Patterns of force: Institutional factors behind fatal police encounters

• In Event: Activist Scholarship

Abstract

Do characteristics of law enforcement agencies—such as budget size, staffing levels, or accountability policies—influence how often police use deadly force? Campaign Zero recently introduced a crosswalk linking Mapping Police Violence (MPV), a public database documenting police killings since 2013, to key law enforcement datasets including LEMAS, CSLLEA, LEAR, and the FBI’s agency roster. This development enables researchers to analyze fatal encounters in the broader context of agency-level characteristics. We leverage this crosswalk to combine MPV with LEAR datasets from 2013, 2016, and 2020, exploring how law enforcement agency characteristics—such as operating budgets, size, authorized use of force policies, HR practices, and officer demographics—relate to patterns of police violence. Our goal is to identify whether agencies involved in more fatal police encounters share common structural or policy characteristics.By combining incident-level data with organizational indicators, this analysis provides a more nuanced understanding of how institutional context may shape police violence.

Authors

• M. Gabriela Ayala, Campaign Zero

• Kudakwashe Mawunganidze, Campaign Zero