Research into racial disparities in officer-involved shootings has been limited by a lack of publicly available data.
But new research published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences uses a more complete data set of fatal police shootings.
It concludes that in 2015, the police officer’s race, sex, or experience level did not predict the race of the person fatally shot.
Dr. David Johnson, a social psychologist at the University of Maryland, and his team say that white officers, for example, were not more likely than non-white officers to shoot civilians of a different race.
Instead, if more violent crime in a given county was committed by individuals from one race, then someone of that same race was more likely to be shot and killed by the police.
In a county where more whites committed violent crime, for instance, more whites were fatally shot by police.
“” We have better information on how many people die of shark bites every year than we do people who are fatally shot by police.Until recently, detailed information about deaths from police officer shootings relied on voluntary reporting to the FBI, but the data had significant limitations. There was no information about the race and sex of the officers involved and no details of the shooting circumstances.