Responsible researcher: Bruno Benevit
Author: Roland G. Fryer Jr
Original title: An Empirical Analysis of Racial Differences in Police Use of Force
Intervention Location: United States
Sample Size: 5,000,000 police stops
Sector: Public safety
Variable of Main Interest: Police violence
Type of Intervention: Racial discrimination
Methodology: Logit
Summary
Until recently, information about police-involved shootings was scarce and details about the incidents were lacking. Simply counting the number of police shootings did not sufficiently explore whether racial discrepancies in the frequency of these events were the result of police misconduct or differences in suspect behavior. In this sense, this study investigated racial differences in the use of police force in the United States. Employing an optimization model, the results revealed that in non-lethal force situations, black and Hispanic individuals are up to 50% more likely to experience some form of force in interactions with the police. Regarding the use of police force involving the use of lethal force, no significant racial differences were found that imply an increase in the incidence of shootings, both in the raw data and when contextual factors are considered.
The problem of police brutality towards black individuals in the United States is a historically sensitive topic that has generated broad public debates. The country's history is marked by unfortunate incidents in which African-American citizens have been victims of police violence, raising concerns about unequal treatment and selective application of force by authorities. Furthermore, the topic is also related to other forms of racial inequalities in the country, such as disparities in the criminal justice system.
These cases highlight the relevance of persistent racial inequalities in the United States and raise scrutiny over how authorities deal with this problem. Identifying how this problem manifests itself is critical to improving police practices, training, and policies that govern interactions between police and the community. However, the availability of data on this type of incident is scarce and, when available, it may result in underreporting during the compilation process due to possible conflicts of interest with the police officers themselves and their corporations (Fryer, 2019).
This study used four separate data sets to look at racial differences in police use of force, including two constructed specifically for the research. All results were conditional on an interaction. The study sought to deal with the existence of biases in data collection resulting from police reports themselves, involving possible conflicts of interest that could lead to underreporting.
To this end, the four data sources employed sought to jointly portray racial differences in the use of police force conditional on an interaction. The first two data sources, from Stop, Question, and Frisk and the Police-Public Contact Survey (PPCS), provided information on the use of nonlethal force, observed both from the perspective of police and civilian, respectively. The other two databases included event summaries related to officer-involved shootings at 16 locations across the United States and information about civilian-police interactions in Houston in which the use of deadly force could have been legally justified. The use of this data set allowed the investigation of racial differences in police-involved shootings in terms of both length and intensity, analyzing databases with different sources.
Stop, Question, and Frisk program stems from a New York Police Department practice in which officers approached and questioned pedestrians, and may also search them for weapons or illegal items. The dataset contained approximately 5 million observations. This database provided detailed information on a wide range of uses of force, from civilian handholding to the use of batons. The second data set, PPCS, is a three-yearly survey of a nationally representative sample of civilians, which included, from a civilian perspective, a description of interactions with police, also covering use of force. Both datasets are for public use and easily accessible.
The third and fourth data sets were compiled by a team of researchers for the purposes of the study. In the third database, event summaries of all incidents in which a police officer fired his weapon at civilians - including both hits and misses - were considered in three large Texas cities (Austin, Dallas and Houston), Denver, Seattle, nine large counties in Florida, Jacksonville, and Los Angeles County in order to build a data set in which to investigate racial differences in officer-involved shootings. Given that all of the people in these data were involved in a police shooting, analyzing these data alone allows us to estimate racial differences only at the intensive level (e.g., whether officers fired their weapons before or after the suspect attacked).
Finally, the fourth data set contains a random sample of Houston Police Department police-civilian interactions from arrest codes in which the use of deadly force is most likely to be justified: attempted murder of an officer public safety, assault on a public safety officer, resisting arrest, evading arrest and interfering with an arrest. This data comes from arrest reports that range in length from two to 100 pages. A team of researchers was responsible for reading arrest reports and collecting nearly 300 variables on each incident. Combining this with Houston police-involved shooting data, we can estimate both the extent (e.g., whether or not an officer decides to shoot) and the intensive scope.
The study presented estimates of the extent of racial differences in police use of force using the four data sets presented separately. To this end, the logistic regression method (Logit) was used, commonly used for the analysis of binary outcome variables. Regarding the outcome variables examined, the probability of police interaction was initially observed conditioned on the race of civilians and considering different “risk sets”, that is, the sets of civilians who could potentially be stopped. Furthermore, these interactions were disaggregated considering the level of force used by the police officers, separating them by violent use of non-lethal force: (i) putting hands on a civilian, (i) forcing against a wall, (iii) handcuffing, (iv) draw a weapon, (v) push to the ground, (vi) point a weapon, (vii) use pepper spray or strike with a baton. Additionally, racial differences were estimated in relation to involvement in shootings. They were estimated by adding several specifications regarding the vector of covariates. When controls were incorporated into the models, demographic characteristics, behavior of the civilians approached, characteristics of the approach, characteristics of police officers and year fixed effects were considered.
The analysis was completed through the development of a discrimination test, based on models from studies by Knowles, Persico and Todd (2001) and Anwar and Fang (2006). The test by Knowles et al. checks racist preferences by analyzing the success rate of searches carried out by police officers on different races. Their model assumed that police sought to maximize the number of successful searches, taking into account the cost associated with these approaches. If racial prejudice existed, the cost of searching drivers would be different between races, implying a rate of successful searches that would also differ between races. All study results were conditional on an interaction.
Estimates found using data on police interactions from Stop and Frisk indicated large racial differences. When looking at the raw data, black and Hispanic civilians were more than 50 percent more likely to have an interaction with police that involved some use of force. Controlling for variables representing baseline characteristics, approach characteristics, civilian behavior, and district and year fixed effects, the odds ratios for blacks and Hispanics compared to whites were 1.178 and 1.122, respectively. Specifically in relation to black people, this group is 21% more likely than white people to deal with an approach where a weapon is drawn by the police officer. Additionally, the odds ratio of non-lethal use of force for black people compared to white people varied between 1.175 and 1.275, decreasing according to the level of intensity of force used in the approach.
The results considering the Police Public Contact Survey (PPCS) data are qualitatively similar to the results from the New York data, but quantitatively different in terms of magnitude. Blacks and Hispanics were approximately 1.3 percentage points more likely than whites to report any use of force in a police interaction compared to the 0.7 percent average for whites. In other words, the odds ratio was 2.769 for blacks and 1.818 for Hispanics. Stop and Frisk data can be explained by disparities in the baseline probabilities of use of force and the national representativeness of PPCS versus the specific nature of Stop and Frisk in dense urban areas, as well as limitations of location variables present in the PPCS database.
The evidence found from the models by Knowles, Persico and Todd (2001) and Anwar and Fang (2006) revealed that, controlling for the behavior of civilians, police officers present approaches with greater use of force against black civilians compared to white ones. When evaluating the probability of suspects involved in shootings having weapons considering the race of the police officers involved, no statistically significant difference was found between the behavior of white and black police officers towards black suspects. However, surprisingly, it was found that black police officers were 16 percentage points more likely than white police officers when the suspect was white.
When observing these results, it was found that this behavior is consistent with the proposed police officer optimization model in that the costs to police officers' utility associated with involvement in shootings are considerably higher compared to the use of non-lethal force.
Police violence and its racial correlation has become one of the most controversial topics in American debates, raising a range of emotions, from indignation to indifference. The lack of substantial data complicates understanding racial disparities in police use of force, compounded by the complexity of interactions between police and civilians. In addition to the scarcity of data, the analysis of police behavior faces challenges, such as the reliability of existing data and the impossibility of randomly assigning race.
As police departments in the USA explore community policing models that induce greater compliance with good practices and the reduction of officers' implicit discriminatory bias during police stops, the results found in this study highlighted how the process of racial discrimination in police stops police happens. Currently, few police departments collect data on less serious uses of force or apply explicit punishments for misconduct in these tactics, resulting in incentives that are reflected in low accountability for discriminatory conduct. This scenario highlights the need to increase the expected cost of excessive use of non-lethal force for police officers.
References
ANWAR, S.; FANG, H. An Alternative Test of Racial Prejudice in Motor Vehicle Searches: Theory and Evidence. American Economic Review , vol. 96, no. 1, p. 127–151, 2006.
DELAVANDE, A.; ZAFAR, B. University Choice: The Role of Expected Earnings, Nonpecuniary Outcomes, and Financial Constraints. Journal of Political Economy , vol. 127, no. 5, p. 2343–2393, 2019.
FRYER, RG An Empirical Analysis of Racial Differences in Police Use of Force. Journal of Political Economy , vol. 127, no. 3, p. 1210–1261, 2019.
KNOWLES, J.; PERSICO, N.; TODD, P. Racial Bias in Motor Vehicle Searches: Theory and Evidence. Journal of Political Economy , vol. 109, no. 1, p. 203–229, 2001.
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