Race and Deadly Force: Assessing Minority-Threat Arguments

• In Event: Race and Police Violence

Abstract

No social justice issue has been more present in the news media recently than the deaths of racial minorities at the hands of the police in the United States of America. This clear division between communities and the police has resulted in protests and marches sweeping the nation under the statement that “Black Lives Matter.” With racial disparities in the criminal justice system being a long-standing issue, the need for empirical investigations into the factors that contribute to police use of force is essential in today’s criminological literature. In this study, Blalock’s (1967) theory of minority-group relations is utilized to determine the impact that racial threat has on the use of deadly force by police. This study offers a state-level analysis that accounts fully for Blalock’s theory by including race-specific economic measures and relevant political indicators. Census data are merged with other existing data on the use of deadly force [Supplementary Homicide Reports (SHR) and Mapping Police Violence (MPV)] to explore the impact of racial threat on racial patterns in police violence.

Author

• Andrew Charles Gray, University of Delaware