Macro-level Analyses of Lethal Violence by the Police

Session Submission Type: Complete Thematic Panel

Abstract/Description

In the United States, there is a long-standing concern about the frequency of police homicides and the variation in the rate of police homicides across different jurisdictions, law enforcement agencies, and races. One of the primary ways that researchers have addressed these concerns is to use aggregated databases that can represent national samples of communities or law enforcement agencies that may report several dozen police homicides per year or none. The earliest research primarily used systems such as the Supplemental Homicide Reports or Vital Statistics, but recent studies have utilized crowd-sourcing databases, such as Fatal Encounters. But despite more than 50 years of research that have tested many hypotheses about police violence, the existing body of research has produced no agreement on the nature or size of the impact of any of the potential sources of police violence, and perhaps more importantly, no consensus regarding which types of law enforcement personnel, policies, programs, or organizational structure is effective at reducing police violence. This panel will deliver new research that aims to improve the scientific basis for understanding the correlates of police violence by summarizing prior research and by using original data to retest the macro-level correlates of police violence.

Sub Unit

• Area IV. Correlates of Crime / 29. Macro-Structural

Individual Presentations

• The Characteristics of Macro-Level Studies of the Frequency of Homicides by the Police. - Joel H. Garner, Justice Studies; Kyle Maksuta, Western Kentucky University; Christopher Maxwell, Michigan State University; Yunhan Zhao, Colorado State University Pueblo

• A Systematic Summary of Reported Findings Produced by Macro-Level Studies of the Frequency of Homicides by the Police - Kyle Maksuta, Western Kentucky University; Joel H. Garner, Justice Studies; Yunhan Zhao, Colorado State University Pueblo; Christopher Maxwell, Michigan State University

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

• The Impact of Agency Policies on Level of Force Used by Officers - Jackie Sheridan-Johnson, NORC at the University of Chicago; Weiwei Liu, NORC at the University of Chicago; Veronica Pletsch, NORC at the University of Chicago; Sharon R. Fairley, University of Chicago Law School; Bruce Taylor, NORC at the University of Chicago