kennedy School, 2021. 27p.

By Tanaya Devi and Roland G. Fryer, Jr.

This paper provides the first empirical examination of the impact of federal and state "Pattern-or-Practice" investigations on crime and policing. For investigations that were not preceded by "viral" incidents of deadly force, investigations, on average, led to a statistically significant reduction in homicides and total crime. In stark contrast, all investigations that were preceded by "viral" incidents of deadly force have led to a large and statistically significant increase in homicides and total crime. We estimate that these investigations caused almost 900 excess homicides and almost 34,000 excess felonies. The leading hypothesis for why these investigations increase homicides and total crime is an abrupt change in the quantity of policing activity. In Chicago, the number of police-civilian interactions decreased by almost 90% in the month after the investigation was announced. In Riverside CA, interactions decreased 54%. In St. Louis, self-initiated police activities declined by 46%. Other theories we test such as changes in community trust or the aggressiveness of consent decrees associated with investigations -- all contradict the data in important ways.

Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research, 2020. 673p

By Jonas Hansson, Miguel Inzunza and Isabelle Stjerna Doohan

From an international perspective, recent years have seen an increase in the use of conducted energy weapons (CEWs), which are used to control potentially dangerous and uncooperative people. In 2019 the Norwegian National Police Directorate launched a two-year trial of CEWs in daily police work. The purpose of the current study was to evaluate the National Police Directorate’s CEW trial and to explore the public’s perceptions of police use of CEWs. The current study found that CEWs are mainly used against individuals who are mentally unstable and exhibit aggressive and dangerous behaviour. The findings showed that CEWs fill the gap between pepper spray or batons and firearms and complement other forcible means. The findings from the interviews showed that the officers could resolve the situations before the introduction of CEWs, but with CEWs they could do so with less intrusive force and a lower risk of injury. … The citizen survey results indicate that citizens believe police officers can be trusted with decisions related to the use of force. The survey also showed that citizens who had received some information on CEWs were significantly more positive towards CEWs than those who had no information. Further, the group with information on CEWs also stated that they would feel more secure if police in their vicinity were equipped with CEWs

Umeå, Sweden: Umea University, 2021. 59p.

By Travis Campbell

A difference-in-differences design finds census places with Black Lives Matter protests experience a 15% to 20% decrease in police homicides over the ensuing five years, around 300 fewer deaths. The gap in lethal use-of-force between places with and without protests widens over these subsequent years and is most prominent when protests are large or frequent. This result holds for alternative specifications, estimators, police homicide datasets, and population screens; however, it does not hold if lethal use-of-force is normalized by violent crime or arrests. Protests also influence local police agencies, which may explain the reduction. Agencies with local protests become more likely to obtain body-cameras, expand community policing, receive a larger operating budget, and reduce the number of property crime-related arrests, but forgo some black officer employment and college education requirements.

Working paper, 2021. 65p.

By Desmond Ang

Nearly a thousand officer-involved killings occur each year in the United States. This paper documents the large, racially-disparate impacts of these events on the educational and psychological well-being of Los Angeles public high school students. Exploiting hyperlocal variation in how close students live to a killing, I find that exposure to police violence leads to persistent decreases in GPA, increased incidence of emotional disturbance and lower rates of high school completion and college enrollment. These effects are driven entirely by black and Hispanic students in response to police killings of other minorities and are largest for incidents involving unarmed individuals.

Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, Kennedy School of Government, 2020. 81p.

By Meagan Cahill, Melissa M. Labriola, and Jirka Taylor

In this report, RAND Corporation researchers summarize what is currently known about killings committed by police officers in the United States and identify existing evidence about various ways to prevent these killings. A relatively large body of research on these topics exists, but these studies often suffer from methodological shortcomings, largely stemming from the dearth of available data. Recognizing the need for more-rigorous work to guide efforts to reform police — and, more specifically, to reduce police killings — the authors present work focused on the development of a research agenda, or a road map, to reduce police killings. The report, based on an extensive literature review as well as interviews with policing experts, contains a series of recommendations for areas in which research efforts may be most effective in helping inform policy-making and decision-making aimed at reducing police killings. The authors identified six focus areas — foundational issues (such as racial inequities, police culture, and police unions), data and reporting, training, policies, technology, and consequences for officers. Reviewing the priority research topics in each focus area, similar themes emerged, especially around the need for more-extensive and more-systematic data collection and around the use of agency policies to better govern a range of operations related to police violence, such as data collection and reporting and technology.

Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2021. 80p.

By Human Rights Watch

Police in the Brazilian state of Rio de Janeiro have killed more than 8,000 people in the past decade, including at least 645 in 2015. Three quarters of those killed were black. Given that Rio police face real threats of violence from heavily-armed gangs, many of these killings were likely the result of the legitimate use of force. But many others were extrajudicial executions. “Good Cops Are Afraid” draws on interviews with more than 30 police officers—two of whom admitted to participating in executions—and in-depth documentation of 64 cases where there is credible evidence that police sought to cover up unlawful killings. Government data examined by Human RightsWatch supports the view of local justice officials that this practice is widespread. Unlawful police killings take a heavy toll—not only on the victims and their families—but also on the police force itself. The killings fuel cycles of violence that endanger the lives of all officers serving in high-crime areas, poison their relationship with local communities, and contribute to high levels of stress that undermine their ability to do their jobs well. The officers responsible for unlawful killings and cover ups are rarely brought to justice. While investigations by civil police have been woefully inadequate, responsibility for this failure ultimately lies with Rio’s Attorney General’s Office. Unless authorities take urgent steps to ensure accountability for unlawful police killings, it will be very hard for Rio to make real progress in reducing violence and improving public security.

New York: HRW, 2016. 118p.

By Hannah Doyle.

Terrorism, the use of military force in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria, and the fatal police shootings of unarmed persons have all contributed to renewed interest in the ethics of police and military use of lethal force and its moral justification. In this book, philosopher Seumas Miller analyzes the various moral justifications and moral responsibilities involved in the use of lethal force by police and military combatants, relying on a distinctive normative teleological account of institutional roles. His conception constitutes a novel alternative to prevailing reductive individualist and collectivist accounts. As Miller argues, police and military uses of lethal force are morally justified in part by recourse to fundamental natural moral rights and obligations, especially the right to personal self-defense and the moral obligation to defend the lives of innocent others. Yet the moral justification for police and military use of lethal force is to some extent role-specific. Both police officers and military combatants evidently have an institutionally-based moral duty to put themselves in harm's way to protect others. Under some circumstances, however, police have an institutionally based moral duty to use lethal force to uphold the law; and military combatants have an institutionally based moral duty to use lethal force to win wars. Two key notions in play are joint action and the natural right to self-defense. Miller uses a relational individualist theory of joint actions to construct the notion of multi-layered structures of joint action in order to explicate organizational action. He also provides a novel theory of justifiable killing in self-defense. Over the course of his book, Miller covers a variety of urgent topics, such as police shootings of armed offenders, police shooting of suicide-bombers, targeted killing, autonomous weapons, humanitarian armed intervention, and civilian immunity. New York: Oxford University Press 2016, 312p.

Prepared for Mark and Elena Patterson. In memoriam Luke Patterson

.This report summarizes what is currently known about killings committed by police officers in the United States and identifies existing evidence about various ways to prevent them. A relatively large body of research on these topics exists, but these studies often suffer from methodological shortcomings, largely stemming from the dearth of available data on police killings. Recognizing the need for more-rigorous work to guide efforts to reform police—and, more specifically, to reduce police killings—this report presents work focused on the development of a research agenda, or a road map, to reduce police killings. The report, based on an extensive literature review as well as interviews with policing experts, presents a series of recommendations for areas in which research efforts may be most effective in helping inform policymaking and decisionmaking aimed at reducing police killings.

Police are one of the only institutions in the United States allowed to use force to coerce civilian compliance with laws and government decisions. In some cases, force—even fatal force—is needed to maintain the safety of the general public. But too often, excessive force is used against civilians, and this is the target of current police reform efforts in the United States. Sustained attention to and momentum toward reducing police killings had been lacking until May 2020, when the highly publicized murder of George Floyd was committed. Contributing to the current national conversation, this report summarizes what is currently known about killings committed by police in the United States and identifies existing evidence about various ways to prevent them.

RAND 2022. 80p.