Who’s Really at Risk for Fatal Police Force? Georgia State Study Broadens the Profile

ATLANTA—High-profile police killings disproportionally impact Black men and youths. However, the risk of racialized fatal encounters with law enforcement impacts a broader profile of racial, ethnic and gender subgroups under different circumstances, according to new research led by criminologist Shytierra Gaston at Georgia State University.

“Many law enforcement agents contend that people of color living in dangerous, disadvantaged communities are at greater risk for fatal police encounters,” Gaston said. “Policing literature reinforces this justification, underscoring economic, socio-cultural, demographic and other macrolevel factors as important in shaping police use of force. Given the emphasis on men in this line of research, the degree to which these forces shape homicide risks across other racial, ethnic and gender subgroups was unknown.”

Her study with co-authors April D. Fernandez of North Carolina State University and Rashaan A. DeShay of the University of Texas at Arlington addresses this knowledge gap by bringing Black women, Hispanic women and Hispanic men to the forefront of their research on police killings.

The researchers examined fatal force incidents between 2013 and 2018 among 580 U.S. counties with resident populations greater than 100,000. They then analyzed the degree to which violent crime, social disorganization and racial conflict explain county-level police killings across these subgroups.

When race, ethnicity and gender are factored in, the effectiveness of macrolevel predictors of police killings varied in significance and magnitude, they found. Violent crime, for example, was strongly related to police killings of Black and white men, and Hispanic men and women, but not to Black or white women.

Economic disadvantage, a category of social disorganization, predicted police killings of white men and women, while residential instability — another category — shaped the killings of Black men and women. Neither measure was related to Hispanic men or women police killings.

“These findings show, importantly, that in contrast to common rhetoric that attributes racialized police killings to dangerous, disadvantaged places, areas with higher violent crime rates and social disorganization had statistically similar effects on the police killings of both Black and white men,” Gaston said.

Racial conflict, too, helped explain police killings. Officers killed civilians more often in counties with more non-Black residents, irrespective of the victim’s race or gender. Black men were the only victims who faced an additional greater risk in predominantly white counties, specifically those with high Black-white income inequality. Police killed men of all races/ethnicities, but not women, in counties with greater income competition between whites and Hispanics.

“Violent crime, social disorganization and racial conflict shape police use of fatal force across racial, gender ethnic and gender subgroups,” Gaston said. “Understanding the sources of racialized and gendered police killings is vital to informing efforts to reduce them.”

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