Abstract:
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The United States collects no systematic data on shootings by police officers. The FBI's Law Enforcement Officers Killed and Assault program collects details on officers killed and assaulted in the course of their duties, but no federal program supports the collection of data on police shootings or, more generally, use of violence. While journalists and activist groups use newspaper data to identify the number of people killed by police, this is a poor proxy for police use of violence.
This missing data has spillover consequences for our understanding of the relationship between police practices and community violence. Police gun violence is likely a key obstacle to achieving community cooperation with police to address other kinds of gun violence. Members of communities targeted by police violence usually prefer to avoid vigilantism; when police gun violence weakens trust in police, however, they turn to extrajudicial mechanisms for dispute resolution. Without data on police use of violence, however, we cannot determine the extent of these issues.
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