scholarly journals Big data and the New Transparency: Measuring and representing police killings

2017 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 205395171769633
Author(s):  
Ben Brucato
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Big Data ◽  
Police Officers ◽  
Use Of Force ◽  
The United States ◽  
Police Violence ◽  
Police Use Of Force

Controversies about recent killings by police officers in the United States have prompted widespread questioning about the scale and changes in police use of force. A perceived lack of transparency about the frequency of police killings amplifies concerns that many such killings are unjustified. This commentary considers efforts by journalists and activists to comprise databases that document and measure police violence, particularly in terms of how these endeavors exemplify the New Transparency.

Police Violence

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jenna Milani ◽  
Ben Bradford ◽  
Jonathan Jackson
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Social Control ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Use Of Force ◽  
The United States ◽  
Police Violence ◽  
Police Use Of Force ◽  
England And Wales ◽  
Self Harm

The ability of the police to assert social control and reproduce social order depends, crucially, on the capacity to use force to achieve these ends—whether when restraining someone attempting to self-harm or shooting dead an armed terrorist. But what do we know about police use of force in the United States and England and Wales? Why does unjustified police use of force occur? And why do citizens have different views on the acceptability and unacceptability of various forms of police violence?

The Men Who Lived Underground: The Chicago Police Torture Cases and the Problem of Measuring Police Violence, 1970-2016

2017 ◽  
Vol 44 (2) ◽  
pp. 262-277 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew S. Baer
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Police Officers ◽  
Historical Data ◽  
Use Of Force ◽  
The United States ◽  
Primary Method ◽  
Police Violence ◽  
Criminal Investigations ◽  
Chicago Police ◽  
Official Data

Historical data on the use of force by police officers in the United States are unreliable or nonexistent. Available data, moreover, focus primarily on the behavior of patrolmen on the streets while neglecting violence by detectives during criminal investigations. Through an examination of a police torture scandal in Chicago from the early 1970s through the late 1990s, this article explains why violence during custodial interrogation often goes undocumented. In Chicago, the primary method of discovering, correcting, or preventing custodial abuse—pretrial motions to suppress statements—proved inadequate. By including the work of detectives, this article argues that a true measurement of police violence, impossible in practice, would likely be much higher than official data suggest.

Challenging the Ordinality of Police Use-of-Force Policy

2021 ◽  
pp. 088740342110383
Author(s):  
Scott M. Mourtgos ◽  
Ian T. Adams ◽  
Samuel R. Baty
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Use Of Force ◽  
Police Department ◽  
The United States ◽  
Physical Force ◽  
Police Use Of Force ◽  
Lethal Force ◽  
Police Agencies ◽  
Municipal Police ◽  
Force Data

Most use-of-force policies utilized by U.S. police agencies make fundamental ordinal assumptions about officers’ force responses to subject resistance. These policies consist of varying levels of force and resistance along an ordinally ranked continuum of severity. We empirically tested the ordinal assumptions that are ubiquitous to police use-of-force continua within the United States using 1 year’s use-of-force data from a municipal police department. Applying a quantitative technique known as categorical regression with optimal scaling, we found the assumptions of ordinality within the studied department’s use-of-force continuum (which is similar to many police use-of-force continua within the United States) are not met. Specifying physical force as a “lower” force option than less-lethal tools is associated with increased officer injury and decreased subject injury. Our findings call into question use-of-force continua featuring ordinal rankings for varying categories of less-lethal force.

scholarly journals Police Use of Body-Worn Cameras: Challenges of Visibility, Procedural Justice, and Legitimacy

2019 ◽  
Vol 17 (3/4) ◽  
pp. 305-321 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ermus St. Louis ◽  
Alana Saulnier ◽  
Kevin Walby
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Social Development ◽  
Community Policing ◽  
United States Of America ◽  
Use Of Force ◽  
The United States ◽  
Local Democracy ◽  
Police Use Of Force ◽  
Community Police ◽  
Accountability Mechanism

Recent controversies over police use of force in the United States of America have placed a spotlight on police in Western nations. Concerns that police conduct is racist and procedurally unjust have generated public sentiments that accountability must be externally imposed on police. One such accountability mechanism is body-worn cameras (BWCs). Optimistic accounts of BWCs suggest that the technology will contribute to the improvement of community–police relations. However, BWCs address consequences, not causes, of poor community–police relations. We argue that the evolving visibility of police associated with BWCs is double-edged, and suggest that the adoption of surveillance technologies such as BWCs in the quest to improve community–police relations will fail without a simultaneous commitment to inclusionary policing practices (such as community policing strategies, community and social development, and local democracy). We outline two initiatives that optimize BWCs by promoting these simultaneous commitments.

scholarly journals The Law on Police Use of Force in the United States

2020 ◽  
Vol 21 (8) ◽  
pp. 1526-1540
Author(s):  
Brandon Garrett ◽  
Christopher Slobogin
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Supreme Court ◽  
Use Of Force ◽  
Fourth Amendment ◽  
The United States ◽  
Deadly Force ◽  
Regulatory Regime ◽  
Police Use Of Force ◽  
The Law ◽  
The Impact

AbstractRecent events in the United States have highlighted the fact that American police resort to force, including deadly force, much more often than in many other Western countries. This Article describes how the current regulatory regime may ignore or even facilitate these aggressive police actions. The law governing police use of force in the United States derives in large part from the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures. As construed by the United States Supreme Court, the Fourth Amendment provides police wide leeway in using deadly force, making custodial arrests, and stopping and frisking individuals. While state and local police departments can develop more restrictive rules, they often do not. Additionally, the remedies for violations of these rules are weak. The predominant remedy is exclusion of evidence, the impact of which falls primarily on the prosecutor and in any event only has a deterrent effect when evidence is sought. Civil and criminal sanctions have been significantly limited by the Supreme Court, particularly through the doctrine of qualified immunity (applied to individual officers) and the policy or custom defense (applied to municipalities). This minimal regulatory regime is one reason police-citizen encounters in the United States so often result in death or serious bodily harm to citizens, in particular those who are Black. The Article ends with a number of reform proposals.

Deadly Force

Criminology ◽  
2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip M. Stinson
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Law Enforcement ◽  
Police Officers ◽  
Use Of Force ◽  
The United States ◽  
Deadly Force ◽  
Bodily Injury ◽  
Police Accountability ◽  
Imminent Threat ◽  
Meaningful Data

Deadly force refers to any use of force by a police officer that could result in the imposition of serious bodily injury or death. It includes homicides by police. Most homicides by police in the United States are found to be legally justified. A sworn law enforcement officer with general powers of arrest is legally justified in using deadly force if the officer has a reasonable apprehension of an imminent threat of serious bodily injury or death being imposed against the officer or someone else. The fleeing felon rule has been abrogated and police officers are no longer legally justified in using deadly force to stop a fleeing felon absent other exigencies that would constitute an imminent threat. Deadly force research has long been hampered by the lack of meaningful data on the incidence and prevalence of police use of deadly force. Government counts of fatal officer-involved shootings have grossly underestimated annual counts of deadly force incidents. Recent open-source databases, largely created and curated by media organizations, have found that between 900 and 1,000 persons are shot and killed by on-duty police officers each year in the United States. This bibliography mostly focuses on deadly force in the United States. There has been a renewed interest in deadly force research in the aftermath of numerous officer-involved shooting in recent years, with calls for police accountability, transparency, and legitimacy, particularly as various stakeholders have called attention to racial disparities in terms of who is victimized by police deadly force and claims of police bias manifested through police violence against minority citizens.

scholarly journals Risk of being killed by police use of force in the United States by age, race–ethnicity, and sex

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frank Edwards ◽  
Hedwig Lee ◽  
Michael H Esposito
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Alaska Native ◽  
African American Men ◽  
Use Of Force ◽  
The United States ◽  
Average Lifetime ◽  
Latino Men ◽  
Police Use Of Force ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Asian Pacific

We use novel data on police-involved deaths to estimate how the risk of being killed by police use-of-force in the United States varies across social groups. We estimate the lifetime and age-specific risks of being killed by police by race and sex. We also provide estimates of the proportion of all deaths accounted for by police use-of-force. We find that African American men and women, American Indian / Alaska Native men and women, and Latino men face higher lifetime risk of being killed by police than do their white peers. We find that Latino women and Asian / Pacific Islander men and women face lower risk of being killed by police than do their white peers. Risk is highest for Black men, who (at current levels of risk) face about a 1 in 1,000 chance of being killed by police over the life course. The average lifetime odds of being killed by police are about 1 in 2,000 for men and about 1 in 33,000 for women. Risk peaks between the ages of 20 and 35 for all groups. For young men of color, police use-of-force is among the leading causes of death.

scholarly journals Risk of being killed by police use of force in the United States by age, race–ethnicity, and sex

2019 ◽  
Vol 116 (34) ◽  
pp. 16793-16798 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frank Edwards ◽  
Hedwig Lee ◽  
Michael Esposito
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Alaska Native ◽  
African American Men ◽  
Use Of Force ◽  
The United States ◽  
Average Lifetime ◽  
Latino Men ◽  
Police Use Of Force ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Asian Pacific

We use data on police-involved deaths to estimate how the risk of being killed by police use of force in the United States varies across social groups. We estimate the lifetime and age-specific risks of being killed by police by race and sex. We also provide estimates of the proportion of all deaths accounted for by police use of force. We find that African American men and women, American Indian/Alaska Native men and women, and Latino men face higher lifetime risk of being killed by police than do their white peers. We find that Latina women and Asian/Pacific Islander men and women face lower risk of being killed by police than do their white peers. Risk is highest for black men, who (at current levels of risk) face about a 1 in 1,000 chance of being killed by police over the life course. The average lifetime odds of being killed by police are about 1 in 2,000 for men and about 1 in 33,000 for women. Risk peaks between the ages of 20 y and 35 y for all groups. For young men of color, police use of force is among the leading causes of death.

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