The question of where lethal acts of force can be broken down into the highly localized (neighborhood, zip code) and by the highly generalized (states, regions).
By zoning
I tried to determine the exact setting that the decedent had
been standing in or on when he or she was killed. I divided these into five categories.
- Streets – All public streets, highways, alleys, sidewalks and right-of-way.
- Other type of public land – parks, mass transit, public buildings, courthouses, schools, universities, etc.
- Private land – residential land (houses, apartments, condominiums, etc.) or agricultural land (in rural areas, the distinction between land zoned for housing and land zoned for agriculture gets blurred); or the parking lots and driveways on parcels of land used for such purpose
- Commercial or industrial land – land used for businesses, shops, places of work, factories, etc. Includes hotels and parking lots used for businesses.
- Religious land – Churches, temples, synagogues, etc., and the parking lots that serve them.
A plurality of incidents took place on private land, usually
residential.
The San Diego County District Attorney’s Office found that
130 of 358 shooting incidents that occurred between 1993 and 2012 happened on a
street, by far the largest number in any zoning category they analyzed.[1]
This amounts to 36%. Also a combined 121
incidents occurred inside a residence, on the grounds of a residential complex,
in a yard, in a driveway, or in a garage or shed, which adds up to 34%. San Diego County’s analysis lumped all parking
lots together. They found 43 incidents (12%) occurred in parking lots.
By zip code
The deadliest zip code in America was not located in New
York, Chicago or Los Angeles, but rather in Fresno, California. Five police lethal acts of force occurred in
zip code 93706.
Of the 12 zip codes with 3 or more police lethal acts of
force, 4 of them were in California, and two of them were in Albuquerque.
|
Zip code
|
No. of lethal acts of force
|
|
93706 – Fresno, CA
|
5
|
|
93905 – Salinas, CA
|
4
|
|
30044 – Lawrenceville, GA
|
3
|
|
32210 – Jacksonville, FL
|
3
|
|
43207 – Columbus, OH
|
3
|
|
60632 – Chicago, IL
|
3
|
|
85051 – Phoenix, IL
|
3
|
|
87121 – Albuquerque, NM
|
3
|
|
87123 – Albuquerque, NM
|
3
|
|
90003 – Los Angeles, CA
|
3
|
|
95209 – Stockton, CA
|
3*
|
|
99301 – Pasco, WA
|
3
|
*The three lethal acts of force in zip code 95209 stemmed
from the same incident, where police shot and killed two bank robbers armed
with AK-47s in a getaway car, but in the process accidently shot and killed one
of the bank robbers’ hostages.
Using American Community Survey U.S. Census data from
2006-2010, the University of Michigan Population Studies Center calculated the
median annual income for each zip code in America.[2]
I used this dataset to find the median income of the zip codes in which people
were killed by police.
The median income in the United States in 2010 was $49,445,
according to the U.S. Census Bureau. According
to the University of Michigan data, the average of the median incomes for the
32,634 zip codes in the U.S. was $50,938. I found that the average median
income of the zip code in which the decedent was standing before being killed
by police officers in 2014 was $47,563. On average, decedents stood on land in
slightly poorer zip codes than the population as a whole.
This income effect is more noticeable when the median income
numbers are broken down into tranches.
The percentage of lethal acts of police force outpaces the
percent of population for zip codes with median incomes less than $50,000. This effect is starker when the number of
tranches is reduced to 2: those areas with median incomes above $50,000 and
those with median incomes below $50,000.
A slight majority of residents in the U.S. live in zip codes
with median annual incomes above $50,000.
But only a third of the lethal acts of police force occurred in these
zip codes.
It is a tenuous leap from a zip code’s median income to a
decedent’s income, but since people were very often killed by police in or near
places where they lived, the data suggests that poorer people get killed by
police more frequently than richer people.
By state
Every state in the nation had at least one lethal act of
force in 2014.
California, Texas and Florida led the nation in number of
people killed by police in 2014. I found
165 lethal acts of force in California, 101 in Texas, and 81 in Florida.
Of course, these states also lead the nation in population,
so this isn’t too surprising. A more informative measure is the rate of death.
New Mexico led the nation in terms of death rate by police officers in 2014.
The rate of death for the entire United States found in this
analysis was 3.14 deaths per million per year.
28 states and the District of Columbia experienced rates higher than
this in 2014. The average is kept low by
the high-population states of the northeast, New York, Pennsylvania and
Massachusetts in particular. The four
lowest rates in the nation came from four of the six states that comprise New
England. The one weird exception was
Maine, where six lethal acts of force occurred, more than happened in
Massachusetts despite having five million fewer people than the Bay State.
By police force
The Los Angeles Police Department, the third largest police
department after New York and Chicago, killed more people than any other local
or municipal police department in 2014.
On a per million resident basis though, the Oklahoma City
Police Department was the most deadly of the police departments in the 55
largest cities in America, killing 14.7 people per million residents.
The asterisks are for police departments that also serve
surrounding cities and unincorporated areas. Only in Las Vegas’s case would
this affect the numbers, as one of the eight people killed by Las Vegas
Metropolitan PD was based on an officer responding to a call in Laughlin.
But this gets at one of the problems with just looking at
the police killings within the city limits: people from adjoining cities maintain
close economic ties and close demographic ties with the big city. If there is something about culture,
economics, crime rate, etc., that affects the rate at which police officers
kill citizens, the effect should also be found in adjoining localities. This
is why I also looked at the number of lethal acts of force within metropolitan
statistical areas.
By metropolitan statistical area
Metropolitan statistical areas are defined by the Census
Bureau and generally must have more than 100,000 residents. They follow county line boundaries, meaning
large chunks of rural areas fall within the boundaries of metropolitan
statistical areas, and the areas can stretch for hundreds of miles away from
the city in the western U.S., where counties are large. Still, by focusing on metropolitan
statistical areas, one can choose any number of statistical measures published
by the US Census Bureau and figure out a correlation between lethal acts of
police force and whatever statistical measure one chooses.
I found lethal acts of force occurred roughly proportional
to the size of the metro areas, on a nationwide basis.
This finding surprised me. I had two hypotheses. One was
that I would find that big city police forces kill at a higher rate than the
rest due to their tendency to have large concentrations of violent crime and
police officers who may be lacking in empathy. That wasn’t the case. Police in
giant metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) accounted for only 21% of the
lethal acts of force, though giant MSAs make up 25% of America. My other hypothesis was that I would capture
a lot of rural incidents due possibly to less well-trained and more gun-crazed
crooked county sheriff’s offices. That
also wasn’t the case. Only 15% of incidents came from areas not in any MSA,
which make up 16% of the population of the United States.
There were large differences among MSAs though.
There are 52 metropolitan statistical areas in the U.S. with
populations over one million. The Los
Angeles metro area experienced 53 incidents of people being killed by police in
2014, the most in the nation, and almost double the number from the 2nd
place MSA (both Phoenix and Chicago had 28 people die from lethal acts of
force; New York was 4th with 25 and Houston 5th with 24).
But it was Oklahoma City that topped the list on a per million basis.
Though the spotlight was on the New York Police Department
in 2014 over the killing of Eric Garner, the New York metro area had one of the
lowest rates of police killings in the country, at only 1.3 per million
residents. The Raleigh-Cary Metropolitan
Statistical Area was the largest MSA not to suffer a single police killing in
2014 (1.2 million residents, according to 2013 census estimates).
Oklahoma City may have killed nearly 10 people per million
residents, triple the national average, but that city was not the highest on
the list of MSAs with over 500,000. The most police-caused deaths from that
list of cities was my hometown, Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Police in the Albuquerque metro area killed people at a rate
three-and-a-half times the national rate of 3.14 per million.
Cities like Fresno, Stockton, Tulsa and Wichita pop up on
this list, all with shockingly large quantities of police killings.
But the MSA with the highest rate overall was tiny Yuba
City, California. Its 168,000 residents
were killed by police at a rate of 23.7 deaths per million residents. 4 people were killed by police in the Yuba
City area in 2014, the same number that were killed by police in the entire
Boston metro area, which has 4.7 million people.
The following chart shows all the small city MSAs that had
three or more people killed by police in 2014.
The Los Angeles metro area and the New York metro diverged significantly in the rate at which people were killed by police.
Of the nine metro areas in the United States with populations
greater than 5 million, New York’s metro area of 20 million people accounts for
a quarter of the population of that list of nine, while Los Angeles’s metro area
of 13 million people accounts for 17%.
But in terms of police killings in 2014, it was the exact opposite.
[1]
“Officer-Involved Shooting Review: Analysis of Cases Reviewed by the San Diego
County District Attorney’s Office 1993-2012”. San Diego County District
Attorney’s Office, December 2014. http://www.sdcda.org/files/OIS_20YrReport_Final.pdf
[2] “Zip
Code Characteristics: Mean and Median Household Income”. Population Studies
Center, Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan. http://www.psc.isr.umich.edu/dis/census/Features/tract2zip/
