By Hossein Zare, Andrea N. Ponce, Rebecca Valek , Niloufar Masoudi , Daniel Webster, Roland J. Thorpe Jr. Michelle Spencer, Cassandra Crifasi , and Darrell Gaskin

Social vulnerability, race, and place are three important predictors of fatal police shootings. This research offers the first assessment of these factors at the zip code level. Methods: The 2015−2022 Mapping Police Violence and Washington Post Fatal Force Data (2015 −2022) were used and combined with the American Community Survey (2015−2022). The social vulnerability index (SVI) was computed for each zip code by using indicators suggested by CDC, then categorized into low-, medium-, and high-SVI. The analytical file included police officers who fatally shot 6,901 individuals within 32,736 zip codes between 2015 and 2022. Negative Binomial Regression (NBRG) models were run to estimate the association between number of police shootings and zip code SVI, racial composition, and access to guns using 2015-2022 data. Results: Moving from low-SVI to high-SVI revealed the number of fatal police shootings increased 8.3 times, with the highest increases in Blacks (20.4 times), and Hispanics (27.1 times). The NBRG showed that moderate-, and high-SVI zip codes experienced higher fatal police shootings by 1.97, and 3.26 times than low-SVI zip codes; zip code racial composition, working age population, number of violent crimes, number of police officers and access to a gun, were other predictors of fatal police shootings. Conclusions: Social vulnerability and racial composition of a zip code are associated with fatal police shooting, both independently and when considered together. What drives deadly police shootings in the United States is not one single factor, but rather complex interactions between social-vulnerability, race, and place that must be tackled synchronously. Action must be taken to address underlying determinants of disparities in policing.

American Journal of Preventive Medicine, Volume 68, Issue 1, January 2025, Pages 126-136

By Susan Olzak

Though it has had a long history, the recent social movement aimed at stopping police violence against minorities has consistently endorsed policies designed to make police conduct more accountable. This paper analyzes the effects of protest in cities on the establishment of Citizen Review Boards (CRBs) in recent decades. It also examines whether or not the presence of a CRB influences subsequent rates of police-involved fatalities in cities.

Preprint, 2020.

By John A. Shjarback

Broader public, media, and scholarly interest in police shootings of residents in the United States has been a constant since 2014. This interest followed a number of high-profile deadly force incidents, including those leading to the deaths of Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO, and Tamir Rice in Cleveland, OH. In the decade since, researchers from a variety of academic disciplines have learned much about the scope and nature of police shootings. While US police as a whole use their firearms more than most other countries, rates of police shootings of residents vary across states.

The purpose of this report is to examine police shootings of residents—including both fatal and nonfatal, injurious incidents—using a comparative lens. More specifically, it explores rates of police shootings in the states comprising the Regional Gun Violence Research Consortium (RGVRC)—Connecticut, Delaware, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, and Rhode Island—with the rest of the country. These comparisons suggest an association between levels of firearm prevalence/availability in the general population, as well as related laws and rates of police shootings per capita. The majority of RGVRC states possess the lowest rates of police shootings of residents, which appears to at least partially be a function of low levels of firearm prevalence/availability among residents and strong laws and legislation related to guns.

Albany, NY: Rockefeller Institute of Government, 2024. 20p.

By: Thiago R Oliveira, Johnathan Jackson, Renan Theodoro de Olivieria

Objectives: Examine the legal socialization of adolescents aged 11 to 14 years in São Paulo, Brazil, a city characterized by a high prevalence of police violence and organized crime. Assess the extent to which exposure to neighborhood and police violence and aggression influence adolescents’ developmental trajectories of beliefs about the legitimacy of the law.

Methods: A four-wave longitudinal survey of 2005-born adolescents living in São Paulo was fielded annually between 2016 and 2019 and measured respondents’ perceptions of legal legitimacy, exposures to neighborhood and police violence, and police contact. Adopting a life- course approach, developmental trajectories are estimated using quadratic latent growth curve models.

Results: Witnessing police officers assaulting a suspect, being involuntarily stopped by the police, and seeing people selling drugs on the street are all negatively associated with changes in legal legitimacy beliefs. Exposure to gunshots, gun-carrying, or robberies are not associated with changes in legitimacy beliefs.

Conclusions: Indicating that adolescents in São Paulo are socialized through violence, exposure to police violence and proximity to organized crime could undermine their development of legal legitimacy beliefs. Exposure to other episodes of neighborhood violence might be too frequent in this context and do not distinguish adolescents’ developmental trajectories of legitimacy beliefs.

Preprint, 2023.

By Abdul Nasser Rad, David S. Kirk, and William P. Jones

Recent discussions of police violence in the United States and the corresponding lack of accountability have shone a light on a highly debated agent opposing police reform—police unions. Although police unionism continues to be an understudied area, a recent wave of empirical investigations, both qualitative and quantitative, have contributed to a nascent understanding of the ways in which police union mechanisms facilitate police misconduct and violence. Accordingly, in this review we first discuss the origins of police unionism in the United States, illustrating how historical forces, including racial animus, have shaped the existing landscape. Then, we highlight significant empirical work exploring the relationship between police unionism and misconduct. Thereafter, we review the potential intervening mechanisms, which are employed in ways to reduce disciplinary consequences of misconduct and excessive use of force, undermine oversight of the police, and limit police transparency. We end with a set of recommendations on future avenues for research.

Annual Review of Criminology, 2023. 6:181–203

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 David Klinger

What's it like to have official sanction to shoot and kill? In this brilliantly written, controversial, and compelling book, author David Klinger - who himself shot and killed a suspect during his first year as an officer in the Los Angeles Police Department - answers this and many other questions about what it's like to live and work in the place where police officers have to make split-second decisions about life and death: The Kill Zone.

Klinger, now a university professor, writes eloquently about what happens when police officers find themselves face-to-face with dangerous criminals, the excruciating decisions they have to make to shoot or to hold their fire, and how they deal with the consequences of their choices.

San Francisco. Jossey-Bass. 2004. 304p.

By Goldberg, Zach

From the document: "Recently, there has been a dramatic increase in media and public attention to police brutality and racial bias. By some measures, the volume of media references to these topics has been greater over the past decade than ever before. Google search behavior shows that Americans are consuming this messaging ('Figure 1'), and their attitudes toward police--particularly Democrats' and liberals' attitudes--have responded accordingly. Confidence in police has never been lower, while antipolice sentiment, perceptions of police brutality and racism, and support for defunding the police have never been higher. So much have perceptions of racist policing grown that, as of 2021, more than half (52%) of Democrats felt that levels of racism were greater among police officers than other societal groups (up from 35% in 2014). Fears of the police among black Americans have increased to the point that, in 2020, roughly 74% of black respondents to a Quinnipiac University poll said that they 'personally worry' about being the victim of police brutality, compared with 64% and 57% who said so in 2018 and 2016, respectively. Yet these trends in media coverage and public perceptions seem divorced from empirical reality. A stark illustration of this was provided by a nationally representative survey conducted in 2019 by the Skeptic Research Center, which found that nearly 33% of people--including 44% of liberals--thought that 1,000 or more unarmed black men 'alone' were killed by police in 2019. In fact, according to the Mapping Police Violence (MPV) database, 29 unarmed black (vs. 44 white) men were killed by police that year."

NY. Manhattan Institute for Policy Research. 2023. 50p.

By Beatriz Magaloni, Edgar Franco Vivanco, Vanessa Melo

State interventions against drug trafficking organizations (DTOs) sometimes work to improve security, but often exacerbate violence. To understand why, this paper offers a theory about different social order dynamics among five types of criminal regimes – Insurgent, Bandit, Symbiotic, Predatory, and Anarchic. These differ according to whether criminal groups confront or collude with state actors; predate or cooperate with the community; and hold a monopoly or contest territory with rival DTOs. Police interventions in these criminal orders pose different challenges and are associated with markedly different local security outcomes. Evidence for the theory is provided by the use a multi-method research design combining quasi-experimental statistical analyses, extensive qualitative research and a large N survey in the context of Rio de Janeiro’s “Pacifying Police Units” (UPPs), which sought to reclaim control of the slums from organized criminal groups.

American Political Science Review. 2020. 51p.

By Cecilia MacDowell Santos

Women's Police Stations examines the changing and complex relationship between women and the state, and the construction of gendered citizenship. These are police stations run exclusively by police women for women with the authority to investigate crimes against women, such as domestic violence, assault, and rape. S?o Paulo was the home of the first such police station, and there are now more than 300 women's police stations throughout Brazil. Cecilia MacDowell Santos examines the importance of this phenomenon in book form for the first time, looking at the dynamics of the relationship between women and the state as a consequence of a political regime as well as other factors, and exploring the notion of gendered citizenship.

New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. 246p.

Edited by Vicente Riccio and Wesley G. Skogan

In Brazil, where crime is closely associated with social inequality and failure of the criminal justice system, the police are considered by most to be corrupt, inefficient, and violent, especially when occupying poor areas, and they lack the widespread legitimacy enjoyed by police forces in many nations in the northern hemisphere. This text covers hot-button issues like urban pacification squads, gangs, and drugs, as well as practical topics such as policy, dual civil and military models, and gender relations.

The latest volume in the renowned Advances in Police Theory and Practice Series, Police and Society in Brazil fills a gap in the English literature about policing in a nation that currently ranks sixth in number of homicides. It is a must-read for criminal justice practitioners, as well as students of international policing.

New York: Routledge, 2017. 206p.

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 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 Erica Marat

In most Soviet successor states, the police militia are among the least trusted government agencies. The police are frequently seen as representatives of the state who are allowed to persecute ordinary citizens, extort bribes, and protect the real criminals. This leads to cycles of mutual antagonism in which society does not expect the police to perform their function properly, and the police are unable to enforce state regulation of society. In the examples of Georgia and Kyrgyzstan in this monograph, Dr. Erica Marat examines which domestic processes will likely fail and which have a chance to succeed in changing the post- Soviet police from a punitive institution into a more democratic entity. Dr. Marat demonstrates that the fundamental element of police reform in the post-Soviet context must be a redefinition of what constitutes the legitimate use of violence against civilians to maintain order in everyday life and during mass protests. It means toning down the use of forceful methods against the unruly and redefining which crimes must be prosecuted. In the course of the reform, the government must relinquish its ability to control the thoughts and actions of opponents and the people. Instead of being used as a punitive instrument of oppression, the postauthoritarian police must learn to behave in a transparent, accountable way, by respecting the rights of citizens. Importantly, new venues and forms of interaction between society and the police should emerge, while a country's chief police agency should become responsive to the concerns of the public. The police must begin to work on behalf of the public, not the regime, and to obey the rule of law, not government orders. Essentially, democratic police reform in the post-Soviet or any context means entrusting the citizenry to police the police

Carlisle, PA: U.S. Army War College,Strategic Studies Institute, 2013. 74p.