An Empirical Analysis of Racial Differences in Police Use of Force

By Roland G. Fryer. 2019

247 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper explores racial differences in police use of force. On nonlethal uses of force, blacks and Hispanics are more than 50 percent more likely to experience some form of force in interactions with police. Adding controls that account for important context and civilian behavior reduces, but cannot fully explain, these disparities. On the most extreme use of force—officer-involved shootings—we find no racial differences either in the raw data or when contextual factors are taken into account. We argue that the patterns in the data are consistent with a model in which police officers are utility maximizers, a fraction of whom have a preference for discrimination, who incur relatively high expected costs of officer-involved shootings.

Subfields: Political Science and International Relations, Sociology and Political Science, Strategy and Management

Citations in the corpus

• A Few Bad Apples? Racial Bias in Policing (2017, unknown): “, 2017; Agan and Starr, 2016), studies that vary the observability of race or gender (Goldin and Rouse, 2000; Grogger and Ridgeway, 2006; Donohue, 2014), and studies of settings with rich controls for underlying behavior and context (Fryer, 2018).”