I have led two starkly different lives-that of a Southern black boy who grew up without a mother and knows what it's like to swallow the bitter pill of police brutality, and that of an economics nerd who believes in the power of data to inform effective policy.
In 2015, after watching Walter Scott get gunned down, on video, by a North Charleston, S.C., police officer, I set out on a mission to quantify racial differences in police use of force.
Black civilians who were recorded as compliant by police were 21% more likely to suffer police aggression than compliant whites.
Our data come from localities in California, Colorado, Florida, Texas and Washington state and contain accounts of 1,399 police shootings at civilians between 2000 and 2015.
Several scholars have rightly pointed out that these data all begin with an interaction, and suggested that racist policing manifests itself in more interactions between blacks and the police.
When we use our data to calculate the descriptive statistics used in popular databases such as the Washington Post's, we find a higher percentage of black civilians among unarmed men killed by the police than they do.
Those statistics cannot address the fundamental question: When a shooting might be justified by department standards, are police more likely actually to shoot if the civilian is black? Only our data can answer this question, because it contains information on situations in which a shooting might meet departmental standards but didn't happen.
In 2015, after watching Walter Scott get gunned down, on video, by a North Charleston, S.C., police officer, I set out on a mission to quantify racial differences in police use of force.
Black civilians who were recorded as compliant by police were 21% more likely to suffer police aggression than compliant whites.
Our data come from localities in California, Colorado, Florida, Texas and Washington state and contain accounts of 1,399 police shootings at civilians between 2000 and 2015.
Several scholars have rightly pointed out that these data all begin with an interaction, and suggested that racist policing manifests itself in more interactions between blacks and the police.
When we use our data to calculate the descriptive statistics used in popular databases such as the Washington Post's, we find a higher percentage of black civilians among unarmed men killed by the police than they do.
Those statistics cannot address the fundamental question: When a shooting might be justified by department standards, are police more likely actually to shoot if the civilian is black? Only our data can answer this question, because it contains information on situations in which a shooting might meet departmental standards but didn't happen.
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