By Justin Nix and John A. Shjarback

Objectives

To quantify nonfatal injurious police shootings of people and examine the factors associated with victim mortality.

Methods

We gathered victim-level data on fatal and nonfatal injurious police shootings from four states that have such information publicly available: Florida (2009–14), Colorado (2010–19), Texas (2015–19), and California (2016–19). For each state, we examined bivariate associations between mortality and race/ethnicity, gender, age, weapon, and access to trauma care. We also estimated logistic regression models predicting victim mortality in each state.

Results

Forty-five percent of these police shooting victims (N = 1,322) did not die. Black–white disparities were more pronounced in nonfatal injurious police shootings than in fatal police shootings. Overall, Black victims were less likely than white victims to die from their wound(s). Younger victims were less likely to die from their wound(s), as well as those who were unarmed.

Conclusions

Racial and age disparities in police shootings are likely more pronounced than previous estimates suggest.

Policy implications

Other states should strongly consider compiling data like that which is currently being gathered in California. Absent data on nonfatal injurious police shootings–which account for a large share of deadly force incidents–researchers and analysts must be cautious about comparing and/or ranking jurisdictions in terms of their police-involved fatality rates.

PLOS One,  November 10, 2021

By Daniel S. Nagin

Do states with more guns have higher rates of fatal police shootings? This article uses a validated measure of firearm availability (the percentage of suicides committed with a firearm) to examine the relationship between gun proliferation and fatal police shootings. It expands on existing research to include (1) measures of access to Level I and II trauma centers, (2) interpretation of the findings from the lenses of “statistical prediction,” and (3) tests for structural differences between models for black descendants versus nonblack decedents. Findings confirm the correlation between statewide prevalence of gun ownership and fatal police shootings for both all decedents and unarmed decedents. It provides partial support for “statistical prediction” by police and finds that greater access to trauma centers is associated with lower rates of citizen deaths. The analysis suggests a far broader range of policy options for saving lives, such as better enforcement of legal restrictions on firearm possession, than focusing solely on policing systems.

The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social ScienceVolume 687, Issue 1, January 2020, Pages 49-57

By Jennifer Carlson

The summer of 2020 was a summer of mass unrest. Protesting the thousand-plus, disproportionately Black and Indigenous lives taken every year by police violence, millions of Americans mobilized for racial justice and police accountability under the banner of Black Lives Matter. Their message was not new — the Black Lives Matter movement was founded years earlier in the aftermath of George Zimmerman’s acquittal for the murder of Trayvon Martin — but its urgency felt renewed amid egregious cases of anti-Black racism, police violence, growing political polarization, and white supremacist extremism. The killings of Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd, Dion Johnson, and Breonna Taylor — a handful among thousands — yet again spotlighted police complicity with and perpetuation of anti-Black violence, invigorating months of protests and calls for police accountability, police demilitarization, police defunding, and even police abolition. The demands themselves differed in substance; some focused on closing down police departments altogether, while others emphasized the fiscal necessity of redirecting public funding from police to other agencies.1 But the gist of these calls was unanimous: they insist that to transform rather than merely reform the institutions within American society that perpetuate anti-Black racism, police must be decentered as the go-to institution for solving not just problems of crime but social problems more generally. Anti-Black racism within policing is one slice of the entrenched tendency in 20th- and 21st-century America to treat a wide panoply of social problems as problems of crime and bloat the criminal justice system as the catchall state apparatus to address those problems — a dynamic that legal scholar Jonathan Simon describes as “governing through crime.”2 The protests, the demands, and the community organizing of 2020 may have been immediately focused on the criminal justice system, but because that system has so thoroughly penetrated vast realms of American society as a core vector of anti-Black racism, the message carried by the protesters reached far and wide — including gun politics. Often buttressing the well-worn terms of the gun debate, those in favor of increased gun regulations declared that “police violence is gun violence,” while others promoted gun ownership as a way to put the message to “defund the police” into practice. But the challenge that the summer 2020 Black Lives Matter protests have posed to American gun politics goes far beyond rehashing the usual sides of the gun debate in the key of anti-Black police violence. Rather, this challenge invites those invested in the gun debate to consider their own complicity with the criminal justice system and how, by decentering crime and criminalization within the gun debate, that debate might be transformed. In short, the summer 2020 protests challenge us to imagine anti-racist gun politics.

New York: Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law, 2021. 10p.

By Robert VerBruggen  

When the 2014 police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, set off riots, we knew very little about the true number of people killed by American law enforcement. But since that time, private actors have stepped up efforts to count such killings comprehensively—and to collect some basic details about each incident. These data, along with agency-specific information furnished by police departments, have facilitated a massive amount of research into an important question: whether there is racial bias in police officers’ use of lethal force. This report summarizes several major lines of work on this question. The simplest studies merely compare racial groups’ rates of police-killing deaths with their rates of crime. Other studies meticulously account for the situational factors of each case, ask whether black officers are less likely than white officers to kill black suspects, analyze police-shooting rates geographically, or even put officers in simulation exercises to see how they respond to suspects of different races.

New York: Manhattan Institute, 2022. 32p.

By London Assembly, Police and Crime Committee

Taser is the brand name of the ‘conductive energy device’ used by police forces in England and Wales. Taser is a laser‐sighted, single shot weapon designed to incapacitate a subject through the use of an electrical current, which temporarily interferes with the body’s neuromuscular system. Taser is classed as a restricted firearm under Section 5 of the 1968 Firearms Act. Taser is one of a range of ‘less lethal’ weapons which have been approved by the Home Office. Under United Nations, European Union and national law, the Home Office is responsible for maintaining a range of weapons which allow officers to deploy the least amount of violence necessary to resolve a given situation. In England and Wales, Taser is part of a series of potential interventions which vary from verbal negotiation to CS spray, baton charges and traditional firearms in dealing with potentially disruptive or violent suspects. The term ‘less lethal’ is used as an acknowledgement that any weapon can be lethal if used incorrectly. The Home Office first authorised the use of Taser by the Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) in 2003, and then allowed forces to expand its use in 2008. Taser is now used by two types of officer: • Those who had undergone firearms training; and • Additional officers who had been designated members of Specially Trained Units by the Chief Officer in their area.1 The majority of Taser guns are used by specialist firearms officers and officers within the Territorial Support Group.

London: Greater London Authority, 2013. 31p.