A statistical review published by psychologists from Michigan State University made headlines in 2019 when it claimed to find “no evidence of anti-Black or anti-Hispanic disparities across [police] shootings, and [that] White officers are not more likely to shoot minority civilians than non-White officers.” After years of highly visible cases of police violence against African Americans, and in particular young Black men, the conclusion barely seemed credible. Now a fresh look at the data used in that review shows there’s a good reason for the counterintuitive findings: They are not accurate at all.
In fact, what the new analysis shows is that the “no disparity” findings of the previous paper were created only by ignoring major contributing factors that disguised the truth about police violence. Factors like whether the victim of the shooting was armed. Factors like whether that person was trying to commit suicide. Remove that fog from the data, and young Black men are 13 times more likely to be the victim of a fatal police shooting than their white peers.
The original paper started from a simple premise that says the nation is 50% white and 12% Black. Pore back over the statistics for the period with a few simple assumptions, and they concluded that the victim of a fatal police shooting was actually 6.67 times more likely be white than Black—a narrative that runs counter to what appears every day in the news. And it’s also a narrative that made this study a big hit on the right, where it was touted as evidence that not only are police colorblind, it’s whites who have to watch out for the police.
But the assumptions made in the original paper were more than a little convenient. As the new analysis shows, the numbers were based on several values that simply don’t hold up to scrutiny.
For one thing, the paper assumed that the rate of police encounters involving someone trying to commit suicide—either by directly challenging the police, or endangering others as part of a suicide effort—was equal across races. That’s not the case. The majority of suicide cases that ended in a police shooting overwhelmingly involved white people. They also generally involved older victims. Taking out those shootings related to suicide moves the numbers significantly.
The original paper also made other all-things-equal projections, such as calculating on a basis that mental health issues were the same across all communities. And that rates of firearm possession were the same.
But a even bigger factor involves the underlying basis of the original paper. To get to their model that a white person was 6.67 times more likely to be subject to a fatal police shooting, they didn’t go by just population statistics—because that’s not what the statistics show. On a pure population basis, whites were much less likely to be victims of a police shooting. What the original paper is actually saying is that white people are just as likely to be shot in an encounter with police.
To determine how often people interacted with the police, the researchers looked at crime statistics as a proxy. By using the crime rate rather than population, the original researchers claimed that the average Black person was much more likely to have a police encounter than a white person. And when that was factored in, the outcome of encounters was likely to be similar. So the original paper was never saying what many headlines were claiming.
When that inflation-by-crime rate is removed, and the way the suicide rate actually skews older, and whiteness is factored out, the new analysis brings a startling different conclusion. Except the conclusion isn’t startling, because it’s the same one we see on television and social media day after day.
Young unarmed Black men are much more likely to be the subjects of fatal police shootings. In fact young, unarmed, male victims of police shootings are “13.67 times more likely to be Black than White, 95% confidence interval.”
The original authors of the first study have responded, admitting that the original paper was wrong in claiming there was no evidence of police bias—in part because that original paper also looked at the race of officers involved in shootings. But they deny that population is an appropriate value to use in determining the rate of police shootings, and stick by their model based on crime statistics. Basing the results on population “adds little to our understanding,” they say, because “it is already widely known that Black citizens are shot more than White citizens on a per capita basis.”
Which … seems like the important point, rather than fishing for some way of manipulating the numbers to make it not so.