(Part 1 here)
(Part 2 here)
Jurisdictions
The police officers who committed homicides in 2014 mostly
came from city police forces.
The numbers add up to a sum greater than the 1,000 who were
killed in 2014 because multiple officers from different agencies were
responsible for the shooting deaths of several decedents.
The Bureau of Justice Statistics analysis of arrest related
deaths between 2003 to 2009 found that 73.2% of police homicides came from city
police, while 19.7% came from sheriff’s offices and 5.9% from state police or
highway patrol.[1] I
believe that the reason more homicides in this analysis of 2014 data came from
county and state law enforcement agencies was that these are the types of rural
agencies less likely to report to the BJS or the FBI. Patrick Ball, executive director of the Human
Rights Data Analysis Group, pointed out to Dara Lind of Vox that rural agencies
are less likely to be sophisticated users of the FBI’s data system, and that
these agencies are more likely to commit homicides of white people.[2]
This is an assertion borne out by the data from 2014. While
71% of black people killed by police acts of force in 2014 were killed by city
or township police departments, only 55% of white people were killed by city or
township police departments. 43% of
white people killed by police acts of force in 2014 were killed by county
sheriff’s deputies or state police, while the rate was only 25% for black people.
The jurisdictional profile for Hispanic or Latino people
killed by police was more similar to black people than to white people, but
with a slight increase in the number killed by county and federal police
officers. The federal numbers for Hispanic people killed by police were elevated
because of a few killings committed by the US Border Patrol. The US Border Patrol committed five known
lethal acts of force in 2014 (four by gunshot, one by taser), all against
Latinos.
Gender
While it was quite easy to determine the agency responsible
for the deaths of the 1,000 people killed by police in 2014, it was much
trickier to determine identifying characteristics of the officers involved in
the deaths. The initial news report
about the incident almost never identified the specific officers involved in
the incident, and I was only able to find even the most basic information about
the officer involved in the incident in 584 of the 1,000 incidents (59%).
Of the 584 incidents I did have some information about, 96%
of the officers involved were male, and only 4% were female.
With 4% of officers involved in police killings being
female, and 5% of people killed by police being female, there was only a
2-in-1,000 chance that a female officer would have killed a female decedent in
2014. (Actually the chance is greater
than this due to the fact that multiple officers can be responsible for one
person’s death).
I did find exactly two incidents of a woman killing a woman
in the line of duty. The first was on June 7 near Baltimore, when Maryland Transit
Administration Officer Tracey Turpin shot a mentally ill homeless woman while
engaged in a physical struggle with her. The decedent in that incident, Angela
Randolph, had been acting belligerent towards transit riders waiting at the
Cromwell light rail station south of Baltimore.[3]
The second was on August 14 in San Jose when veteran police officer Wakana
Okuma shot and killed Diana Showman. Okuma was responding to a call placed by
Showman, who had threatened to shoot members of her family if police didn’t
come. Showman had painted a cordless drill to look like an Uzi and was holding
it like a pistol, trying to draw officers into shooting her.[4] Both of these women were unarmed.
Years on force
I had data about 451 officers regarding the number of years
as a member of their law enforcement agency. Besides gender and name, this was
the third most common statistic that was released in media reports. Sometimes the media reported the age of the
officer or the number of years that the officer had been a police officer with
any department, but I only kept track of the number of years on the force that
was responsible for the lethal act of force.
The average officer was a 9.8-year veteran. The median officer was only a 7 year veteran,
and the most frequently occurring officer in terms of years on force had been
with his or her police department for 6 years.
Buzzfeed news reporter Mary Ann Georgantopoulos found that
officer involved shootings are more likely to be committed by younger officers
than by older veterans.[5] My research serves as evidence to back this
claim up, since younger officers have had fewer years on the force. But it is also a fact that younger officers
are more likely to be out in the streets than older officers. What Georgantopoulos wasn’t able to say was
whether or not young officers on patrol kill people at a higher rate than older
officers on patrol. Without data on the
ages of officers and the specific duties assigned to these officers, I can’t
answer this question either.
Race
I did not collect data on the race of the officer involved
in the shooting. For one thing, I had an
officer’s name in only 532 of the 1000 lethal act of force incidents. And the
race of the officer was hardly ever mentioned by law enforcement agencies or
media reports of the incident. Standard
practice for jurisdictions that choose to identify officers is to release the
name, usually the number of years on the force, and sometimes the age of the
officer involved as well. But there aren’t any law enforcement agencies in the
U.S. that regularly release the race of the officer involved at the time of the
shooting. There were examples though of
police spokesmen choosing to release the name of the officer, particularly in
the case of a black officer shooting a black decedent. This behavior unfortunately produces a
non-random sampling. Ultimately I decided against recording any data about the
race of the officer as analysis of such data would at best be incomplete and at
worst be misleading.
I found a few local media outlets that did a story on all
officer involved shootings within a given time frame, sometimes focusing on the
decedent’s race, but few focused on the officer’s race. One that did was from South Carolina. Columbia’s newspaper The State examined data
from investigations conducted by the State Law Enforcement Division looking at
all officer involved shootings in 2014. They found that white officers were
responsible for 35 of the 43 incidents in South Carolina in 2014, while black
officers were responsible for only 7 incidents (16%), even though black
officers made up 22% of the state’s law enforcement officers. [6]
(Part 4: What is a "lethal act of force" anyways?)
[1]
Burch, Andrea M. “Arrest-Related Deaths, 2003-2009 – Statistical Tables”.
Bureau of Justice Statistics, November 17, 2011. http://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=pbdetail&iid=2228
[2]
Lind, Dara. “What We Know About Who Police Kill in America”. Vox, August 21,
2014. http://www.vox.com/2014/8/21/6051043/how-many-people-killed-police-statistics-homicide-official-black
[3]
Bottalico, Brandi. “Witness: Shooting Victim at Light Rail Was Belligerent,
Attacked Officer”. Capital Gazette, June 11, 2014. http://www.capitalgazette.com/search/cg2-arc-140611cn-randolph-shooting-20140611,0,5463588.story
[4]
Lee, Henry K. “Teen Shot by San Jose Cop While Holding Drill ID’d”. SFGate,
August 18, 2014. http://www.sfgate.com/crime/article/Teen-shot-by-San-Jose-cop-while-holding-drill-ID-d-5696601.php
[5]
Georgantopoulos, Mary Ann. “Age of Police Officers Who Kill People a Rarely
Discussed Factor”. BuzzFeed, March 11, 2015. http://www.buzzfeed.com/maryanngeorgantopoulos/age-of-police-officers-who-kill-people-a-little-discussed-fa?utm_term=.ci88OMqaky
[6]
LeBlanc, Clif. “Exclusive: SC Police Shot at 43 Suspects in 2014, Killing 18 of
Them”. The State, January 31, 2015. http://www.thestate.com/2015/01/31/3962048_exclusive-sc-police-shot-at-43.html?rh=1
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