By James P. Murphy, Roland Neil, Jessica Welburn Paige

Key Findings

• The impact of police shootings is severe—particularly for communities of color in the United States—and more-nuanced research is needed to understand the dynamics of racial bias.

• Thinking of racial bias in police shootings as a process with a series of stages can improve research in this area. These stages include officers’ encounters with civilians, use of force, and the type of force used.

• Fully unpacking how racial bias operates in police shootings is challenging due to data limitations. These limitations include unreliable federal and crowdsourced datasets, and the problem is particularly severe for non-fatal shootings.

• The most common forms of tests—benchmark and outcome tests—face significant challenges in inferring bias that research has only started to confront.

• We recommend several ways to improve understanding of the dynamics of racial bias in police shootings: better data, clearer definitions and estimands, better methods, and the use of bounding and sensitivity analyses.

Shootings of racial minority civilians by police officers have long been a major social issue in the United States, the subject of extensive media coverage, and a reality that has galvanized social movements, such as Black Lives Matter. Police in the United States shoot people at far higher rates than police in other economically developed countries (Zimring, 2017). The victims of these shootings are disproportionately Black and, to a lesser extent, Hispanic, compared with their shares of the population. These shootings occur in a society that continues to grapple with its oftentimes racist history, one that, to this day, remains beset with pervasive racial inequalities. This is especially true of the relationship between police in the United States and the country’s minority communities, which, although complex, has long been characterized by high degrees of both mistreatment and mistrust. It is perhaps no surprise, then, that this issue has become a national flashpoint and that high-profile police shootings weigh so heavily on the psyche of Americans, especially Black Americans.

In this context, researchers have increasingly sought to answer a fundamental question: To what extent are police shootings of civilians driven by racial bias? This is research that is high profile and high stakes, being published in prestigious journals, getting coverage in leading media outlets, and gaining exposure among a public in search of answers. However, research on this topic faces limitations: the quality of data available and the methods used to make inferences about racial bias. These limitations are significant enough to call into question the findings of this body of work.[1]

In this essay, we review the evidence to date (as of early 2024) on racial bias in police shootings, focusing on the data and methodological challenges that exist for research on this topic. In particular, we explore the importance of thinking of racial bias as a process with a series of stages, the data that are available to study bias in shootings, the main methods that have been used and their limitations, and—crucially—how researchers ought to procced to arrive at stronger and more-informative conclusions. While we employ a critical eye, our goal is productive: to draw attention to the data and methodological improvements most needed to strengthen research on this pivotal topic.

Santa Monica CA: RAND, 2024. 23p.