“If black people weren’t shot at a disproportionate rate, would people be shouting “Hands up! Don’t Shoot!” and “I can’t breathe” as they march through the cities?” Otis R. Taylor, Jr./San Francisco Chronicle June 1, 2020.
How do we determine what is “disproportionate”? By comparing one set of numbers with another set, like in the following table:
If we compare black arrest-related deaths to the black share of the state population, these deaths are clearly disproportionate. But if share of population is the appropriate comparison, why would the cops be so gentle with Asians, whose arrest-related deaths are less than a fifth of their share of the California population? Obviously something else is at work here, such as the frequency of interactions between different racial/ethnic groups and the police. There is no single measure for these interactions, but "percent of felony defendants” is a decent proxy for particularly tense interactions, given that felony defendants are often arrested unwillingly. And when this metric is used as the point of comparison, there is no evidence of racial bias in arrest-related deaths - at least not in California, not recently. Of course, the high number of black felony defendants in itself may be a product of racial bias, but that’s a subject for another post.
So what should be the point of comparison for questions of race, ethnicity and arrest-related deaths? The answer matters, because it sheds light on the nature of the problem…which in turn leads to better ideas on how to fix it.
—
Further Reading:
R. G. Fryer, Jr (2019). "An Empirical Analysis of Racial Differences in Police Use of Force." Journal of Political Economy 127(3): 1210-1261. https://www.hoplofobia.info/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/2016-An-Empirical-Analysis-of-Racial-Differences-in-Police-Use-of-Force.pdf
“On non-lethal uses of force, blacks and Hispanics are more than fifty percent more likely to experience some form of force in interactions with police. Adding controls that account for important context and civilian behavior reduces, but cannot fully explain, these disparities. On the most extreme use of force – officer-involved shootings – we find no racial differences in either the raw data or when contextual factors are taken into account.”
Taylor, P. L. (2020). Dispatch Priming and the Police Decision to Use Deadly Force. Police Quarterly. https://doi.org/10.1177/1098611119896653
“The findings suggest that officers rely heavily on dispatched information in making the decision to pull the trigger when confronted with an ambiguously armed subject in a simulated environment. When the dispatched information was erroneous, it contributed to a significant increase in shooting errors.”
Cesario, J., Johnson, D.J., & Terrill, W. (2019). Is there evidence of racial disparity in police use of deadly force? Analyses of officer-involved shootings in 2015-2016. Social Psychological and Personality Science https://doi.org/10.1177/1948550618775108
“When adjusting for crime, we find no systematic evidence of anti-Black disparities in fatal shootings, fatal shootings of unarmed citizens, or fatal shootings involving misidentification of harmless objects….[However], exposure to police given crime rate differences likely accounts for the higher per capita rate of fatal police shootings for Blacks, at least when analyzing all shootings.”