• Quick Recap
• Race and Policing
• Forms of discrimination
• Evidence of discrimination

Historically and today…

• racial bias has shaped criminal code
• concerns about bias in who is policed, how they are policed, consequences of police encounters.

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?

  • Does motive matter?
  • Was police violence ethnic even before BLM movement?
  • Has BLM protests changed the way in which police violence is coded as ethnic

For every 10,000 black people arrested for violent crime, 3 are killed

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

— Leonydus Johnson (leave/me/alone) (@LeonydusJohnson) June 1, 2020

What do you take the key argument to be?

statistical discrimination:

inequality that exists between demographic groups even though economic agents (consumers, workers, employers, etc.) are rational and non-prejudiced.

• Discrimination can be “rational” if individual attributes are hard to observe (e.g. propensity toward crime) while group membership is observable and different groups have different behaviors on average.
• Discrimination is “rational” if relevant considerations (threat, criminal activity) objectively correlate with group membership

taste-based discrimination:

inequality that exists in treatment demographic groups due to some gain/utility that agents gain by discriminating.

• racial hatred, SIT/in-group preference leads people to value discrimination
• ethnic discrimination is intentional and based on some kind of animus

Data

Non-Lethal Force

• NYPD Stop, Question, Frisk reporting data (publicly available)
• where, when, level of force, attributes of suspect, officer details

Lethal Force

• Incidents involving police where suspect was subject to lethal use of force or arrested (could have been shot) from Houston PD
• Details on race of suspect, suspect behavior, context, and officer attributes from police reports
• Lots of work by two separate sets of research assistants to code behavior and context

Results:

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

1. If police violence follows a pattern of statistical discrimination, does that mean it is not racial violence? (if Mr. Johnson is correct, if Fryer’s estimates are correct\(^*\))

Another perspective on ethnic violence is to ask:

How does violence relate to ethnic boundaries?

1. Violence that transforms ethnic boundaries:
   • altering status, access to resources/power, along ethnic categories
2. Violence that defends/polices ethnic boundaries:
   • violence that punishes or deters transgressions/changes of an ethnic boundary
3. Violence that is constitutive of an ethnic boundary:
   • routine violence that disproportionately targets/affects members of specific ethnic categories

1. If police violence follows a pattern of statistical discrimination, does that mean it is not racial violence?

2. Are these estimates of racial bias in police violence even right?

If we can estimate rate of “black-only-stop”, we can adjust:

1. Police taste-based discrimination likely worse than it appears

2. Even if this was statistical discrimination (doesn’t look like it), likely should be seen as ethnic violence

3. But useful to distinguish most police shootings from boundary-changing/boundary-policing violence.