October 28, 2022
Historically and today…
In recent years, focus has been on police shootings and use of force.
How would you characterize the pattern of violence? (repertoire, targeting, frequency, technique)
Is police violence ethnic violence?
For every 10,000 black people arrested for violent crime, 3 are killed
— Leonydus Johnson (leave/me/alone) (@LeonydusJohnson) June 1, 2020
For every 10,000 white people arrested for violent crime, 4 are killed
I'm going to keep tweeting this until someone can explain to me how this is possible if there is truly pervasive racial bias in policing
What do you take the key argument to be?
inequality that exists between demographic groups even though economic agents (consumers, workers, employers, etc.) are rational and non-prejudiced.
inequality that exists in treatment demographic groups due to some gain/utility that agents gain by discriminating.
Non-Lethal Force
Lethal Force
Comparing police-suspect interactions with similar suspect behavior, context, officer attributes (board):
Police more likely to use nonlethal force against black suspects than white suspects.
Police less likely to use lethal force against black suspects than white suspects.
Lethal violence appears to be statistical discrimination
Another perspective on ethnic violence is to ask:
How does violence relate to ethnic boundaries?
If police violence follows a pattern of statistical discrimination, does that mean it is not racial violence?
Are these estimates of racial bias in police violence even right?
If we compare racial discrimination in police use of force among those who have been stopped by the police we are almost certainly going to under-represent racial disparities:
Why?
If we can estimate rate of “black-only-stop”, we can adjust:
Police taste-based discrimination likely worse than it appears
Even if this was statistical discrimination (doesn’t look like it), likely should be seen as ethnic violence
But useful to distinguish most police shootings from boundary-changing/boundary-policing violence.