The influence of selected community and agency characteristics on the variable rate of the use of lethal force across U.S. law enforcement agencies.

• In Event: Macro-level Analyses of Lethal Violence by the Police

Abstract

This study seeks to address some limitations of prior research on police homicides by using newly collected data from a nationally representative sample of law enforcement agencies. One limitation of the prior national-level studies is that they included only incidents where police behavior resulted in a death; for this reason, they do not capture the larger number of incidents where officers used lethal force by discharging their firearms. A unique item provided in this survey is its annual count of subjects shot at by an officer, regardless of whether the shot resulted in injury or death. Using these data, this study tests for the impact of 15 frequently tested and supported hypotheses identified from our review of research on police homicides. We examine the influence of social conditions and agency characteristics on variations in the rate of police use of lethal force per resident as well as the rates of lethal force targeted at White and Black residents. The analyses use multivariate, multi-level regressions to produce models that explain the variations in the frequency of the total number of firearm discharges by the police. The analyses will also assess the support for these hypotheses across critical demographic-based-dependent measures.

Authors

• Christopher Maxwell, Michigan State University

• Joel H. Garner, Justice Studies

• Weiwei Liu, NORC at the University of Chicago

• Jackie Sheridan-Johnson, NORC at the University of Chicago

• Bruce Taylor, NORC at the University of Chicago