Rhetoric and Behavior: An Interrupted Time Series Analysis of Police use of Deadly Force

• In Event: 4260 - Race/Ethnicity and Police Shootings: Call for New Data and Knowledge

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is straightforward. Drawing on insights garnered from the conflict and consensus models of macro social control, we examine the influence of idiosyncratic historical events on police use of deadly force. To assess the merits of the conflict perspective, we specify and estimate ARIMA interrupted time series equations to model the effects of President Trump’s derogatory statements about racial and ethnic minorities on total, race-specific, and ethnic-specific measures of police use of deadly force against civilians. Similarly, to assess the merits of the competing explanation (the consensus paradigm), we specify and estimate ARIMA interrupted time series equations to model the impact of the July 7, 2016 homicide of five Dallas police officers on an identical set of outcome series.
The data are weekly, spanning the period from the first week of 2013 through the last week of 2018 (n = 312). The total and disaggregated time series used in this study are derived from data provided by the Mapping Police Violence initiative (Mapping Police Violence, 2018). In brief, the exploratory analyses indicate that the Trump’s verbal attacks upon the less powerful segments of society had a greater impact on the behavior of the police than did the fatal shooting of the five Dallas police officers. The implications of the preliminary findings, as well as those from the ensuing interrupted time series analyses, are discussed.

Author

• Mitchell B. Chamlin, Texas State University