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Abstract:
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Assessing whether individual characteristics of police officers like age, race, and prior performance influence the risk of shootings has been a long-standing topic of social science research. The effect of officer characteristics on the risk of police shootings is confounded by police assignments and the environmental factors associated with those assignments. This paper demonstrates a method to separate out the influence of individual officer characteristics from environmental factors. Shooting incidents involving multiple officers hold constant the environmental factors present at the scene of a shooting, which permits an assessment of the relative importance of individual officer characteristics in predicting who is at the greatest risk of shooting. Although multi-officer shootings are not common, they are a uniquely rich source of information about the role of officer characteristics and can produce estimates that require no measuring or modeling of a shooting’s environment, greatly reducing the risk of confounding. This paper demonstrates the approach using police shooting data from New York City and from member agencies of the Major Cities Chiefs Association.
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