New Report: Determining Racial Bias in Lethal Police Shootings

NEW YORK, NY — Ever since the Ferguson riots, the narrative that police use lethal force disproportionately and without justification against African-Americans has been rampant. But is it true? At the time, little was known about the true number of people killed by American law enforcement. Since then, private actors and police departments have collected a massive amount of research. In a new Manhattan Institute report, fellow Robert VerBruggen offers a literature review of the most significant new research that has tried to answer the complicated question as to whether there is racial bias in police officers’ use of lethal force. He finds that research has come to several conclusions:    

• On-duty police fatally shoot about 1,000 people every year. This number and its racial breakdown have remained remarkably steady since 2015.  

• Approximately a quarter of those killed are black. This is roughly double the black share of the overall population, but it is in line with—and sometimes below—many other “benchmarks” that one might use for comparison. 

• Blacks are an even higher percentage of unarmed civilians shot and killed by police (34%), which is a potential sign of bias. However, not all shootings of unarmed civilians are unjustified.  

• More rigorous research into the question of whether police killings reflect racial bias is in its infancy, and it has been subject to intense debates over the appropriate methods of research.  

In the aggregate, these studies rebut the existence of extreme, flagrant racial bias nationwide. But evidence of bias in an anonymous city that was the subject of one recent study warrants further investigation to understand if and how biases operate in other local precincts. To that end, VerBruggen makes several suggestions for further study of this enormously complicated topic: 

• No more simplistic benchmarking studies. The simple act of comparing police-shooting odds or proportions to benchmarks such as crime rates has reached the end of its usefulness.  

• Use data from individual departments to flesh out variation in shootings and fatalities. Police departments almost certainly differ as to the existence and extent of racial bias in the use of lethal force, so more is to be gained by studying where the problems lie specifically. 

• Fill in the many remaining data gaps. The federal government and states should improve current systems, fund a lethal-force database, and collect better data on non-interactions between police and civilians. 

• Increase the use of body-worn cameras.  

• Study cases where lethal force was not intended. 

Click here to view the full report.