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Abstract:
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Fatal police shootings in the United States continue to be a polarizing social and political issue. Clear disagreement between racial proportions of victims and nationwide racial demographics together with graphic video footage has created fertile ground for controversy. However, simple population level summary statistics fail to take into account fundamental local characteristics such as county-level racial demography, local arrest demography, and law enforcement density. In this talk, I look at fatal police shootings between January 2015 and July 2016, and implement straightforward resampling procedures designed to examine how unlikely the victim totals from each race are with respect to these local population characteristics if no racial bias were present. I present several approaches considering the shooting locations both as fixed and also as a random sample. In both cases, I find overwhelming evidence of a racial disparity in shooting victims with respect to local population demographics but substantially less disparity after accounting for local arrest demographics.
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