academics, police-involved shootings, Use of Force

Issues with analyzing police use of deadly force

Justin Nix has a good article (academic, but plain English and not behind paywall) about the dangers of using cops-killing-people as a variable. He writes in response to an article by Schwartz and Jahn that maps “police violence” across U.S. metropolitan areas. Schwartz and Jahn find, as have I, that Rates of police-related fatalities varied dramatically, with the deadliest MSAs…

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police-involved shootings

Police-Involved Shooting, Baltimore July 1, 2020

In some ways this is yet another too typical police-involved shooting (not that police-involved shootings are typical — these kind of calls get handled in the thousands “without incident”). But it’s all here: a man with a gun, mentally disturbed, confronted by police. And not for the first time. The man is black, unlike the previous one I wrote about,…

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Police, police-involved shootings

Disparities in Police-Involved Shootings by City and County

So I’ve done a little work using the data from FatalEncounters.org on people shot and killed by police. Fatal Encounters is like the Washington Post database, but for adults. I combined/merged this with a city or police department’s population, number of cops, average number of murders in the jurisdiction (over 4 or 3 years), median household income, percentage Black, and…

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