Why Do Police Investigations of Nonviolent Incidents Turn Deadly? Situational and Contextual Correlates of Civilian Fatalities

• In Event: Profiling and Understanding Police Shootings in Metropolitan America

Abstract

Many police-citizen encounters that do not involve violent crime committed or violent crime in progress escalate into violent confrontations between police and the policed for different reasons. Civilian fatalities resulting from these low risk incidents are often the most controversial because they are widely perceived as preventable. Using past research that has proposed various models to describe the use of force continuum and typologies of civilian actions, we set out to identify situational-, departmental-, and community-level risks that can lead to the deadly escalations in non-violent crime encounters. Special emphasis will be placed on the measurement and analysis of temporal conditions, social spaces, and human interactions that converge in these incidents. Using open source data stored at the online repository Gun Violence Archive, about 600 police shooting cases from cities with a population of 100,000 residents or more will be examined. Results will contribute to our understanding of the dynamics of the use of force continuum in non-critical situations.

Authors

• Allison Bernheimer, The Graduate Center, John Jay College / CUNY

• Hung-En Sung, The Graduate Center, John Jay College / CUNY

• Frank S Pezzella, The Graduate Center, John Jay College / CUNY