A Study of the Determinants of Police Strength

Home , Justifiable homicide

LETHAL VIOLENCE BY AND AGAINST THE POLICE IN U.S. CITIES

DISSERTATION

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for

The Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the

Graduate School of The Ohio State University

Stephanie Laura Kent, M.A.

*****

The Ohio State University 2005

Dissertation Committee Approved by Professor David Jacobs, Adviser

Professor Richard Lundman

Professor J. Craig Jenkins ______Adviser

Graduate Program in Sociology

ABSTRACT

Much of the research on the determinants of social control mechanisms used explanations derived from conflict theory to predict the amount of control applied to citizens by the police. I follow these researchers by hypothesizing that the threat produced by racial minorities leads to increases in the need for police control including the use of deadly force against citizens. Yet few studies test reactions of citizens to the governments’ coercion. This study addresses the objects of social control by examining the frequency of homicides of police in U.S. cities.

Prior studies investigated the role of racial threat by identifying relationships between the presence of racial minorities and lethal violence by the police. However, most of these studies were limited to few cities or one time period and measured racial threat with only the size of minority populations. These important shortcomings mean that the effect of threat indicators may have been underestimated, and shifts in racial threat over time have been neglected.

I use negative binomial regression to analyze raw counts of killings of citizens by police officers. Results suggest that cities with large African-American and Hispanic populations report more police killings, but killings of African-Americans are partly explained by the number of homicides of police. These findings support those of previous research but I find more nuanced effects of threat measures.

I then analyze the number of killings of officers and find that officers are more likely to be murdered in cities with the most citizens killed by the police. Black lethal violence against whites and high percentages of female-headed families lead to increases in homicides of officers, but cities with an African-American mayor experience decreases in these killings.

These analyses suggest that the presence of and reaction to minorities affect the amount of lethal force used by the police. Conflict explanations are also the strongest determinants of homicides of police. The results of this study suggest that more restrictive weapons policies may reduce police use of deadly force. These findings also suggest that increasing the political influence of racial minorities may reduce homicides of police officers.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I wish to thank my adviser, David Jacobs, for intellectual support, encouragement and his contagious enthusiasm for sociology which has guided my research and made this dissertation possible. I also thank him for painstakingly teaching me econometrics and for his patience during the writing and rewriting process including his willingness to share with me his knowledge of stylistic guidelines.

I thank Richard Lundman for his guidance throughout my graduate career as a temporary adviser and as a teacher. I also thank him for sharing with me his expertise on the police and for his invaluable suggestions during my academic job search.

I am grateful to Craig Jenkins for his advice during my academic job search process and for sharing with me his knowledge of political sociology that has supplemented my graduate focus on crime and criminal justice outcomes.

I also wish to thank those who have provided me with moral support and have helped me overcome various technical issues, especially Jason Carmichael.

Finally, even though he will probably not read this, I wish to thank my husband,

Matthew Kosarko, for providing me with moral and financial support during my graduate career and for helping me with the formatting of this document.

VITA

2002…………………………………………..M.A. Sociology, The Ohio State University

2000-present………………………………….Graduate Teaching and Research Associate, The Ohio State University

PUBLICATIONS

Refereed:

1. Kent, Stephanie L. and David Jacobs. 2004. "Social Divisions and Coercive Control in Advanced Societies: Law Enforcement Strength in Eleven Nations from 1975 to 1994." Social Problems, 51: 343-361.

Non-refereed: 1. Jacobs, David and Stephanie L. Kent. 2005. “The Death Penalty” in The Encyclopedia of Disability. Ed. Gary L. Albrecht. Thousand Oaks Sage Publications.

FIELDS OF STUDY

Major Field: Sociology Concentrations: Criminology The Politics of Crime Control

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page Abstract……………………………………………………………………………….... ii Acknowledgments……………………………………………………………………… iv Vita……………………………………………………………………………………... v List of Tables…………………………………………………………………………... vii List of Figures………………………………………………………………………….. ix

Chapters:

1. Introduction………………………………………………………………………..1

2. Police Use of Lethal Force……………………………………………………….11

3. Killings of Police Officers in the Line of Duty…………………………………..81

4. Conclusions……………………………………………………………………..123

List of References……………………………………………………………………....139

LIST OF TABLES

Table Page

2.1 Predicted Signs, Means, and Standard Deviations for Total Police Killings Analyses…………………..……………………………….46

2.2 Predicted Signs, Means, and Standard Deviations for Police Killings of Blacks Analyses………………………...... ……………..….47

2.3 The average number of police killings by region over time……………………..49

2.4 The city-years with the most number of police killings ……………….………..52

2.5 The city-years with the most number of police killings of African- Americans…...... 53

2.6 Zero-Order Correlations for Total Police Killings Analyses…………………….55

2.7 Zero-Order Correlations for Police Killings of African-Americans Analyses…………………………………………………….56

2.8 Negative Binomial Estimates of the total Number of Police killings in U.S. Cities………………………………………………….….59

2.9 Negative Binomial Estimates of the total Number of Police killings in U.S. Cities ………………………………………………..…...60

2.10 Negative Binomial Estimates of the Number of Police killings of Blacks in U.S. Cities…………………………………………..64

2.11 Negative Binomial Estimates of the Number of Police killings of Blacks in U.S. Cities…………………………………………..65

2.12 Summary of findings from the analyses of total police killings and police killings of African-Americans………………………………………..74

3.1 Predicted Signs, Means, and Standard Deviations……………………………...105

3.2 Regional variation in raw numbers of Officers killed over time……………….107 vii

3.3 Regional variation in average number of Officers killed over time……………108

3.4 City-years with the highest number of officers killed and their percentage of African-Americans…………………………………….110

3.5 Zero-Order Correlations for Killings of Police Analyses………………………112

3.6 Negative binomial estimates of the total number of killings of police in U.S. cities …………………………………………………114

3.7 Negative binomial estimates of the total number of killings of police in U.S. cities …………………………………………………115

4.1 Summary of findings……………………………………………………………127

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LIST OF FIGURES

Figure Page

2.2 The average number of police killings per city-year over time ………………....49

2.3 Police killings per 100,000 population at risk

by former confederacy status ………………………...... ……………..……….50

3.1 Total Killings of Citizens by Police Officers and Homicides of Officers in the United States. 1976-1998…………………………83

3.2 Average killings of police over time………………………………………...... 107

3.3 Average number of Killings of Police by Confederacy Status…………………109

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

This chapter introduces the theoretical traditions that guide this dissertation with two

goals in mind. First, I will identify missing links in the sociological theories that inform

research on social control apparatuses such as the police and offer a potential solution

that combines tenets of sociological, criminological and political theory. Second, this

chapter will present the analyses and explain why the chosen topics together help address

the problems at issue.

Theoretical Background

Using Conflict Theory to explain Social Control

Early conflict theorists such as Blalock (1967), Turk (1969) and Quinney (1970) assume

an uneven distribution of interests in crime control and an uneven distribution of power

necessary to translate self-interests into social policy. Lawmaking and enforcement is

assumed to reflect the interests of the powerful so the behaviors that threaten their interests become criminalized. According to the conflict perspective, because some law

violations are viewed as more threatening than others, the laws that protect the interests

of the powerful will be enforced.

Conflict theories also propose that the poor or minority populations are seen as

more threatening. If this is true, then law enforcement efforts should target the groups

that threaten the powerful. According to this logic, a main proposition of conflict theory

is that the amount of social control is based on the amount of criminal acts by people that

threaten the powerful.

But this conflict-based theory of social control neglects to describe how it is that the powerful translate their perceptions of threat into increases in crime control.

Although the theory is clear in its proposition that amount of social control applied is contingent upon political power, the mechanisms through which power determines crime control outcomes are not specified.

Later conflict theorists provided some insight into this process. These theorists attributed differences in power to comparative differences in economic resources (Collins

1975; Chambliss and Seidman 1980). In addition, these conflict theorists see economic inequality as a frail condition. They argue that inequality produces a potentially unstable

social order that must be sustained by coercion. Chambliss and Seidman (1980, p. 31),

for example, write that "The more economically stratified a society becomes, the more it

becomes necessary for dominant groups to enforce through coercion the norms of con-

duct that guarantee their supremacy."

In addition to providing the need for coercion, substantially unequal distributions give the most prosperous citizens the means to increase this domestic control capacity. If such immense differences in rewards produce discrepancies in political power, these differences should enhance affluent abilities to make successful demands for increases in police strength when they sense that the order that benefits them so much has become increasingly vulnerable.

In addition to fears related to the presence of the poor, the racial version of the threat perspective adds another dimension to arguments that social control reflects the interests of the powerful. The racial threat argument asserts that racial minorities are perceived as threatening to the dominant racial group. Based on the assumption that racial majority groups have more political power than minorities, these dominant social strata should be able to translate these perceptions of threat into public policy and thereby affect the size and administration of crime control apparatuses. But the question remains, why do racial majorities have more political power than minority groups?

In comparison to other nations, race relations throughout U.S. history have been exceptionally antagonistic and violent (Tocqueville 1948; Myrdal 1944). Following the civil war until the civil rights movement vigilantes repeatedly used brutal violence against African Americans to maintain a racial caste system (Beck and Tolnay 1996). In order to continue this discrimination despite advances in civil rights, repression had to take a more acceptable form. Wacquant (2000) argues that after the civil rights movement, “while whites begrudgingly accepted integration in principle, in practice they strove to maintain an unbridgeable social and symbolic gulf with their compatriots of

African American descent. They abandoned public schools, shunned public space, fled 3

to the suburbs in millions to avoid mixing, . . . (and) they extended enthusiastic support for law and order policies" that helped enforce these racial boundaries (p. 382). While racial domination in the form of vigilantism is no longer acceptable, it is unlikely that support for racial discrimination has completely dissipated. In fact, in more recent times the public consensus has been that urban violence is almost entirely due to acts committed by racial and ethnic minorities (Chiricos, Welch, and Gertz 2004).

This history of harsh methods that maintained the domination of whites over blacks should result in a system of social control that replicates racial inequality by targeting African-Americans. In addition, current sentiments that implicate racial minorities as the root cause of social problems such as crime and disorder should cause whites to feel threatened by large minority populations. In reaction to this threat, whites may resort to harsh methods of social control that disproportionately target African-

Americans.

A history of race-based discrimination has also contributed to a concentration of racial minorities in the poorest social classes. In the United States, race differences in political power are accentuated by gaps in economic resources. A superimposition of race and class whereby minorities (typically African-Americans) occupy the lowest economic strata should increase power disparities to favor majority whites. If coercion through social control apparatuses maintains economic disparities that follow racial lines, cities with large economic and racial underclass populations will use more social control.

These conflict theories, however, have one more missing link – they fail to define the exact mechanisms through which power based on economic resources allows the affluent to shape social control to their benefit. An examination of political explanations offers a final link that explains the relationship between economic resources and political power.

Combining Conflict theory and Political Explanations

The assumptions of conflict theory are plausible if we examine how political processes shape crime control. If political influence in democratic societies is based largely on access to those who make policy decisions, then those who have the greatest ability to influence lawmakers will have their demands met. Studies suggest that the affluent have the economic and social capital necessary to lobby politicians, advertise their position through the media, and form social movement organizations (Domhoff

2002). Because decisions about social control policies are made by politicians at various levels of government, citizens who are able to influence these politicians should partly control how the criminal justice system is used.

In addition to these advantages, research on voting behavior adds to class differences in political efficacy. Voter surveys indicate that minorities are less likely to register to vote or go to the polls (Current Population Survey: Voter Supplement File,

November 2002). The reasons for racial disparities are uncertain but it is likely that one reason minorities vote less is because many are not knowledgeable about our voting system (Abramson and Claggett 1984). If minorities are uncertain about how to participate in politics, they are unlikely to have much influence on the politicians who ultimately make decisions about the use of social control.

In addition, discrimination in political access may partly explain why African-

Americans are less likely to vote. In the United States, legislation including Jim Crow laws ensured that voting rights were reserved for white males up until the last decade.

While African-Americans are no longer prohibited from voting, it is likely that minorities are deterred from voting through felon disenfranchisement laws and other acts that discourage political participation. Based on these arguments, discrimination in political access may partly explain why majority whites can make successful demands for law and order policies that may disproportionately target racial minorities.

Measuring Social Control

The above perspectives should be useful to those who wish to study differences in social control across macro units. One social control outcome that is especially controversial is the use of coercive force by the police. Theories that combine the conflict perspective with political explanations are suited to studies about this police behavior because the police represent the “edge of the state’s knife” (Bittner 1990). The 6

police deal with the task of maintaining social order on a daily basis and so their actions reflect how the government uses coercion against citizens. If conflict theory is applicable to the behavior of law enforcement agents, the police should use their discretion to apply force to some groups more than others. Conflict theorists argue that racial minority groups are seen as the most threatening to the social order (Blalock 1967). If this is true, then police should use force more often against racial minorities. Although the reasons for the disparities are unclear, studies indicate that minorities are disproportionately arrested (Hindelang 1975) and are more often the targets of police use of force than expected given their proportion of the population (Chevigny 1995; Geller and Karales

1981; Blumberg 1981). The perception that police unfairly target racial minorities has lead to widespread distrust in the police by racial minorities. In addition, numerous incidents of police use of force against minority citizens have fueled civil disorder and racial strife in U.S. cities (Skolnick and Fyfe 1993). For these reasons, racial disparities in the application of force deserve attention.

There are additional reasons for studying the police. If conflict theorists are correct in defining the relationship between economic resources and political influence, it is surprising that threats to the social order are not prevalent considering that only a small number of people hold the majority of economic resources in modern societies. It is also surprising that the current social order is maintained despite such inequalities in power between classes and races. An appropriate study of social order should focus on the police since they specialize in the internal use of force and are the primary agency responsible for maintaining social order.

The use of force is not the only way that societies remain stable. No society needs to rely solely on coercion to maintain social order yet we should not assume that this task can be accomplished only through consensual obedience. Some claim that societies that rely solely on coercive force would fail. Yet this argument should not discount any efforts to include coercion as a possible prerequisite for order (Goode,

1972). While both of these processes likely take place, scholars often neglect the role of coercion, perhaps because the use of conspicuous violence is so rare. Even though violence by government agents is relatively unusual, it remains an effective way to maintain order and so it should be studied.

Sociologists should therefore benefit from an examination of coercion in modern society. Because the police are essential to the survival of existing social arrangements, a study of the relationship between inequality in its various forms and the use of lethal force should help us to determine how force is used to hold societies together. Because the use of lethal force by police is one of the most extreme forms of social control, if political explanations based on conflict theory have any merit, they should at least partly predict variation in police killings.

A Second Test of Conflict and Political Explanations

While there is an established literature that uses conflict theory to account for police use of deadly force and other social control outcomes, few have used the tenets of this theory to examine the potential violent reactions of those who are coerced. Prior research has treated the targets of social control as passive figures, but perhaps this is not a valid assumption. Jacobs and Carmichael (2002) argue that in order to fully understand the 8

processes that surround the use of coercive force by the state, the responses to social control should not be neglected. Because this study examines the use of deadly force by police, a logical reaction to this violence is retaliative force against police officers. In this dissertation I therefore consider both killings of citizens by police and homicides of police in the line of duty.

A second reason to analyze both violence by and against the police is to discover whether the same factors determine the frequency of both these outcomes. Because conflict explanations for reactions to coercive control are often neglected, it is uncertain whether the same processes determine both of these violent outcomes. To date, only one previous study has explicitly tested these two parallel outcomes. Lester (1982) analyzed both police use of deadly force and killings of police in 31 major U.S. cities and concluded from his results that these two sources of death are not aspects of the same phenomenon. This study, however, did not offer any theoretical grounding for including a wide variety of social and demographic indicators and only tested bivariate correlations.

Due to these shortcomings, additional study is warranted. I advance this study by testing explanations that incorporate sociological and political theories using superior methods.

Summary

Part of this study addresses the relationship between differences in resources that capture power differentials and coercive state control by examining the use of force by the police.

I focus on race-based disparities in the application of police violence by explicitly testing propositions derived from conflict theory that argue that the use of deadly force by police is party based on reactions to the threat produced by racial minorities. In addition, this 9

study investigates the related reactions against government agents by coerced populations

by examining the lethal violence that targets the police. These two related outcomes

should suggest whether the same conflict and political indicators determine both killings

of and by the police.

Empirically, the analyses will test the findings of previous studies that relied

mainly on cross-sectional designs or data from a limited number of places by using

pooled time-series cross-sectional data and the most appropriate and rigorous estimation

methods available. Panel data produces a large number of cases which ensures more

efficient estimation. It also overcomes problems with heterogeneity due to unmeasured

explanatory variables in cross-sections, which can cause bias in estimation. I also measure the outcomes using raw counts in order to ensure that idiosyncratic events do not affect the findings.

The analyses will therefore provide more generalizable conclusions and more

accurate results because this research design captures both cross-sectional differences

and over-time changes in the city level conditions that I will test. Theoretically, I use

explanations from both criminology and political sociology to form my hypotheses.

These contributions should help define the specific macro characteristics that

determine the use of lethal force by and against the police and should direct future

research on coercive social control.

CHAPTER 2

POLICE USE OF LETHAL FORCE

Introduction to the Issue

The use of lethal force by police officers has become a critical social issue since the urban disorders during the 1960’s and early 1970’s. In fact, the 1968 Kerner commission report on civil disorders cited hostility between the police and underclass communities as a primary cause of disorders and that specifically, the use of excessive force may lead to even worse civil strife (Waegel 1984).

There have been many documented examples of the consequences of police use of force, and especially use of force against racial minorities on community disorder.

Probably the most relatively recent well-known incident is the beating of Rodney King which resulted in the 1991 LA riots. But the use of lethal force by police has resulted in similar, if not more destructive consequences in other cities.

One chilling example is the death of Amadou Diallo, a West African immigrant who was killed by 19 of the 41 shots fired at him by New York City Police officers on

February 4, 1999. Diallo, who was unarmed, was standing in the lobby of his apartment building when police approached him due to “suspicious behavior”. When he did not respond to police calls to raise his arms and refused to drop the wallet he was holding, police, believing he was instead holding a gun, began shooting. Prosecutors brought 6 11

different charges against each of the officers, but the police were acquitted of all accusations (Chua-Eoan 2000). As a result, the case was responsible for bringing the issue of police violence to the nation’s attention. Around this time, civil rights violations committed by the Los Angeles Police Department’s CRASH (Community Resources

Against Street Hoodlums) unit came to the attention of the public through whistle-blower

Rafael Perez.

These incidents illustrate the inherent difficulties involved in understanding police violence. Indeed, there is “a fine line officers must walk in controlling crime and recognizing civil liberties” (Burns and Crawford 2002, p.74). Because an incredible amount of power is allocated to police officers regarding the use of violence, the consequences of police mistakes can be devastating, especially when they result in death.

The role of race

This issue also poses severe consequences for the state of race relations in U.S. cities.

Over half the citizens killed by police nationwide are members of minority groups. This is a disproportionate proportion than expected based on the racial composition of the

United States. One result of this well-publicized finding is widespread dissatisfaction and decreased trust in the police by minorities.

Criminologists who study urban communities claim that this distrust exacerbates efforts to effectively control crime and disorder because citizens are unlikely to cooperate with police when they are viewed as a source of discriminatory violence. Indeed, community involvement in crime detection and prevention is often offered as the most promising solution to the blighted conditions of underclass urban neighborhoods (Skogan 12

1990), but this strategy is unlikely to be successful without effective police-citizen cooperation. Determining the causes of police use of lethal violence against minorities should provide insight into the issue of possible discrimination and perhaps some solutions for the current situation. Considering the magnitude of the impact of the use of lethal force on our urban communities, examining changes in both the total amount of killings by police officers and killings of African-Americans is certainly worthwhile.

The role of coercion in Policing

What is it about the police though, that sets their behavior apart from other violence on the streets? A unifying task of all police agencies is to maintain social order, and it is clear that violence is one means of accomplishing this task (Manning 1980). Police departments in large cities almost always are the first government agency that must handle violent threats to internal stability. Modern states avoid the military and employ these specialists to fulfill the ever present need to control internal disorders, but the resulting element that is common to most police tasks is the potential use of force (Bittner 1990).

In Aspects of Police Work, Egon Bittner (1990) contends that:

“Whatever the substance of the task at hand, whether it involves protection against an undesired imposition, caring for those who cannot care for themselves, attempting to solve a crime, helping to save a life, abating a nuisance, or setting an explosive dispute, police intervention means above all making use of the capacity and authority to overpower resistance to an attempted solution in the native habitat of the problem. There can be no doubt that this feature of police work is uppermost in the minds of people who solicit police aid or direct the attention of the police to problems, and that every conceivable police intervention projects the message that force may be, and may have to be, used to achieve a desired objective.” (Cited on p.1 of Police Foundation Reports, September, 1996).

Based on this understanding of the role of the police in modern society, these street level public officials therefore find themselves on "the cutting edge of the state's knife" (Bayley 1985). Even the most benign governments must employ at least the cred- ible threat of violence to support their control over potentially defiant citizens. Effective police organizations therefore are crucial in even the most progressive societies as police officers are the most proficient and least conspicuous specialists in the day to day use of coercion that is required to preserve domestic order (Silver 1966; Bittner 1990).

Studying police use of lethal force against citizens should illustrate the extent to which the police rely on coercion and the reasons for the existence of occupational strategies that result in violence.

Studying police violence also informs sociological theory. Some of the most important explanations for police coercive behavior stem from conflict theory. The conflict perspective suggests that police officers are more likely to use deadly force against persons who live outside the American mainstream, particularly members of minority groups. Adherents to this model argue that police use deadly force against groups who threaten the status quo (Harring et al. 1977). Accordingly, police officers, who act according to the desires of the affluent classes, are more likely to use deadly force to maintain order in places where economic and racial stratification exist (Jacobs and Britt 1979). Because conflict theory should be useful in explaining how police retain the volatile balance of power in unequal cities, these and other perspectives will be considered. The next section encompasses a review of previous research on police use of deadly force against all citizens and against racial minorities in particular.

Previous Research on Police Use of Lethal Force

Police behavior and specifically police use of deadly force has been studied using several different levels of analysis. In the next section I summarize this body of research and provide evidence for choosing a macro-level approach that focuses on cities as the unit of analysis.

Research on police violence has typically focused on differences among:

(1) Individuals

(2) Situations or police-citizen interactions

(3) The communities in which police organizations are embedded.

Individual level explanations

Research on the use of deadly force by the police at the individual level focuses on police violence as a product of individual officer characteristics and propensities. These studies test whether attributes of officers such as age, length of service, race, education, and social class predict which officers use deadly force. Sherman and Blumberg (1981) found that officers in Kansas City (Missouri) who were involved in a shooting did not differ much from those who did not use deadly force. Only officer age and length of service had strong effects on their use of deadly force, suggesting that younger officers and those with fewer years of service were more likely to be involved in a shooting after assignment type was held constant. Alpert (1984) however, found a null relationship between these factors and police use of deadly force in Miami, suggesting that findings from individual-level studies may be department-specific.

Sherman and Blumberg’s (1981) study did not find any measurable effects of officer race, education, marital status and other individual characteristics. In attempts to replicate these findings, Geller and Karales (1981) and Fyfe (1981) test for a relationship between officer race and use of force and find that black officers have a higher shooting rate compared to whites, but this effect disappears after residence and assignment area are held constant. Sherman and Blumberg (1981) found that gender and social class were the only other characteristics that distinguished shooters from non-shooters. Female officers and those from middle class backgrounds were less likely to shoot than males and middle class officers. However, after controlling for assignment type, Grennan (1987) found that female officers in New York City fired their weapons as often as their male counterparts, and concluded that hiring more female officers will not decrease shooting instances. In sum, the findings from this group of studies indicate that many individual officer attributes are unimportant after situational or other external factors are held constant.

Situational Factors

Studies that examine the situations in which police officer use deadly force go a bit further than individual-level studies by considering the factors that surround police- citizen encounters. Blumberg (1993) cites Geller and Karales (1981) who identify the most common situation in which police use lethal force against a citizen:

The most common shooting of a civilian by a police officer in urban America is one in which an on-duty, uniformed officer shoots an armed, black male between the ages of 17 and 30 at night in a public location, in connection with an armed robbery. Typically, the shooting is subsequently deemed justifiable by the police department following an internal investigation. Even if the officer is criminally prosecuted, a jury is unlikely to convict. . . . (p.56)

In addition to these factors, the empirical evidence covers a wide number of

characteristics of police-citizen encounters that increase the potential for the use of lethal

force. Most of the studies of situational characteristics focus on suspect attributes and

find that police of both races are more likely to use lethal force against African

Americans (Friedrich 1977; Reiss 1972). These and other studies find that suspects who

physically or verbally challenge the police are more likely to be arrested (Lundman,

Sykes and Clark 1978) or receive harsh treatment (Reiss 1971). A final common finding

is that younger suspects (Kobler 1975), males and members of the lower class are more

likely to be the subjects of police use of force (Reiss 1972). But Sherman (1993) notes

that these relationships have alternative explanations based on contextual factors. For

example, the finding that black officers are more likely to kill black suspects may be a

spurious result of the assignment of black officers to high crime areas (Fyfe, 1978). In

addition, these studies examine differences in various levels of force, but few specifically

examine the use of lethal force. In sum, the whether consistent relationships exist between these situational factors and police killings is unknown.

Situational studies of suspect race as a precipitating factor

Nearly all empirical research that examines suspect race differences in police use of deadly force finds that African Americans and Hispanics are disproportionately killed by police (Chevigny, 1995; Geller and Karales,1981; Blumberg, 1981). In general, researchers rely on two perspectives to explain this disparity.

The first perspective argues that police are more likely to use deadly force against members of racial minority groups because the FBI reports that minorities commit disproportionately more violent crime and are therefore more likely to be represented among the suspects police encounter in violent situations. In addition, some researchers suggest that African Americans and Hispanics are more likely to be victims of police violence because they are disproportionately arrested for violent crimes. The arrest process is a common situation in which use of deadly force occurs so it is logical that those who face arrest will more often be subjects of police violence. If arrests are fairly good indicators of criminal behavior then this close relationship between arrest and use of force reinforces the claim that minorities are more likely to commit crimes of violence

(Fyfe, 1981; Blumberg, 1981).

Yet if arrests themselves are products of police discrimination, the second perspective on racial differences in police victimization is more plausible. This second perspective suggests that the disproportionately high death rates of minorities at the hands of the police result from differential administration of law enforcement toward minority citizens (Sherman, 1980; Takagi, 1974). The theory behind this argument rests on claims that the police are encouraged to use greater force against members of the lowest socioeconomic classes that include a large proportion of racial minorities (Forslund 1972;

Sutherland and Cressey 1970). Though it is unclear which perspective is more accurate, one can assume from the evidence regarding disproportionate use of lethal force against blacks that either or both of these processes are at work at the situational level

(Goldkamp, 1976).

The literature on police killings suggests that research at the individual and situational levels has produced contradicting results and that it often explains only a minute amount of the variation in police use of force after factors like job assignments and community characteristics are controlled. I conclude from the examination of evidence about the disproportionate use of lethal force against minorities that it is difficult to determine if either the criminal propensity or racial discrimination theory is correct, and perhaps explanations at more macro levels of analysis will be more fruitful.

An introduction to the research at the community level should provide some insight into the unexplained variation in police use of deadly force and alternative theories that may better explain these killings.

Department-Level Explanations

Studies that test organization-level explanations aim to identify relationships between police killings and the characteristics of police departments. These studies form hypotheses about differences in departmental characteristics that contribute to variation in the use of deadly force across cities. Wilson’s (1971) typology of watchman, service and legalistic police departments is often used to predict officer behavioral outcomes. These

“types” are partly based on the cultural and procedural ideals projected by police administrators. According to this and similar classification systems (McGregor 1961;

Argyris 1974) officers in “legalistic” departments that advocate harsh policing tactics should be most likely to use lethal force against citizens. Unfortunately, studies that rely on a typology have been unsuccessful in predicting police killings because it is difficult to assign departments according to “style” in part because most departments are 19

characterized by more than one classification (Scharf and Binder 1983). Some research has looked at department differences in training. These studies evaluate the effectiveness of situational training techniques that are designed to reduce shootings (Schwartz 1980) but most of the evidence suggests that department guidelines on when to use force are unlikely to be helpful in actual encounters when police must make this important decision

(Fyfe 2005).

The most promising organizational explanation for variation in police killings examines differences in shooting policies across police departments. Because both shooting policies and justifiable homicide rates across departments vary widely, administrative intervention may affect changes in the amount of police use of force.

Deterrence theories predict that unclear or vague shooting policies and laxity in investigations of police use of deadly force should make these killings more likely.

Studies of the effect of recent regulations on police use of force suggest that this behavior does decrease after restraints are put into place (Fyfe 1978; Los Angeles Police

Department 1979). Though almost all of the studies that examine lethal killings before and after major restrictions on shooting policies were established were conducted in the

1970’s, it is apparent that Atlanta, New York, Newark and other cities decreased police use of deadly force through administrative control over department weapons policies

(Scharf and Binder 1983). More recently, Sparger and Giacopassi (1992) and Culliver and Sigler (1995) suggest that police killings decreased after departments instituted more restrictive shooting policies in response to the Supreme Court’s decision in Tennessee v.

Garner (1985). In this case, the “fleeing felon” rule of police use of force was successfully challenged. This rule, derived from English common law, empowered the 20

police to use the force needed to stop any known or reasonably suspected felon from fleeing but the court decided that deadly force is only appropriate to prevent the escape of someone who has committed or threatened to commit a crime involving serious physical harm. Police departments in some cities also tightened shooting policies after the institution of additional state statutes that restricted deadly force to “dangerous” felonies or allowed use of lethal force only when there is immediate probability of harm to the officer or other bystanders.

In sum, the few studies that test the usefulness of these statutes suggest that stricter regulations decrease the frequency of killings of citizens by police. The findings of these studies suggest that absent regulations, police will be less cautious in their use of violence, resulting in more police shootings in situations that have any potential for violence directed against the police or other citizens. Because the demands of the department Chief influence the amount of regulation and investigation surrounding deadly force (Scharf 1983) the policies and philosophy articulated by this head administrator should determine how frequently officers kill citizens.

This argument fits with the political nature of municipal police organizations.

Police chiefs are typically accountable to the city Mayors who have the power to fire and appoint officers to this position. In turn, in order to retain voter support, city Mayors must respond to public demands regarding police behavior. But it’s unlikely that political figures will respond equally to the demands of all citizens. Neo-Marxist and other conflict based theories suggest that political power is based on economic assets (Lenski

1966; Collins 1975) so that the concerns of the affluent will more often be addressed. In other words, these theories suggest that political efficacy is greater among the affluent yet 21

these power differences extend beyond class lines. In a racially-stratified nation such as the United States, racial minorities are often overrepresented among the most economically disadvantaged. It follows that when African-Americans hold less economic assets compared to whites, their political influence is limited. This means that the power necessary for blacks to influence decisions that would curb violent police behavior is diminished.

In sum, the evidence suggests that unnecessary police killings decrease after departments institute increased restrictions yet the likelihood of increases in restrictions is based on demands from the most politically-powerful segments of society. In order to test whether changes in police killings are determined in part through the differences in political power based on the superimposition of race and class, political explanations at the city-level should be considered. Despite the usefulness of individual, situational and department-specific explanations for police killings, political explanations must be studied using a more macro-level unit of analysis, so this study uses cities. In the next section I review the previous literature on police killings that examined cities and the theories that informed these studies.

Previous Literature on City-level Explanations and Related Hypotheses:

A review of previous studies suggests that there are two broad city-level explanations that influence the likelihood that police will use deadly force against citizens. While the political or conflict perspective assumes that killings by police are affected by political arrangements and by community differences in racial and economic stratification, the reactive or community violence perspective suggests that police use deadly force in 22

response to violent situations. In this section I elaborate on the theories behind these perspectives and discuss the findings of previous studies that address these explanations.

I then outline the hypotheses I have constructed based on theory and prior research.

Political Explanations

Police behavior is intrinsically political. As before, police officers are the most visible representatives of the state and their ability to use force is perhaps the most distinct and unifying aspect of their job (Bittner 1990). As agents of the government, the police represent the state’s ability to use force against those who threaten domestic order.

Indeed, Weber noted that the defining element of the state is its ability to command a preponderance of force when necessary to control internal conflicts. He argued that without this force or its’ threat, governments would not exist.

Others argue that modern democratic societies do not need to rely on force or the threat of force to maintain domestic order and can accomplish this task through consensual obedience. Some claim that societies that rely solely on coercive force would fail. Yet this argument should not discount any efforts to include coercion as a possible prerequisite for order (Goode, 1972). While both of these processes likely take place, scholars often neglect the role of coercion, perhaps because the use of conspicuous violence is so rare. Even though violence by government agents is relatively unusual, it remains an effective way to maintain order and so it should be studied.

for example, argues that government agents such as the police apply the law against some groups more than others based on differences in class, race, and the relative social distance between parties in police-citizen interactions. According to this view, criminal law is used to control groups who are viewed as threatening to the social order.

Others add to this explanation by arguing that power is the key difference that separates those who are coerced from those who are not (Lenski 1966; Collins 1975) and that power in modern societies is based on comparative differences in economic resources (Blalock 1967; Collins 1975). In addition, these conflict theorists often see economic inequality as a frail condition. They argue that inequality produces a potentially unstable social order that must be sustained by coercion. Chambliss and

Seidman (1980, p. 31), for example, write that "The more economically stratified a society becomes, the more it becomes necessary for dominant groups to enforce through coercion the norms of conduct that guarantee their supremacy."

In addition to providing the need for coercion, substantially unequal distributions

give the most prosperous citizens the means to increase this domestic control capacity. If

such immense differences in rewards produce discrepancies in political power, these dif-

ferences should enhance the abilities of the affluent to make successful demands about

public policies. When the affluent sense that the order that benefits them so much has

become increasingly vulnerable, they will demand increases in social control in order to

protect themselves from the crime and violence produced by the underclass. If coercion

maintains economic disparities that follow racial lines, cities with large economic and

racial underclass populations will need additional social control. Because the use of

lethal force by police is one of the most extreme forms of social control, if political 24

explanations based on conflict theory have any merit, they should at least partly predict variation in police killings. I next review previous studies that use political explanations and propose hypotheses based on theory and prior research on police killings.

Racial Threat

Theorists claim that dominant groups are menaced by larger racial minority populations

(Blumer 1958; Blalock 1967). This racial threat account suggests that majority whites will feel threatened in areas with a large racial underclass. In addition, may studies find a link between the size of minority populations and unfavorable attitudes about minorities.

Foster and Kiecolt (1989) Taylor (1998) find that negative views about African-Amer- icans in the United States are more prevalent in areas with higher percentages of blacks.

Others report that substantial minority populations produce increased white votes for anti minority candidates (Giles and Buckner 1993; Giles and Hertz 1994).

Additional evidence suggests that these hostile views lead to enhanced demands for repressive criminal measures. With the crime rate held constant, findings show an association between the percentage of African-Americans in neighborhoods and fear of crime (Quillian and Pager 2001). These findings also suggest that whites may lobby for enhanced social controls that target disadvantaged minorities. If this is the case, majority group response to racial threat is partly a political process.

This reaction is plausible, but it is also not the only explanation for lethal violence. Police violence is probable when restraints are few (Chevigny 1995). Absent restraints and during violent encounters when “split second” decisions must be made,

police have reason to err on the side of caution and are therefore more likely to use

deadly force (Fyfe 2005). In addition, because police are expected to preserve order

rather than enforce the law (Bittner 1990), they may resort to lethal force in order to

accomplish this task. Because police behave according to departmental policy, majority

whites need only not advocate policy changes that increase restrictions on the use of

deadly force. Race-based political explanations should still explain police killings as long as whites fail to demand reductions in police violence.

Prior research suggests that the threat posed by a large racial or ethnic underclass leads majority groups to pressure political authorities to increase efforts to control these populations through coercive measures. A few previous studies found that cities with larger African-American populations had more police killings (Jacobs and O’Brien 1998;

Sorenson, Marquart and Brock 1993). In addition, after controlling for crime rates, many studies found a link between minority threat and city differences in other forms of social control like police force size (Jacobs 1979; Liska, Lawrence, and Benson 1981), expenditures on police (Jackson 1989) or prisons and jails (Jacobs and Helms 1999), and arrest rates (Liska, Chamblin, and Reed 1984). Based on these findings and the theoretical impetus guiding prior research, I hypothesize that cities with a high proportion of African-Americans will have more police killings of citizens of all races. In addition, because African-Americans comprise the largest and most visible racial minority group their presence is likely to threaten whites. Members of this racial group should therefore be likely targets of police control. According to this logic, I expect that places with a high percentage of blacks should have more killings of African-Americans by police. 26

While the above hypotheses have been tested in previous research on police

killings of citizens and general social control outcomes, it is likely that more specific

forms of minority threat should also affect police killings of citizens. With the increases

in Hispanic populations found in many areas of the country, the minority threat argument

may have an ethnic component as well. Perhaps majority whites respond to large

Hispanic populations with similar demands for increased social control. In order to test

for an effect of the presence of an additional minority group, I hypothesize that cities with

high percentages of Hispanic residents will experience more police killings. But this

relationship may not be linear. Some studies of racial threat and social control outcomes

find that the amount of social control actually decreases after racial minorities comprise a

majority of the population (Jackson 1989), so I test for a threshold effect of ethnic threat

by including a squared term for percent Hispanic. This relationship is particularly likely

as the percentage of Hispanics is unequally distributed across cities with most cities

having quite low percentages of Hispanics while a few have large Hispanic populations.

A factor related to racial threat is the degree to which whites are aware of changes in the size of racial or ethnic minority populations. When racial minorities are segregated from majority whites, punitive reactions to perceived racial threat should be diminished because contact between the races is less likely. In segregated cities where whites do not interact with minorities, whites should be less likely to feel threatened by their presence and less inclined to demand less control over the law enforcement agents who control the underclass. If the amount of interracial contact affects responses to racial threat I expect that police killings should be less in cities where racial residential segregation is high.

A final reconceptualization of traditional forms of racial threat is needed to assess

whether there are more specific reasons besides the size of racial minority populations

that lead whites to respond with requests for increased social control. A better way to

gauge white responses to criminal threat posed by minorities is by assessing the amount of violent crime committed by African Americans against whites. Interracial homicides, while relatively rare, are often highly publicized, so these murders should accurately represent the extent of this specific criminal threat. To account for the presence of other measures of racial threat I hypothesize that cities with a high rate of homicides committed by blacks against whites will have the most police killings. Because African-Americans are the most visible racial minorities that may threaten whites, police killings of blacks should also be high in cities with many black killings of whites.

Other Political Explanations

If coercive responses to racial threat are based on differences in political power between majority whites and racial minorities, then when racial minority groups gain political power, the effect of racial threat should be attenuated. Assuming that theorists are correct in their claims that political power is largely based on economic resources, one way to assess the political power of racial minorities is to examine their economic position relative to the racial majority group. If power is a zero-sum commodity, the group who holds the majority of economic resources will be best able to exert influence on policies affecting police behavior. This means that when economic differences between the races increase, African-Americans relative to whites will possess less political resources precluding any efforts to change current policies regarding police use of lethal force that 28

disproportionately targets them. One way to measure relative resources is to construct a

ratio of black-white median family incomes. Based on the link established between

economic and political resources, I predict that cities with high racial income inequality

will have more police killings. Because police violence overwhelmingly targets African-

Americans, I predict that police lethal violence against blacks will also be high in cities

where this racial group holds the fewest relative economic resources.

Local political arrangements should affect the use of lethal force as well. Over the last few decades many cities have appointed city managers to help make important political decisions. Cities with city managers who are appointed rather than elected are

arguably less swayed by public sentiment about police departments because their position

is not contingent on the whims of voters (Wilson 1971). If city managers are more

concerned with efficiency than pleasing voting constituencies, mass efforts to control

police violence should be less successful in cities with this administrative arrangement.

As a result, I hypothesize that cities with a city manager form of government may have

less police killings.

In sum, political explanations based on conflict theory are used to justify tests for

relationships between various forms of racial threat and police killings while more direct

explanations predict that police killings are related to city political arrangements. Yet

there are additional explanations that should be considered. The next section will outline

environmental conditions.

Reactive Explanations

The above political explanations that stem from conflict theory are based on claims that police killings are not evenly distributed among citizen populations and that deadly force is applied disproportionately against those who are located at the margins of society.

Segments of the population, in particular the underclass, are often seen as threatening to the social order. In contrast, a common underlying assumption of reactive explanations is that because police use lethal force in response to the violence they encounter in the course of their work, they are using deadly force only when it is necessary.

Reactive explanations therefore assert that the level of police violence in a geographic area is a function of the level of violence in that area (Matulia 1985; Sherman and Langworthy 1979). Qualitative research on police behavior suggests that the use of lethal force by the police should be most likely in areas where the police encounter and must react to violent populations (Rubenstein 1973). Other early studies on the situations surrounding police use of force found that the majority of police killings involved use or threatened use of weapons by those were killed (Binder and Fridell 1984).

Most of the previous macro research found that the level of violence in the community is the strongest predictor of the rate of police killings. Fyfe (1980) reports that New York City police killings were the most numerous in the areas with the highest violent crime arrest rates while Matulia (1985) and Sherman and Langworthy (1979) found strong positive correlations between police killings and violent crimes. Yet these studies were limited to either one or a few cities and only examined bivariate correlations.

Early multivariate analyses of states found that police exposure to violent crimes

predicted police use of deadly force (Kania and Mackey, 1977; Jacobs and Britt 1979).

But state-level analyses, as previously noted, obscure important community differences.

Despite these limitations, the evidence from more recent studies at the city level,

however, generally corresponds to the above findings. Sorenson, Marquart and Brock

(1993) in one of the few multivariate analyses at the city level identified a strong effect of violent crime rates on the rate of police killings in large cities over 100,000 population but found that this effect diminishes in the largest cities. Jacobs and O’Brien (1998) also find a positive relationship between citizen violence and police killings. Specifically, their analyses showed that cities with the highest murder rates had the most police killings and cities with the highest race-specific murder rates had the most police killings of African-Americans.

Based on the overwhelming evidence that police respond to violent communities with enhanced lethal social control, I hypothesize that there will be more police killings in places with high murder rates. For analyses restricted to police killings of African

Americans, I predict that cities with the highest black murder rates will experience more police killings of African-Americans. In order to rule out the possibility that police are more likely to use deadly force in response to violence specifically directed against them rather than in response to the general level of community violence, I include a more direct measure of violence and hypothesize that places where police officers were recently murdered in the line of duty will have more police killings.

Yet official crime rates may not capture all of the violence that contributes to police killings. It is probable that other environmental characteristics that lead to violent 31

acts not enumerated in official crime rates capture variation in police killings. Urban conditions such as high rates of poverty are associated with increases in interpersonal violence and public disorder. But much of the interpersonal conflict in cities is not reported to police and will therefore not be included in official crime reports. As a result, community characteristics such as poverty contribute to disorderly behavior that may influence the amount of violence police are subjected to in the course of their work in addition to violence associated with the general crime rates (Jacobs and O’Brien 1998).

If high levels of poverty lead to additional violent crime not captured by official statistics, it is probable that in cities with high percentages of families living in poverty there will be more lethal violence directed at the police.

Other environmental characteristics that may contribute to interpersonal violence not included in the FBI’s crime reports include correlates of social disorder and decay.

Social disorganization theory provides a basis for claims that increases in interpersonal violence stem from factors such as family disruption that plague urban neighborhoods

(Sampson and Wilson 1995; Shihadeh and Steffensmeier 1994; Sampson 1987). High rates of family disintegration at the community level are believed to be partly responsible for undermining the capacity for social organization and mechanisms of social control, creating higher amounts of crime (Huff-Corzine, Corzine and Moore 1986; Loeber and

of informal networks that can provide valuable supervision of youth and guardianship of property. Studies suggest, for instance, that divorced mothers have less contact with neighbors than married mothers (Alwin, Converse, and Martin 1985). Hence, communities characterized by high levels of family disruption are likely to have higher rates of crime and disorder because formal and informal control mechanisms that could reduce such antisocial behavior are undermined by this situation. In support of this claim, Sampson (1987) showed that family disruptions at the city level had a large direct effect on crime.

But much of the interpersonal violence produced by social disorganization is not offensive enough to warrant reporting to the police and therefore will not be included in official measures of crime. For example, because high rates of family disruption produce large numbers of unsupervised adolescents, unruly behaviors and interpersonal violence should ensue. Although these disorderly acts will sometimes require police intervention and may need to be resolved by using lethal social control, this delinquent behavior is not included in official violent crime rates.

Police intervention is also necessary in many domestic violence incidents that are often resolved without arrest. If family breakdowns contribute to the number of potentially violent domestic disputes to which police must respond, police use of lethal force against citizens should be more likely in these situations. In order to be sure that this source of additional violence is accounted for, the characteristics that produce this behavior should be considered.

Some prior research on police killings supports this perspective. Jacobs and

O’Brien (1998) find that indicators of social disorganization such as divorce rates and 33

female-headship of African-American families helps explain police killings in urban

areas. Based on these findings I hypothesize that if social disorganization leads to

increases in violence behavior independent of the violence captured by official crime rates, police killings should be more frequent in cities with high levels of social disorganization.

In sum, reactive accounts suggest that police killings are most likely in cities where the police must control a violent population or where they encounter difficult urban conditions such as social disorganization and decay that lead to violent crime or fear of violent crime.

Alternative explanations

Other possible explanations for the number of police killings include the size of police departments and the size of the populations they police. Deadly force may be likely in cities with fewer officers relative to the population they control. Finally, anonymity is high in larger cities making policing more difficult. While smaller departments can rely on informal controls to maintain order, police in larger cities may have to resort to using deadly force in order to keep subordinate racial groups in check (Jacobs and O’Brien

1998). I therefore hypothesize that the largest cities will experience more police killings.

Data and Measures

In order to test these hypotheses, I’ve compiled a three panel dataset for the years 1980,

1990, and 2000 that includes information for all U.S. cities whose population was greater

than 100,000 in 1980. Due to missing values and other statistical transformations, the 34

total number of city-years for the analyses of total police killings is 342 city-years.

Because of missing data for race-specific murder rates for two cities, the total n for models that analyze killings of African-Americans is 340 city-years.

Unit of Analysis

The most appropriate approach to the study of police organizations involves an examination of the characteristics of the communities they serve. The most rigorous quantitative studies of police violence that examine more than several cases use the city as their unit of analysis. These studies use cities for several additional reasons.

First, data that includes individual officer characteristics or situational attributes are available for only a handful of cities so the results of studies that use these limited samples yield less generality. A logical answer to this problem would be to collect data for more places. But collecting micro-level data on individual officer behavior is particularly difficult. For example, when researchers conduct interviews of individual officers, respondent truthfulness may affect the validity of the data because the police are often characterized as having a subculture that stresses secrecy. Direct observation of violent police behavior is also problematic because the use of deadly force is so rare. In sum, until better data collection methods are introduced, widespread data on the police use of deadly force and related characteristics is limited to the city.

A second reason for studying cities concerns the nature of the theories I test in this paper. First, because I am interested in identifying the effect of racial composition on use of lethal force, the city is a more logical unit than states because race and other differences are likely to be found in urban areas and averaging measures across states 35

obscures these differences. Second, I am interested in testing whether political

arrangements affect variation in the police use of lethal force. Political arrangements

such as the type of local government should matter at the city level. A final piece of

evidence that suggests that I am using the correct level of analysis comes from Rossi at al

(1974) who found that the 67% of the variance in police use of aggressive detention

tactics, including police use of deadly force, is attributable to city-level indicators.

Utility of Panel Data

Before operationalizing the variables, it is useful to note that panel data has advantages

compared to cross-sectional or time-series designs. First, panel data overcomes problems

with heterogeneity due to unmeasured explanatory variables in cross-sections, which can

cause bias in estimation. Kennedy (2003) claims that the ability to deal with the omitted

variable problem is the biggest advantage of panel data. Second, since one can combine

both cross-sectional and over time variation, panel data create more variability,

alleviating potential multicollinearity problems. In short, it provides the most efficient

estimation. Finally, time-series data requires a very long series of data to provide good

estimates of changes in behavior while cross-sectional results tell us nothing about the

dynamics of sociological relationships. Panel data allows for estimation of dynamic

sociological phenomena and avoids the need for lengthy time-series data. These

attractive features suggest that using panel data to assess these relationships will produce

the most reliable results.

The Dependent Variables

Both dependent variables, total police killings and police killings of African-Americans,

are measured using raw counts of these events. The data for the dependent variables

come from the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Supplementary Homicide Report series.

This series is available from the University of Michigan’s Inter-University Consortium

for Political and Social Reseach (ICPSR). Because police killings are rare, the total

number of “Justified Officer Homicides” is aggregated for 3 years in each panel to

decrease the probability that idiosyncratic events will distort the results. These killings are then disaggregated by race and again summed for three years per panel to construct the measure of killings of African-Americans by police. While these data can be further disaggregated by race of the officer involved, the high percentage of cases in the SHR in which this characteristic is recorded as “unknown” precludes such an analysis at this time.

The Explanatory Variables

All explanatory variables are from the decennial census years 1980, 1990 and 2000. The measures for these variables are as follows:

Reactive explanations: These include both indicators of community disorder and

measures of crime and violence.

Community disorder or social disorganization is measured using several indicators

obtained from the United States Census Bureau:

- Poverty: The percentage of families below the poverty line

- Broken homes: The percentage of the population comprised of divorced persons

and the percentage of female-headed family households.

The violent nature of city residents is measured using several indicators obtained from the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Uniform Crime Reports. These include:

- Murder rates: Number of homicides per 100,000 persons

- Violence directed at the police: Number of homicides of police in the line of duty

from the FBI’s Law Enforcement Officers Killed and Assaulted Series available

from the University of Michigan’s Inter-University Consortium for Political and

Social Reseach (ICPSR)

Political Explanations: These include measures of racial threat, relative power by race

and direct political explanations:

- General racial threat: The percentage of the population that is African-American

from the U.S. Census

- Specific racial threat: The rate of killings of whites committed by African-

Americans per 100,000 African-Americans from the Uniform Crime Reports

Supplemental Homicide Reports

- Ethnic threat: The percentage of the population that is Hispanic from the

U.S.Census

- Relative racial economic resources: Median income of white households divided

by the median income of black households calculated from U.S. Census figures.

- City political arrangements: Government type as defined by the Census of City

and County Governments.

Additional variables:

- Segregation: The index of dissimilarity measures the probability that a white

resident will encounter a black citizen in the census tract in which they reside.

This index is available from the U.S. Census Bureau’s Mumford Center.

- Police Strength: The size of a city’s police force is measured using the number of

sworn police per 100,000 people obtained from the FBI’s Crime in the United

States yearly series.

- City size: Total resident population

- Dummy variables for two of the three periods are included in the models to cap-

ture cross city trends.

- Regional dummies are entered to capture otherwise unmeasured factors like

culture.

Variables specific to the analyses of police killings of African-Americans are as follows:

- Black murder rates: Number of homicides committed by African-Americans per

100,000 African-American persons

- Social disorganization as measured by the number of African-American female-

headed households divided by the number of African-American family

households.

- Size of the population-at-risk: The number of African-Americans.

Estimation

I use negative binomial regression to test for the hypothesized relationships because this technique is the most appropriate to use with a count dependent variable and is superior 39

to Ordinary Least Squares regression for several reasons. First, OLS assumes a normal

distribution but because there are no or few police killings in most cities the distribution

of police killings is skewed. Because counts with low means follow a Poisson

distribution, estimators that assume this distribution are most appropriate. But the biggest

problem with OLS is that produces biased and inconsistent estimates when the dependent

variable contains many zero values, which is often the case in count models (Long 1997).

Using negative binomial regression instead should produce more accurate results that

those from studies that use OLS to analyze rates of rare events.

A second reason this technique is most appropriate for modeling rare events is because it treats the outcome as a raw count rather than using a rate. Rates are problematic when accounting for rare events that affect a small population at risk. For example, Jacobs and O’Brien (1998) in a study of police use of lethal force against blacks in U.S. cities measured the dependent variable with the number of police killings of blacks per 100,000 black residents. They found that a few cities including Torrance and

Sunnyvale, California had a relatively low number of African Americans (fewer than

1,000) and 1 (Sunnyvale) or 2 (Torrance) killings of African-Americans by police in the time period under study. The result was an extremely high rate of police killings in these two cities. These two outliers distorted the results and led to heteroskedasticity across cities. This example shows how using rates increases the possibility that extreme outliers due to only a few events causes large changes in estimation. To deflate these rates, the authors weighted cities with fewer blacks. While this technique represents an alternative to models designed for counts, count estimators are preferable because outliers caused by ratios based on rare and potentially idiosyncratic events are not present. 40

Modeling Police Killings

There are several models that deal specifically with characteristics of count outcomes.

The most basic is the Poisson regression model (PRM). With this model, the probability of a count is determined by a Poisson distribution, where the mean of the distribution is a function of the independent variables (Long, 1997). The Poisson regression model, however, is restrictive in several ways. First, it is based on the assumption that events occur independently over time (see Xekalaki 1983 for examples). This may not be a valid assumption in the case of police killings because the occurrence of one may precipitate additional killings. A second restriction is that the PRM assumes that the mean of the outcome is equal to the variance, but in reality, the variance often exceeds the mean, resulting in a condition referred to as “overdispersion”. Using Poisson when overdispersion is present produces underestimated standard errors for the coefficients and overly optimistic significance tests (Cameron and Trivedi 1986).

One way to overcome the assumption of equal means-to-variances is to use a variation of the Poisson distribution, the Negative Binomial Regression Model (NBRM) which allows the variance to exceed the mean. The basic difference is that in the PRM, variation in the mean is assumed to be caused by observed heterogeneity and different values of a set of independent variables (X) will result in different means but all cases with the same values for X will have the same mean. In the NBRM, variation in the predicted mean is due to both variation in X across cases and unobserved heterogeneity introduced by an error term. Because in this model more than one mean is possible for each set of observed X’s, there is a distribution of predicted means rather than a single mean (Long, 1997). In this way, the assumption of equality between the mean and 41

variance (which is rarely true in practice) is relaxed and the NBRM is a more appropriate

choice. Referring ahead to Table 2.1 (p. 46), an examination of the means and variation

of these variables suggests that overdispersion is present. I therefore conclude that the

Negative Binomial Regression Model is a superior choice to the Poisson Regression

Model for analysis of this data.

The Estimation Model for Total Police Killings Using Negative Binomial Regression

The following model provides a general specification of the total police killings model:

NPOLKILS3Y = b0 + blPERBLK + b2PERHISP +b3PERHISP2 + b4OFFKILLED +

b5BWMURDRT + b6MURDRT + b7SEG + b8SWNPOLRT + b9SWNPOLRT2

+ b10BWMDINC + b11CITYMAN + b12PERDIVC + b13PERFMPOV + b14POP +

b15MIDWST + b16NORTHEST + b17SOUTH + b18Y80 + b19Y0 + e where NPOLKILS3Y is an outcome variable consisting of raw counts of police killings,

PERBLK is the city percentage black, PERHISP is the city percentage Hispanic,

PERHISP2 is the square of the city percentage Hispanic, OFFKILLED is the number of police officers killed, BWMURDRT is the rate of murders of whites by African-

Americans per 100,000 African-Americans in square-root form, MURDRT is the number of murders per 100,000 population, SEG is the residential dissimilarity index between blacks and whites, SWNPOLRT is the number of sworn police per 100,000 population,

SWNPOLRT2 is the square of the rate of police, BWMDINC is the ratio of black median family incomes divided by white median family incomes, CITYMAN is a dummy coded one for cities with a city-manager form of local government, PERDIVC is the percentage of the population that is divorced, PERFMPOV is the percentage of families living in 42

poverty, POP is the city population, MIDWST, NORTHEST and SOUTH are dummies

coded one for cities in these respective census-defined regions, Y80 and Y90 are

dummies coded one for are dummies coded one for the years 1990 and 2000 respectively.

The analyses of killings of African-Americans by police test the same theoretical

explanations. Testing lethal police violence against this subset of the population requires

that the explanatory variables represent the exposure probability of African-Americans to

these conditions. Therefore some of the independent variables are disaggregated by race.

The following model provides a general specification of the police killings of African-

Americans model:

NPOLKILSBLKS3Y = b0 + blPERBLK + b2OFFKILLED + b3BWMURDRT +

b4MURDRTBLK + b5SEG + b6SWNPOLRT + b7SWNPOLRT2

+ b8BWMDINC + b9CITYMAN + b10PERBFHFAM + b11NBLACK +

b12MIDWST + b13NORTHEST + b14SOUTH + b15Y80 + b16Y0 + e where NPOLKILSBLKS3Y is an outcome variable consisting of raw counts of police killings of African-Americans, PERBLK is the city percentage black, OFFKILLED is the number of police officers killed, BWMURDRT is the rate of murders of whites by

African-Americans per 100,000 African-Americans in square-root form, MURDRTBLK is the number of murders committed by African-Americans per 100,000 African-

Americans, SEG is the residential dissimilarity index between blacks and whites,

SWNPOLRT is the number of sworn police per 100,000 population, SWNPOLRT2 is the square of the rate of police, BWMDINC is the ratio of black-to-white median family incomes, CITYMAN is a dummy coded one for cities with a city-manager form of local government, PERBFHFAM is the percentage of female-headed black family households, 43

NBLACK is the number of blacks, MIDWST, NORTHEST and SOUTH are dummies coded one for cities in these respective census-defined regions, Y80 and Y90 are dummies coded one for the years 1990 and 2000 respectively.

Additional Considerations

Previous literature emphasizes possible effects of independent variable interactions on social control outcomes (Myers and Talarico 1987). In addition to additive relationships, my analysis tests for first-order interactions between important explanatory variables (in analyses not shown).

Because these analyses use data for the same sample of units over several time periods it is possible that the number of police killings in one time period is affected by the number of killings in the previous period. To account for these time-contagion effects, I control for autocorrelation.

Additional measures were considered in models not reported. In the analyses of total police killings other measures of social disorder including crowding, the percentage of female-headed families and residential stability (the percentage born in current state of residence) were considered. I also added measures of unemployment and median family income to these models. In the analyses of police killings of African-Americans, I assessed potential effects of race-disaggregated measures of these additional variables.

Finally, other local political arrangements such as the race of the mayor that have previously been found to attenuate police killings probably due to their positive effect on perceptions of black political efficacy (Jacobs and O’Brien 1998; Jacobs and Wood 1999) did not have any measurable effect on these outcomes. In sum, these additional measures did not contribute to the variation in police use of deadly force and their inclusion did not alter the most theoretically important variables.

Descriptive Statistics

Table 2.1 provides a summary of the expected directions of relationships between the explanatory variables and total police killings and the means and standard deviations for all explanatory variables including both the cross-sectional and over-time variation and the minimum and maximum values. Table 2.2 includes this information for police killings of African-Americans. To reiterate, positive relationships are expected between most explanatory variables and the dependent variables. Only the presence of a city manager form of local government and the ratio of black-to-white median incomes

(because it is reverse coded) are hypothesized to have a negative effect on police killings.

Variable Predicted Sign Mean Std. Dev. Min Max

Total Police Killings overall 4.824 11.086 0.000 102.000 over time 9.633 0.000 74.000 X-sect. 5.520 -34.176 49.824

% Black + overall 21.021 17.904 0.080 84.032 over time 17.747 0.430 78.458 X-sect. 2.615 10.180 33.886

% Hispanic + overall 12.422 15.173 0.390 90.338 over time 14.543 0.659 84.066 X-sect. 4.422 -4.985 29.305

Officers killed in the line of duty + overall 0.304 1.511 0.000 29.000 over time 0.900 0.000 9.667 X-sect. 1.215 -9.363 19.637

√Rate of Black Killings of Whites + overall 0.056 0.061 0.000 0.491 over time 0.038 0.000 0.209 X-sect. 0.049 -0.107 0.383

Ln Murder Rate + overall 2.280 0.930 -0.693 4.354 over time 0.841 -0.142 4.074 X-sect. 0.422 0.828 4.029

Segregation + overall 59.754 14.507 16.850 88.700 over time 13.423 21.950 85.440 X-sect. 5.793 25.081 79.441

Sworn police per 100,000 + overall 221.693 89.879 85.351 805.569 over time 86.423 103.040 690.576 X-sect. 24.982 125.687 336.686

Black/White Median Income - overall 0.807 0.149 0.380 1.583 over time 0.110 0.595 1.224 X-sect. 0.101 0.535 1.166

City Manager Government - overall 0.512 0.500 0.000 1.000 over time 0.499 0.000 1.000 X-sect. 0.051 -0.155 1.178

% Divorced + overall 10.526 2.200 4.033 17.381 over time 1.939 6.049 16.454 X-sect. 1.046 6.608 13.597

% families in Poverty + overall 12.379 5.393 1.600 29.900 over time 5.089 1.743 26.147 X-sect. 1.813 5.439 19.137

Population/100,000 + overall 3.609 6.794 0.820 80.083 over time 6.782 0.972 74.675 X-sect. 0.588 -0.546 9.017

Table 2.1: Predicted Signs, Means, and Standard Deviations for Total Police Killings Analyses

Variable Predicted Sign Mean Std. Dev. Min Max

Police Killings of Blacks overall 2.288 6.082 0.000 67.000 over time 5.228 0.000 34.667 X-sect. 3.125 -20.712 35.288

Ln % Black + overall 2.507 1.246 -2.526 4.431 over time 1.228 -1.306 4.360 X-sect. 0.223 1.287 3.757

Officers killed in the line of duty + overall 0.304 1.511 0.000 29.000 over time 0.900 0.000 9.667 X-sect. 1.215 -9.363 19.637

√Rate of Black Killings of Whites + overall 0.056 0.061 0.000 0.491 over time 0.038 0.000 0.209 X-sect. 0.049 -0.107 0.383

Ln Black Murder Rate + overall 2.831 1.544 -0.693 5.485 over time 1.197 -0.693 4.449 X-sect. 0.961 -1.008 6.336

Segregation + overall 59.754 14.507 16.850 88.700 over time 13.423 21.950 85.440 X-sect. 5.793 25.081 79.441

Sworn police per 100,000 + overall 221.693 89.879 85.351 805.569 over time 86.423 103.040 690.576 X-sect. 24.982 125.687 336.686

Black/White Median Income - overall 0.807 0.149 0.380 1.583 over time 0.110 0.595 1.224 X-sect. 0.101 0.535 1.166

City Manager Government - overall 0.512 0.500 0.000 1.000 over time 0.499 0.000 1.000 X-sect. 0.051 -0.155 1.178

% Black Female-Headed Families + overall 38.820 11.952 0.000 60.835 over time 8.295 10.214 53.697 X-sect. 8.620 17.130 55.572

Number of Blacks + overall 86,767.120 201,154.400 83.851 2,129,762.000 over time 200,850.600 433.284 2,006,897.000 X-sect. 16,751.470 -131,712.200 209,631.800

Table 2.2: Predicted Signs, Means, and Standard Deviations for Police Killings of Blacks Analyses

The Dependent Variables

An examination of the data suggests that there is sufficient variation in the dependent variables over time. The following graph (Figure 2.1) presents the mean number of police killings by year in order to illustrate changes in the dependent variables over time. These results suggest that the amount of total police killings and police killings of blacks have clearly decreased, which is expected given the increases in legal and other restrictions on police violence that occurred after 1980. Specifically, the average number of total killings per city decreases from 6.76 in 1980 to 5.25 in 2000.

The average number of African-American citizens killed by a city’s police force decreases from 3.66 in 1980 to 2.24 in 2000. If police killings are affected by department firearms regulations, these decreases are plausible because 30.2% of surveyed police agencies in large cities changed their shooting policies as a result of court decisions during the 1980’s that restricted the use of deadly force (Walker and Fridell 1992).

Total killings range from a minimum of zero in many city-years to a high of 101 in New York in 1990-1992. The sample contains 119 city-years (35%) with no police killings and 47 city-years (13.8%) with only one police killing, suggesting that the distribution is indeed skewed toward fewer police killings. Police killings of blacks range from a minimum of zero in 185 city-years (54.4%) to a high of 67. The sample includes 53 city-years (15.6%) with only one police killing of an African-American. The city-year with the most police killings of African-Americans is Chicago in 1980-1982 with 67 incidents of lethal force against blacks.

Average Police Killings

d 8

ille 6

K total police killings

s 4 n killings of blacks e 2 z i t

i 0 C 1980 1990 2000 Year

Fig. 2.1: The average number of police killings per city-year over time

Regional Variation in Police Killings

To get a better overall picture of police killings in U.S. cities, it is important to look for differences in cities by region. The following table illustrates regional differences in time for both total police killings and police killings of African-Americans.

1980 1990 2000

Region # of cities total blacks total blacks total blacks

Midwest 39 5.87 3.82 3.54 2.33 2.87 1.82

Northeast 18 8.00 4.06 8.28 5.00 3.72 2.61

South 61 5.75 3.44 3.80 2.21 2.93 1.62

West 52 3.48 0.98 6.71 1.67 6.33 1.23

Table 2.3: The average number of police killings by region over time

The above table suggests that while total police killings are declining in most areas of the country, cities in the West have shown a significant increase in both total police killings and killings of blacks because 1980. This is not surprising considering the large population growth in the western United States over the last 20 years. This table also indicates that in general, police killings are highest in northeastern cities and have decreased the most in southern cities. This finding contradicts claims that the southern

U.S. is characterized by high rates of violent acts, suggesting that police violence does not conform to the “culture of violence” hypothesis used to explain violent crime rates in this region (Wolfgang and Ferracuti 1967; Toch 1969). In order to examine this finding in more detail, I present the average police killings over time for cities located in both formerly confederate and non-confederate states in the following graph.

4.5 4

d 3.5 ille

k 3 s n

e 2.5 Other z i t i 2 Confedrate c f 1.5 o e t

a 1 R 0.5 0 total blacks total blacks total blacks

1980 1990 2000

Fig 2.2: Police killings per 100,000 population at risk by former confederacy status

This graph corroborates the finding that police killings have decreased more in southern cities than in cities in other regions. Indeed, the average rate of police killings in formerly confederate cities falls from 1.93 in 1980 to .72 in 2000. A similar pattern is seen in police killings of African-Americans with the average number of police killings of blacks dropping from 4.18 in 1980 to 1.26 in 2000. The substantial decrease in police killings of blacks from 1980 to 1990 is particularly surprising considering the history of racism and lethal vigilantism in the South (Jacobs, Carmichael and Kent, forthcoming

2006). However, this finding supports claims that southern cities were less likely to have strict policies against police use of lethal force in place before the Supreme Court decisions in the mid-1980’s that mandated increased restrictions on police shootings

(Sparger and Giagopassi 1992). Multivariate analyses should more accurately specify whether the amount of restrictions affects police killings.

Racial Composition and Police Killings

In order to introduce the relationship between racial composition and police killings, the following table, Table 2.4, presents the cases or city-year combinations with the most total police killings and the percentage of their population that is African-American.

Total Police Killings

% African-

City and State Year Total Killings American

New York, NY 1990 102 28.71

Los Angeles, CA 1990 97 13.99

Chicago, IL 1980 95 39.84

New York, NY 1980 85 25.29

Houston,TX 1990 64 28.09

Phoenix, AZ 2000 51 5.1

Los Angeles, CA 1980 50 17

San Diego, CA 1990 44 9.39

San Diego, CA 2000 40 7.86

New Orleans, LA 1980 38 55.25

Table 2.4: The city-years with the most number of police killings

This table indicates that there is not one particular decade that is represented among the cases with the highest number of deadly force instances. One aspect deserving notice is that the second largest number of total police killings occurred in Los

Angeles in 1990 even though the percentage of the population that is African-American was lower in this city than some of the other cities with similar numbers of deadly force instances. One possible interpretation of this finding is that there are department specific effects attributable to the LAPD. This is consistent with the style of policing used in Los

Angeles before the Rodney King incident in 1991. Police Chief Darryl Gates, who was notorious for advocating aggressive policing, headed the LAPD during most of the time-

period covered in this study and perhaps police were more likely to use lethal force in

order to fulfill the “law and order” policies set forth by this chief. The following Table

2.5 presents the cases with the highest number of police killings of African-Americans.

Police Killings of African-Americans

% African-

City and State Year Killings of African-Americans American

Chicago, IL 1980 67 39.84

New York, NY 1990 53 28.71

Los Angeles, CA 1990 41 13.99

New Orleans, LA 1980 30 55.25

Detroit, MI 1980 29 63.03

New York, NY 1980 28 25.29

Baltimore, MD 1980 25 54.77

Chicago, IL 1990 24 39.07

Detroit, MI 1990 24 75.67

New York, NY 2000 23 26.59

Table 2.5: The city-years with the most number of police killings of African-Americans

Concurrent with total police killings, an examination of only killings of African-

Americans again reveals no apparent panel-specific differences in the use of lethal force in those cities where police kill the most citizens. Again, Los Angeles police stand out as having a higher tendency to kill blacks than would be expected according to the proportion of the population that is African-American.

Additional Bivariate Correlations

Zero-order correlations between explanatory factors and the dependent variables are presented in the correlation matrices in Table 2.6 and Table 2.7. The results show that strong independent predictors of total police killings include the size of the city and the number of officers killed in the line of duty. Although these results do not control for other factors, they tentatively suggest that police killings are more likely in the largest cities and where violence that targets the police is most likely, thereby supporting reactive explanations for police violence against citizens.

13 1.000 12 1.000 0.110 11 1.000 -0.149 -0.200 10 1.000 0.193 -0.150 -0.139 047 187 025 9 1.000 0.088 -0. -0. -0. 8 1.000 0.014 0.407 0.283 -0.304 -0.244 7 1.000 0.403 0.006 0.411 0.286 -0.219 -0.201 6 1.000 0.664 0.372 0.055 0.560 0.169 -0.051 -0.011 5 1.000 0.242 0.156 0.216 0.122 0.046 0.064 -0.009 -0.007 es s 4 aly 1.000 0.136 0.177 0.215 0.199 0.111 0.102 0.409 -0.085 -0.130 An s g 3 1.000 0.095 0.100 0.216 0.139 0.234 -0.001 -0.030 -0.212 -0.104 -0.106 2 1.000 0.119 0.639 0.548 0.525 0.674 0.053 -0.326 -0.046 -0.100 -0.188 -0.086 lice Killin 1 tal Po 1.000 0.126 0.176 0.370 0.138 0.271 0.317 0.295 0.017 0.124 0.771 -0.136 -0.125 To r o f y t s ites u h d f W f lation e e o o r s r g y s t e lin Co r g e th er v overnment d r Killin in te Po a O - ce per 100,000 o i illed ic n hite Median Income lice Killin Black o i f an s k Zer ilies in : at vorced ack 6 m i . l Manager G cer a i orn pol y tal Po f t ack/W D l i w opul e 2 l To % B % Hisp Of ?Rate o Ln Murder R Segregation S B C % % f P 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 Tab

10 1.000 0.124 9 1.000 -0.143 -0.211 8 1.000 -0.049 -0.302 -0.002 7 1.000 0.019 -0.303 0.319 0.473 6 1.000 0.405 0.014 -0.219 0.136 0.415 5 1.000 0.453 0.081 0.053 0.021 0.131 0.133 4 1.000 0.500 0.160 -0.004 0.225 0.113 -0.130 0.033 3 1.000 0.137 0.138 0.215 0.200 0.113 -0.087 -0.026 0.436 2 1.000 0.120 -0.043 0.260 0.549 0.527 -0.094 -0.189 0.361 0.344 1 1.000 0.332 0.342 0.103 0.188 0.410 0.445 0.047 -0.202 0.045 0.786 Rate of Black Killings of Whites of Killings Black of Rate Police Killings of Blacks of Killings Police Ln %Black duty of line the in killed Officers √ Ln Rate Black Murder Segregation 100,000 per police Sworn Black/White Median Income Government Manager City Families Female-Headed Black % Number ofBlacks 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 Table 2.7: Zero-Order Correlations for Police Killings of African-Americans Analyses African-Americans of Killings Police for Correlations Zero-Order 2.7: Table

The zero-order correlations between explanatory factors and the subset of police killings of African-Americans in Table 2.7 reveal some similar results. The number of blacks and the size of the police department are highly correlated with the number of police killings of blacks, suggesting that cities with the most African-Americans and the most police officers experience more police killings of African-Americans. A more theoretically-interesting finding is that racial residential segregation has a positive zero- order effect on this dependent variable. This tentatively suggests that police use violence against racial minorities in places where blacks reside apart from whites. The next set of analyses will determine if these results persist after holding constant the effects of other explanations.

Table 2.6 provides the correlation matrix for all explanatory variables and the dependent variables, total police killings. Table 2.7 presents these results for police killings of African-Americans. These figures indicate that all of the correlations between explanatory variables but one are modest, suggesting that multicollinearity may not be a problem.

Negative Binomial Regression Results

Total Police Killings:

Tables 2.8 and 2.9 present the Negative Binomial Regression results. In Table 2.8,

Model 1 includes the most basic measures of racial threat and the measures of potential violence as well as controls for racial residential segregation, the size of the police department, city population and time and regional controls. In this model I find that the most obvious measure of racial threat, percentage black, is not a significant predictor of 57

police killings but ethnic threat as measured by the percentage of the population that is

Hispanic is a significant factor. Consistent with prior studies that report a nonlinear relationship between social control outcomes and the size of minority populations

(Jackson 1989), percentage Hispanic is best modeled as a curvilinear relationship with police killings. To account for a nonlinear relationship I include both the percentage of the population that is Hispanic and a term that squares these values. I find that percentage

Hispanic has a positive effect on the number of police killings at moderate levels but as the percentage of the population that is Hispanic reaches a threshold (36.59%), this effect becomes negative. Tests show that these two terms are jointly significant and therefore are best modeled using a quadratic specification.

Model 1 Model 2 Model 3 bSEbSEbSE % Black 0.562 8.619 0.205 8.409 % Black * 1980 0.017 * 0.008 % Black * 1990 -0.004 0.011 % Black * 2000 -0.016 0.011 % Hispanic 0.029 * 0.017 0.029 * 0.018 0.024 0.018 % Hispanic2 -0.494 0.305 -0.498 0.305 -0.447 0.310 Officers killed in the line of duty 0.142 ** 0.054 0.143 ** 0.053 0.138 ** 0.053 √Rate of Black Killings of Whites 1.763 1.127 1.721 1.144 3.146 ** 1.244 Ln Murder Rate 0.172 0.140 0.170 0.139 0.195 0.146 Segregation 0.018 0.013 0.018 0.013 0.020 0.016 Sworn police per 100,000 0.003 ** 0.001 0.003 0.003 0.003 0.003 Sworn police per 100,0002 -0.129 0.268 -0.068 0.264 Black/White Median Income City Manager Government % Divorced % families in Poverty Population 0.098 *** 0.012 0.097 *** 0.012 0.087 *** 0.012 Location in Midwest -0.678 0.308 -0.680 * 0.307 -0.618 * 0.345 Location in Northeast -1.467 *** 0.361 -1.489 *** 0.365 -1.473 *** 0.361 Location in South -0.335 0.278 -0.333 0.279 -0.312 0.296 1980 -0.189 0.239 -0.179 0.251 -1.133 ** 0.407 1990 -0.231 0.174 -0.226 0.179 -0.576 * 0.324 Constant -1.000 * 0.439 -1.122 ** 0.468 -0.843 0.529 Notes: Coefficients and SE's for % Black and %Hispanic2, multipied by 1000 Coefficients and SE's for Sworn police2 and Population multipied by 100,000 Significance: * < .05 ** < .01 *** < .001 (standard errors to the right of coefficients; 2-tailed tests on intercepts, period dummy variables, and interactions with period dummy variables).

Table 2.8: Negative Binomial Estimates of the total Number of Police killings in U.S. Cities

Model 4 Model 5 Model 6 bSEbSEbSE % Black % Black * 1980 0.015 * 0.008 0.015 * 0.008 0.035 *** 0.011 % Black * 1990 -0.007 0.010 -0.007 0.010 0.008 0.013 % Black * 2000 -0.017 0.011 -0.017 0.011 -0.007 0.013 % Hispanic 0.023 0.017 0.026 * 0.018 0.036 ** 0.017 2 % Hispanic -0.492 0.306 -0.535 0.306 -0.449 0.291 Officers killed in the line of duty 0.130 ** 0.053 0.131 ** 0.053 0.136 ** 0.047 √Rate of Black Killings of Whites 3.279 ** 1.224 3.296 ** 1.214 3.980 *** 1.167 Ln Murder Rate 0.198 0.147 0.196 0.148 0.121 0.153 Segregation 0.023 0.017 0.023 0.017 0.025 * 0.014 Sworn police per 100,000 0.002 0.003 0.002 0.003 0.003 0.003 Sworn police per 100,0002 0.027 0.274 0.042 0.277 -0.074 0.297 Black/White Median Income 1.125 0.720 1.113 0.719 0.656 0.693 City Manager Government -0.068 0.190 -0.143 0.180 % Divorced 0.129 *** 0.042 Percent families in Poverty -0.043 0.029 Population 0.087 *** 0.012 0.086 *** 0.013 0.083 *** 0.012 Location in Midwest -0.660 * 0.347 -0.652 * 0.348 -0.670 * 0.327 Location in Northeast -1.512 *** 0.365 -1.523 *** 0.365 -1.005 ** 0.400 Location in South -0.197 0.310 -0.188 0.312 -0.280 0.301 1980 -1.423 *** 0.448 -1.407 *** 0.448 -1.311 ** 0.447 1990 -0.806 * 0.366 -0.799 * 0.364 -0.647 * 0.372 Constant -1.619 * 0.715 -1.536 * 0.699 -2.701 *** 0.829 Notes: Coefficients and SE's for %Hispanic2 multipied by 1000 Coefficients and SE's for Sworn police2 and Population multipied by 100,000 Significance: * < .05 ** < .01 *** < .001 (standard errors to the right of coefficients; 2-tailed tests on intercepts, period dummy variables, and interactions with period dummy variables).

Table 2.9: Negative Binomial Estimates of the total Number of Police killings in U.S. Cities

There is some support for reactive arguments as well. While the murder rates do not predict police killings, the more specific measure of violent threats to police, the number of officers killed in the line of duty, is a strong and positive predictor of police killings. Finally, the size of the police force and the size of the population are positively related to police killings as predicted.

In Model 2 of Table 2.8, I test for a potential nonlinear relationship between police killings and police department size by including both the rate of sworn police and it’s quadratic term. I find that this relationship is best modeled as a curvilinear effect because these terms are jointly significant. While the size of the police force has a positive effect on police killings at moderate levels, this effect becomes negative after the number of police per 100,000 population reaches a threshold (775.44). The remaining results from Model 1 persist. In the next model I test for interactive effects between the percentage of the population that is African-American and yearly dummies to see if the number of police killings has fluctuated in the last two decades in the analysis. Recall that this test is conducted by multiplying the 1990 and 2000 period dummy variables by the percentage of blacks. If the coefficients on these interactions are significant after the main effects are held constant, depending on the sign, this suggests that the strength of racial threat relationship expanded or contracted in that panel.

Results show that the interaction between racial threat and the 1980 panel is significant, so the relationship between African American presence and police strength was strongest in 1980 and became insignificant in 1990 and 2000. After including this more accurate specification of the basic measure of racial threat, I also find that the more specific measure of racial threat, the rate of homicides of whites by African-Americans, is a strong predictor of police killings.

Table 2.9 presents the next three models. In Model 4 I introduce the ratio of black to white median incomes. While this indicator is not significant, its addition does not alter the results of the previous model. Similarly, the addition of another ineffective predictor, the dummy variable indicating whether a city manager form of local government is present, does not alter prior results. In the final model, I include measures of social disorganization. While the percentage of families in poverty does not predict total police killings, the percentage of divorced residents has a strong positive effect. In the most complete model several relationships become more important. The effect of the rate of black killings of whites becomes stronger as well as the effect of the percentage of the population that is Hispanic. Finally, a previously ineffective explanation, the segregation index, now has a significant effect on police killings.

Police Killings of African-Americans:

The Negative Binomial regression results for the analyses of police killings disaggregated by race are presented in Tables 2.10 and 2.11. In Model 1 of Table 2.10, I include the most theoretically-interesting predictors along with relevant controls and find that racial threat measured with the size of the African-American population is a positive predictor 62

of police killings of blacks, but that the more specific indicator of racial threat, the rate of black killings of whites, is ineffective. I also find evidence for the reactive explanations that measure police exposure to violence as both the number of officers killed in the line of duty and the number of murders committed by African-Americans per 100,000 blacks are positively related to police killings of blacks. While the rate of sworn officers per

100,000 population and its square do not appear to have a measurable effect on police killings of African-Americans, a chi-square test indicates that these two terms are jointly significant at the .05 level suggesting that police strength is most accurately specified as a curvilinear effect. Finally, the strong relationship between the number of African-

Americans and these killings suggests that places with more blacks experience more police killings of members of this racial group.

Model 1 Model 2 Model 3 bSEbSEbSE Ln % Black 0.426 * 0.185

% Black * 1980 0.026 *** 0.008 0.027 *** 0.008

% Black * 1990 0.008 0.009 0.009 0.009

% Black * 2000 -0.006 0.011 -0.005 0.011

Officers killed in the line of duty 0.156 ** 0.061 0.135 * 0.062 0.129 * 0.063

√Rate of Black Killings of Whites 0.620 1.679 1.529 2.073 1.527 2.095

Ln Black Murder Rate 0.353 ** 0.147 0.379 * 0.168 0.377 * 0.169

Segregation 0.025 0.022 0.030 0.027 0.028 0.027

Sworn police per 100,000 0.003 0.003 0.005 0.003 0.005 * 0.003

Sworn police per 100,0002 -0.106 0.321 -0.218 0.329 -0.288 0.322

Black/White Median Income -0.703 0.755

City Manager Government

% Black Female-Headed Families

Number of Blacks 0.239 *** 0.038 0.227 *** 0.039 0.229 *** 0.040

Location in Midwest -0.670 0.391 -0.416 0.461 -0.398 0.462

Location in Northeast -1.227 * 0.421 -1.099 ** 0.430 -1.071 ** 0.428

Location in South -0.416 0.334 -0.172 0.374 -0.247 0.390

1980 -0.214 ** 0.319 -1.232 * 0.602 -1.071 * 0.628

1990 -0.329 * 0.175 -0.770 0.366 -0.643 0.417

Constant -3.963 *** 0.765 -3.374 *** 0.922 -2.896 ** 1.064

Notes: Coefficients and SE's for Sworn police2 and Number of Blacks multipied by 100,000 Significance: * < .05 ** < .01 *** < .001 (standard errors to the right of coefficients; 2-tailed tests on intercepts, period dummy variables, and interactions with period dummy variables).

Table 2.10: Negative Binomial Estimates of the Number of Police killings of Blacks in U.S. Cities

Model 4 Model 5 bSEb SE Ln % Black % Black * 1980 0.027 *** 0.008 0.027 *** 0.008 % Black * 1990 0.009 0.009 0.007 0.010 % Black * 2000 -0.005 0.011 -0.008 0.010 Officers killed in the line of duty 0.127 * 0.062 0.127 * 0.062 √Rate of Black Killings of Whites 1.559 2.136 1.649 2.053 Ln Black Murder Rate 0.374 * 0.168 0.362 * 0.163 Segregation 0.029 0.027 0.029 0.028 Sworn police per 100,000 0.005 * 0.003 0.005 * 0.003 Sworn police per 100,0002 -0.309 0.320 -0.264 0.304 Black/White Median Income -0.721 0.749 -0.594 0.750 City Manager Government 0.071 0.225 0.082 0.225 % Black Female-Headed Families 0.014 0.023 Number of Blacks 0.231 *** 0.040 0.237 *** 0.043 Location in Midwest -0.394 0.458 -0.461 0.426 Location in Northeast -1.057 ** 0.425 -1.141 ** 0.389 Location in South -0.248 0.389 -0.231 0.413 1980 -1.076 * 0.627 -0.877 0.881 1990 -0.637 0.417 -0.621 0.445 Constant -2.995 ** 1.070 -3.579 *** 1.149 Notes: Coefficients and SE's for Sworn police2 and Number of Blacks multipied by 100,000 Significance: * < .05 ** < .01 *** < .001 (standard errors to the right of coefficients; 2-tailed tests on intercepts, period dummy variables, and interactions with period dummy variables).

Table 2.11: Negative Binomial Estimates of the Number of Police killings of Blacks in U.S. Cities

In Model 2, I respecify the relationship between racial threat and police killings of blacks by entering the three period-specific interactions. Consistent with the results from the analyses of total police killings, racial threat gauged by percentage black has a positive effect on the number of police killings of blacks in 1980 but not in 1990 or 2000 because only the interaction between percentage black and the first panel is significant, so race has a less important effect on police killings in later years. In the next model I account for a possible effect of racial income inequality by including the ratio of black-to white median household incomes and find no support for this race-based political threat explanation.

The final two models are presented in Table 2.11. In Model 4 I account for potential effects of local political arrangements by including the dummy indicator for a city-manager form of government. While this new explanatory variable does not affect the dependent variable, the results from the prior models persist. In the final model I account for the potential effect of social disorganization by including the percentage of

African-American families headed only by a female. Again, this new addition does not significantly affect police killings of blacks, but the previous relationships remain unchanged.

Conclusions

In this section I discuss the findings for the analyses of total police killings and police killings of African-Americans separately. Within these sections I discuss findings related to reactive explanations, political explanations and other controls.

Total Police Killings

Reactive Explanations:

I find consistent support for most of the primary theoretical considerations that motivated this analysis. If the number of police killings is due in part to prior lethal violence directed against police officers and other aspects of violence and disorder found in the areas where police work, reactive explanations should have positive relationships with police killings. The findings provide partial evidence for these explanations. One out of two measures of social disorganization, the percentage of the population that is divorced, has a strong positive effect on police killings. This finding supports the notion that to maintain social order, police must resort to the use of deadly force more often in socially- disorganized areas.

I used city murder rates as a general indicator of violence in the population. This measure did not have an effect on police killings, but the more specific measure of deadly violence directed at the police has a strong consistent effect on police killings of citizens, suggesting that police respond to perceived personal threat by using more lethal force.

This finding supports claims that increased training may not overcome the fear officers perceive when dealing with violent populations especially when officers must make this

“split-second” decision (Fyfe 2005). Instead, perhaps the best strategy is implementing clear and extensive restrictions on when lethal force is allowable so that officers will not be tempted to unholster their weapons unless the situation is dire. In sum, reactive explanations for total police killings are supported by some of the findings but not others.

Political Explanations:

If the impact of racial discrimination and racial threat as explanations for differential policing of minorities has decreased over the last few decades as some scholars suggest, interaction terms that assess the joint effects of racial threat and time period should have a positive relationship with police killings in early periods but not in more recent years. The repeated finding that this dynamic relationship is present provides evidence for claims that race is becoming a less important issue in explaining variations in police violence against minorities versus whites. Building on previous research that gauged minority threat with only the size of the black population, this analysis shows that after accounting for other measures of racial threat, the threat posed by the size of black populations alone is not sufficient enough to trigger this lethal control

mechanism. Instead, in the best models the percentage of the population that is Hispanic

is another predictor of police killings. This finding suggests that ethnic threat should be

an important addition to studies that examine race-based explanations.

In addition, the threat posed by race-specific violence is a strong predictor of

police killings. The rate of black killings of whites positively predicts the use of deadly

force by police. This is not surprising considering the extensive media coverage usually

devoted to these relatively rare crimes. This finding suggests that whites in cities where

these interracial killings take place are more likely to demand that the police are

unencumbered by restrictions that might limit their ability to protect citizens from these

race-specific crimes.

These punitive responses are probably a response to the fear of crime produced by interracial homicide (Liska, Lawrence, and Sanchirico 1982). Again, the persistent effect of this variable despite controls for other racial threat measures and environmental factors provides a more specific picture of how racial threat theory operates to increase social control at the city level.

One expected finding that would have complemented this strong racial threat effect was the hypothesized relationship between the indicator of relative racial economic resources, the ratio of black-to-white median incomes and police killings. Yet this variable had consistent negligible effects. While differences in economic power may translate into differences in political power that arguably shape policies regarding police actions, perhaps only examining racial economic differences masked some of the class effects that may indirectly affect police killings. This analysis did not take absolute economic inequality into account because a gini index on income inequality is not available.

Finally, a relationship between the presence of a city manager form of local government and police killings was not present. One possible reason for a null relationship is that previous researchers that used this indicator were interested in explaining the population-corrected number of police officers (Kent and Jacobs, unpublished manuscript). City managers are arguably concerned with fiscal issues related to the hiring of officers but may be less influential in changing actual department policies.

Other controls:

One additional finding is that in the best model, the degree to which a city’s white and

African-American populations are segregated positively affects the number of police

killings. This is counter to expectations as I hypothesized that segregation would

attenuate racial threat because whites would feel less threatened by blacks when

interracial interaction is low. A possible interpretation of this positive effect is that

segregation results in a concentration of racial minorities that poses a greater threat for

police in primarily African-American neighborhoods. This idea is consistent with studies

of police behavior that suggest that officers associate neighborhoods with the degree to which they encountered suspicious persons. Werthman and Piliavin (1967) find that

“Past experience leads them (officers) to conclude that more crimes are committed in the poorer sections of town than in the wealthier areas, that African-Americans (sic.) are more likely to cause public disturbances that whites.” If officers police areas with dense racial minority populations with more force than racially heterogenous places, a positive effect of segregation on police killings is plausible.

Additional controls included the city population and the rate of police officers per

100,000 residents. The size of a city’s population has a strong consistent effect on police killings, supporting the notion that police killings should be more frequent in places with

more people at risk. In addition, the null effect of the police force size suggests that cities

with more police per capita do not necessarily have a higher number of police killings.

Police Killings of African-Americans:

Again I find consistent support for many of the primary theoretical considerations that

motivated this analysis. Many of the same factors that predicted total police killings also

explain police killings of African-Americans.

Reactive explanations:

If the reactive hypotheses are valid, prior lethal violence directed against police officers and race-specific aspects of violence and disorder found in the areas in which police work should have positive relationships with police killings of African-Americans. Similar to the findings from the previous set of analyses, reactive explanations receive mixed support. A consistent predictor of police killings of blacks is the recent number of killings of police officers. This suggests that officers not only react to violence directed at them by using more deadly force, but they also direct more deadly force at racial minorities. This finding is plausible considering that the majority of police killed in the line of duty are murdered by African-American suspects (Jacobs and Carmichael 2002).

Contrary to the results from the total killings analyses which found a null effect of murder rates, race-specific murder rates have a positive effect on police killings of blacks. This suggests that police killings are not affected by the overall murder rates, but lethal police control over African-Americans is shaped in part by race-specific murder rates. This interesting discrepancy may be explained by situational factors not considered in this study but which are included in the Supplemental Homicide Reports data set. For example, future research might disaggregate police killings according to the events surrounding the shooting in order to see if police killings of blacks are more likely in

specific situations. 71

In another departure from the results of the overall police killings models, social disorganization does not contribute to killings of blacks. It follows that while the disorderly acts and delinquency produced by social disorganization contribute to overall police killings, the use of lethal force against blacks is not attributable to social disorder.

Political explanations:

Unlike the results from the tests of racial threat as gauged by the proportion of the population that is African-American and total police killings, percentage black (in natural log form) has a positive effect on the number of race-specific police killings suggesting that racial threat is important factor in explaining this subset of killings. But another specification of racial threat is also important. Consistent with the prior set of analyses, the interaction terms that assess the joint effects of racial threat and time period shows a positive relationship with police killings in the earliest period but not in more recent years, suggesting that police use of lethal force against African-Americans has diminished over time perhaps due to the many regulations on police violence that were put forth in the mid 1980’s.

An interesting contrast to the findings from the general police killings analyses is that the threat posed by black killings of whites does not explain police killings of

African-Americans. These findings together suggest that the general size of the black population leads to more lethal force directed at this group, but more specific measures of white responses to black threat are not important. This finding along with the consistent positive effect of prior killings of officers lends to a possible conclusion that police killings of blacks are a product of police reactions to violent threat more than they are a result of white political responses to perceived minority threat. 72

Similar to the more general analyses, the two final explanations are not important.

The relative economic resources of blacks to whites as gauged by their relative incomes

and the type of city political arrangement do not affect police killings of blacks. I

conclude that after accounting for political control over the police resulting from racial

threat and after controlling for the environmental conditions in which police work, these

factors are less likely to affect restrictions on police violence.

Other controls:

Controls for the number of blacks and police strength are positive predictors of police

lethal violence against African-Americans. These findings suggest rather intuitively that

places with more blacks and more police per capita have more police killings of blacks.

Yet the effect of police strength is only important until the size of a police department

reaches a relatively large threshold. Evidence for a non-linear effect means that the

number of police per capita affects police killings of blacks up until the rate of sworn

police is well above the mean, after which this effect is no longer important.

Summary of Results

In sum, the coefficients from the race-specific analyses provide additional support for

both reactive explanations and political factors because measures of community crime

and violence along with several measures of racial threat predict police killings of blacks.

Notable similarities to and departures from the findings from analyses of total police killings are summarized in Table 2.12 below.

Total police Police killings of

Variable killings blacks

Political Explanations:

% Black * 1980 + +

√Rate of Black Killings of

Whites + no effect

% Hispanic + NA

Segregation no effect no effect

Reactive explanations:

Officers killed in the line of

duty + +

Ln Murder Rate no effect NA

Ln Black Murder Rate NA +

% Divorced + NA

% families in Poverty no effect NA

% Black Female-Headed

Families NA no effect

Other explanations:

Black/White Median Income no effect no effect

City Manager Government no effect no effect

Population/100,000 + NA

Number of Blacks NA +

Sworn police per 100,000 no effect +

TableU 2.12: Summary of findings from the analyses of total police killings and police killings of African-Americans

In this table, the (+) signs indicate a positive relationship while null relationships

are identified by “no effect”. Those variables not applicable to one or the other group of analyses are marked “NA”. No negative relationships were found. This summary indicates that some of the same factors contributed to variation in both types of police killings and other factors were consistently unimportant. In the next section I discuss the implications of these results.

Discussion

The findings suggest that some police killings stem from officer reactions to difficult urban conditions. While the murder rates do not explain total police killings, the race- specific murder rates do predict police killings of blacks, suggesting that police respond to violent black populations by using deadly force but only against blacks. The finding that police killings are more frequent in places where officers were recently killed in the line of duty lends support to the notion that police are more likely to use lethal force against potentially violent populations. The positive effect of prior officer deaths on police killings of blacks is especially plausible considering that homicides of police are most often committed by African Americans (Jacobs and Carmichael 2002). Finally, although poverty does not influence lethal force, positive relationships between one indicator of social disorganization (divorce rates) and police killings indicate that police may be required to use more lethal force to control the unmeasured interpersonal violence located in areas characterized by high divorce rates and single-parent households.

Police in cities with larger police forces are also more likely to use lethal force but only against African-Americans, and this effect is reduced after the number of police per 75

capita reaches a threshold. Because this effect is race-specific, this finding parallels

claims that areas largely comprised of racial minorities are more heavily policed (Kent

and Jacobs, forthcoming 2005).

Other explanations were not supported. Places with city-manager administrative

arrangements do not fare better in controlling police killings. In contrast to Jacobs and

O’Brien’s (1998) analysis, I find no evidence that racial inequality affects total police killings. Their analysis, however, was limited to the 1980’s and also included controls

for absolute inequality. My findings do not support this economic version of threat, but

this result may be due to the larger time period I assess and the exclusion of overall

inequality. Because many prior studies found inequality to be an important determinant

of deadly force (Sorenson, Marquart and Brock 1993; Jacobs and O’Brien 1998), as data

become available further tests of absolute inequality in multiple time periods should be

considered.

Despite the null effects of the above explanations, I find that minority presence

matters. Cities with a large Hispanic population experienced more police killings,

lending support to an ethnic version of the racial threat explanation. On the other hand,

the consistent effect of the size of the black population in 1980, but not in later years

lends support to claims that race is becoming a less important explanation for the amount

of law and social control in the United States.

A more novel finding is that more direct measures of criminal threat predict the

use of lethal force. The positive influence of black killings of whites on police use of

force suggests that public demands for increases in social control partly stem from

perceived fear of criminal victimization by racial minorities. Surprisingly, these well- 76

publicized interracial homicides did not affect police killings of blacks specifically. But the combination of these findings indicate that racial threat does affect police killings but police themselves do not respond to majority demands for social control by disproportionately targeting African-Americans. The strong effect of this more specific form of racial threat also suggests that studies that examine social control outcomes should consider new and more direct measures of racial threat.

The persistent effect of several versions of minority threat supports claims that whites are less likely to demand restraints on violent police behavior in response to perceived threat from minorities. These relationships are indirect because macro-level analyses can not detect the individual behavioral responses to racial threat, so it is difficult to know the exact mechanisms by which this threat-response takes place. Even though political responses at the micro-level must be inferred, I have provided plausible mechanisms that could explain how racial composition and other structural effects may affect police use of lethal force.

Broader implications:

The results of this study challenge conventional views that police killings are simple reactions to the violence they encounter on the job. Instead, indirect political explanations predict a substantial amount of the variation in police use of deadly force across large cities. The persistent effect of minority threat even after the violent conditions of cities are controlled suggests that conflict based explanations do affect the amount of social control used against citizens in the last three decades. This study

therefore supports the findings of cross-sectional research that also considered indirect political explanations (Sorenson, Marquart and Brock 1993; Jacobs and O’Brien 1998).

This study also has provided refinements to the minority threat perspective on police violence. First, the robust finding that black lethal violence against whites affected police killings increases the plausibility of the minority threat argument because these interracial homicides are a more direct measure of racial threat. Second, this study detected interactions between racial threat and specific periods that could not be tested in prior studies of police killings that were cross-sectional in design. Third, this study found that the racial threat theory has an ethnic variation. Future studies of police killings should therefore test for potential effects of additional measures of racial threat, interactions over time, and threat-based reactions to minority populations other than

African-Americans.

Despite these contributions, the shortcomings of this study should be addressed.

Probably the most important limitation is that I had to assume that department policies on the use of deadly weapons affect the likelihood that police will use lethal force.

Unfortunately, universal information on department-specific shooting policies, which are necessary to corroborate claims that weapons restrictions decrease police killings, are not available.

A second disadvantage is that the exact mechanisms through which racial threat

and other macro conditions alter weapons policies that affect police killings are unknown.

Even if micro-level data on these processes were available, identifying the links between

racial threat and lethal police control would be difficult because behavioral responses to

perceived threat are difficult to gauge. While this study identifies robust relationships

between structural characteristics of cities and police killings, the intermediate processes

must be inferred.

A final limitation involves the use of police killings as a measure of social

control. While this study addresses all incidents of lethal force by police in U.S. cities, I

can not distinguish between justifiable police killings and those that are inappropriate.

Because the definitions of acceptable police violence are varied, it is impossible to

categorize police killings according to these standards. This study represents the best

alternative by addressing the frequency of all police killings with the assumption that a

substantial proportion can be defined as excessive force.

Probably the most important substantive conclusion concerns the findings

involving racial threat. Robust relationships between the presence of racial and ethnic minorities and police killings and the additional finding that black killings of whites precipitate these killings after other important factors are held constant indicates that race-based explanations are integral in identifying variations in the application of lethal

social control in the United States.

The implications of these findings for the frequency of police use of deadly force

suggest that more restrictive shooting policies are not likely to be instituted in cities with

large concentrations of minorities. While the influence of racial threat on police killings 79

is unfortunate, the possibility that increases in the political efficacy of African-Americans may counteract these effects is promising to those who wish to improve police-citizen relations in urban communities. While these findings may influence future policies regarding police use of deadly force, it is important to recognize the strides made by police departments in response to incidents involving the use of lethal force in the last few decades. This is easy to forget, especially when the media is quick to portray the mistakes made by officers yet slow to recognize their accomplishments. Bayley (1998) claims that the police are heading toward a more equitable treatment of all citizens in their daily quest to balance the maintenance of social order, crime control, and the recognition of civil rights. Because the goals of social policy research include identifying weaknesses and offering guidance for improvement, the advancements offered by this study will hopefully influence this issue.

CHAPTER 3

KILLINGS OF POLICE OFFICERS IN THE LINE OF DUTY

Introduction

While the use of deadly force is an important measure of social control that deserves further study, the use of deadly force against police has been a less frequent concern of sociologists who use the conflict perspective to study violent outcomes. This chapter will investigate the relationship between the macro-social conditions of large U.S. cities and the number of homicides of police officers in the line of duty in the years 1980, 1990, and

2000. This study will use count estimators to model the hypothesized relationships and aims to find out whether the same factors affect both violence by and against the police.

In addition to other relevant determinants, this study will take into account the potential repercussive effects of police killings of citizens as a cause of lethal violence against the police.

Police in the United States are more likely to be injured or killed in the line of duty than officers in most other countries. In fact, the FBI reports that no other occupational group in the United States has a higher rate of homicide (U.S. Department of Justice, FBI 1999). According to the Uniform Crime Reports, from 1977 to 1993, the number of violent assaults against the police in the U.S. rose steadily. In 1977, the first year data on violence against the police were recorded, nearly 49,000 officers nationwide 81

were assaulted, primarily with guns or knives. By 1991, this number increased to almost

63,000 with subsequent small increases and declines. Throughout the 1990’s lethal assaults against the police have been fairly constant ranging between 60 and 80 officers killed each year (U.S Department of Justice, FBI, 1998). The most recent trends seem to indicate that both measures of violence are decreasing, although the reasons for these changes are debatable at best. A simple argument might be that the reason for violence against the police now and throughout history has to do with retaliation. In other words, when the police use violence unjustly, citizens in turn respond with violence.

While this may be true in some instances, as a general explanation of officer homicides, it is incomplete. Indeed, the two types of violence do not even seem to be related when examining the trends in police caused deaths and homicides of officers over time for the entire United States. Figure 3.1 represents the raw numbers of total police killings and killings of officers from 1976 to 1998 in the United States. While the number of felons killed by police changes dramatically over time with a low of just under

300 in 1987 to a high of nearly 460 in 1994, the number of police officers murdered has slightly decreased over time.

Figure 3.1: Total Killings of Citizens by Police Officers and Homicides of Officers in the United States. 1976-1998.

Clearly, the citizenry may respond violently to the violent tactics used by the police, but the large differences in trends over time suggest that other factors lead to homicides of police officers. In response to the need for a more complete analysis of the causes of lethal violence used against the police, I seek to answer the question, “What factors determine how often police are killed in the line of duty?”

A logical way to begin this investigation is to consider the role of economic and

political subordination. Stemming from the views of Weberian sociologists and neo-

Marxist writers, violence against the state can be viewed as latent protest against 83

authority. The police are representatives of the state, indeed, they are defined as “the

cutting edge of the state’s knife” (Bayley 1985, pp). A main responsibility of all law enforcement officers is to control what may be seen by many as members of the

“dangerous classes” (Garland 1990). This responsibility is especially large in places where large differences between the rich and poor exist because the poor will be more likely to resist against a highly stratified arrangement. Because the police are the most accessible representative of government authority, violence against officers is one outlet for the resentment and resistance in relatively poor communities.

This explanation for violence directed at the police is political if the assumption that political power is based on economic resources holds (Collins 1975; Weber 1968). If this logic is correct, groups who are economically disadvantaged are less likely to have the political power necessary to express grievances through conventional channels.

These less advantaged groups must therefore use violence as a means to make their political opinions known (Jenkins and Schock 1992). When these politically-excluded groups are economically disadvantaged and are less-powerful due to their status as ethnic or racial minorities, the problem of access becomes greater and violent outcomes more probable (Boswell and Dixon 1990; Tilly 1978). The addition of racial minority status to class disadvantages should make violent political reactions even more likely because relative deprivation along racial lines will be more conspicuous. This study therefore considers the role of differences in economic resources by race in explaining violence against the police.

In addition to considering economic differences by race, racial composition independent of these differences comprises another political explanation for violence 84

directed at these state agents. Racial minorities in U.S. cities are more likely to be economically disadvantaged, suffer from relative deprivation compared to their white counterparts, and perceive these existing social arrangements as unfair. Law enforcement officers in places where the greatest economic and political subordination exists and where it is concentrated should experience more personal violence. I test these political explanations by examining whether places with higher proportions of politically-weak racial minorities that are segregated from more powerful whites affect the number of police killed in the line of duty.

While racial and economic cleavages likely explain some of the lethal force used against police, political subordination need not represent the only possibility.

Criminological explanations provide an alternative to assessing this outcome. This perspective defines violence directed at the police as simply part of general criminal violence. This means that homicides of police officers should stem from structural urban conditions such as violent crimes and social disorganization (Sampson 1987; Sampson and Wilson 1995). If this is the case, these community attributes should be good predictors of killings of officers even after rival political explanations are accounted for.

In this study I test this community violence perspective in addition to political explanations.

In the next section review I some of the shortcomings associated with prior studies of killings of police officers and outline the strategies I use to overcome these problems.

Problems with Previous Research on Killings of Police

There are several issues that must be addressed in order to improve upon previous studies. Theoretical shortcomings include a limited choice of measures of the most probable explanations for violence directed at the police. Prior studies measured political explanations with only the income inequality and the size of racial minority groups. I include additional race-based measures including the percentage of the population that is

Hispanic and the rate of homicides with black offenders and white victims.

There are also many methodological shortcomings associated with prior studies.

First, most of the previous macro-level research on killings of police officers used states as their unit of analysis which obscured local characteristics that affect killings of police.

Cities provide the most appropriate unit of analysis because the political factors and urban characteristics I test in this study will have the greatest effect on killings of police at the organizational or department level. Using state-level means masks community differences and I overcome this difficulty by studying large central cities.

With the exception of Jacobs and Carmichael (2002), prior studies used rates of homicides of police to measure their frequency, but rates are not the most appropriate way to model rare events. The inflated rates produced by a small number of killings of officers in a relatively small department increase the potential for heteroscedasticity because small city variances will inevitably be greater than those for larger cities

(Osgood 2000). Using raw numbers of killings of police and an estimation technique designed for modeling these counts should produce more reliable estimates.

Finally, previous studies were confined to one time period or a small number of places. I study a large sample of U.S. cities over three decades in a panel design which 86

means I am examining the same sample of cities in 1980, 1990 and 2000. There are several advantages of using panel data over cross-sectional or time series designs. First, panel data overcomes problems with heterogeneity due to unmeasured explanatory variables in cross-sections, which can cause bias in estimation. Kennedy (2003) claims that the ability to deal with the omitted variable problem is the biggest advantage of panel data. Second, because one can combine both cross-sectional and over time variation, panel data create more variability, alleviating potential multicollinearity problems. In short, it provides the most efficient estimation. Finally, time-series data requires a very long series of data to provide good estimates of changes in behavior while cross-sectional results tell us nothing about the dynamics of sociological relationships. Panel data allows for estimation of dynamic sociological phenomena and avoids the need for lengthy time- series data. These attractive features suggest that using panel data to assess these relationships will produce the most reliable results.

In sum, this study addresses shortcomings in both methods and theory associated with prior research. Because I address the relative usefulness of several theories by introducing new conceptualizations, the following theory section covers many explanations for use of deadly force against the police.

Theory

Political Explanations

Latent Political Divisions: Race and Economic Inequality

A strategy based on racial and economic disparities is intrinsically political because political exclusion is more likely for those who are less economically advantaged

(Blalock 1967). Studies of civil disorders find that groups that are excluded from

mainstream politics are more likely to use violence and this probability is increased when

political exclusion falls along racial lines (Boswell and Dixon 1990; Jenkins and Schock

1992; Tilly 1978). An hypothesis that combines reactions based on both racial and

economic divisions can be measured with racial inequality. A focus on only economic

inequality ignores racial differences and implies that the economic differences between

poor whites and the affluent and differences between poor blacks and the affluent have

identical effects on violent responses directed against the police. If differences in

disadvantage based on race lead to differences in political power that leave the poor with

no legitimate access to express grievances other than overt conflict, enhanced violence

against the police should follow.

Previous studies of killings of police in the line of duty support this argument. In

the only prior study that analyzed raw number of homicides of police, Jacobs and

Carmichael (2002) find that the most important factor contributing to these killings is the

gap between white and nonwhite incomes. Their findings suggest that political and

economic subordination as measured by racial income inequality should be included in

studies that analyze killings of police. I therefore hypothesize when economic differences

between the races increase, the likelihood of violence against police should increase. 88

If the political exclusion of racial minorities based on economic resources leads to violence against the police, this violence should be enhanced in places where segregation is most apparent. Spatial segregation by race enhances group differences especially because African-Americans are most often concentrated in the most economically- disadvantaged portions of cities (Massey and Denton 1993). I therefore expect that in the most racially stratified cities, state authorities who serve to control an underclass that is predominantly African-American will more often be targets of lethal violence.

The importance of race as an explanation for homicides of police suggests that officers are more likely to be killed in cities with many African-Americans. In addition, this hypothesis is supported by threat theories that suggest that racial conflict will increase in places with large populations of racial minorities (Blalock 1967; Blumer

1958). Where these conditions exist it should be more difficult for police to control a relatively large population that threatens the social order and has the potential for violence that targets the police. Because lethal violence against the police should be enhanced in cities with high proportions of minority residents, I expect that cities with large African-American populations should experience more homicides of police in the line of duty. Prior studies of homicides of police support this claim. Bailey and Peterson

(1994) found a consistent effect of the percentage of the population that is black on monthly national rates of homicides of police while Jacobs and Carmichael (2002) find that the number of officers killed is greater in the largest cities with the most African-

Americans.

With the increases in Hispanic populations found in many areas of the country, the minority threat argument may have an ethnic component as well. Perhaps majority 89

whites respond to large Hispanic populations with similar demands for increased social control. With the exception of Chamlin (1989) who uses the number of Spanish surnames to measure the threat posed by this ethnic group, prior research has not tested for effects of the size of Hispanic populations on homicides of police. Because ethnic threat may capture some of the variation in killings of police not explained by black threat, I control for this effect and hypothesize that cities with large Hispanic populations should experience more homicides of police.

All of the hypotheses offered thus far are political in that they tap the violence against state agents that results from the political exclusion of segments of the population that are politically weak. Most of the prior hypotheses also suggest that because racial minority groups have the least access to traditional political outlets to express grievances, police killings are more likely when racial minorities are involved. Yet prior studies have failed to pursue an additional operationalization of the threat to police posed by racial minorities. Another way to gauge black conflict against perceived authorities is to examine the rate of interracial killings with black offenders and white victims. The literature that has examined the causes of interracial homicide notes that a main reason for black-against-white violence may be largely explained as a reaction to blacks’ feelings of powerlessness. It is plausible that the same explanation is applicable to homicides of police because when blacks commit lethal violence against the police, white officers are their most frequent targets (Jacobs and Carmichael 2002).

In order to test this more specific form of race-based violence accorded to police,

it is important to control for the amount of black-on-white violence. I introduce an

additional political hypothesis: In cities where black killings of whites are relatively

frequent I expect more killings of police.

Direct Political Explanations

While the above hypotheses have political roots, there are more direct ways of assessing whether racial competition for power explains violence against law enforcement agents. Wilson (1978) writes that “The traditional racial struggles for power and privilege are now concentrated in the sociopolitical order…The issues now have more to do with racial control over municipal political systems that with the control of jobs.” This statement suggests that local political arrangements confer more power than relative economic gains. If this claim is valid, it is important to consider the degree to which African-Americans control city politics. For example, the presence of an African-

American mayor should decrease the violence directed at government agents such as the police.

The theory behind this proposition stems from explanations for race-based violence. LaFree (1982) and others claim that violence committed by African-Americans against whites may be largely explained as a reaction to blacks’ feelings of powerlessness. If this is the case, then it is possible that when African-Americans gain political power, these feelings of powerlessness and the associated violence will decrease.

In fact, some have argued that interracial conflict decreases when black mayors are present because a racial minority in office suggests that the power of white elites is 91

diminished (Clark, 1994). Research seems to support this idea. Bobo and Gilliam (1990) find that in cities with black mayors, minorities are more confident about their political influence and efficacy. Lane (1997) notes that black homicide rates increase when this group loses political influence while Jacobs and Wood (1999) report that killings of whites by African-Americans are reduced in cities with black mayors.

These findings suggest that in cities where African-Americans hold the most important political office, the appearance of political efficacy for blacks should increase, and inclinations to violently strike out against the most accessible social control agents should decrease. I therefore expect less killings of police in cities with black mayors.

This hypothesis is plausible because national statistics report that the offenders in cases of police homicides are more likely to be African-American than their total percentage of the U.S. population and Jacobs and O’Brien (1998) suggest that this is true in urban areas where blacks comprise an even greater proportion of civilian populations.

Violence and other Urban Conditions

The police occupy the front line in society’s day-to-day efforts to protect its citizens from the fear of personal violence and property loss due to crime or the threat of crime. Law enforcement officers directly confront criminal situations that entail a risk that at times results in injury or death. If homicides of police result from chance encounters of officers with offenders engaged in criminal activity, places where criminal behavior is most apparent should also have more killings of police in the line of duty.

Qualitative studies of urban policing suggest that this link is obvious. Fyfe (1997) observes that officers must deal with citizens and their problems under sometimes 92

difficult conditions that result in violence. The nature of policing is such that officers

could easily find themselves in a position in which they must simultaneously restrict or

protect the public, maintain their own personal safety, and subdue a violent suspect.

When police must attend to multiple tasks that involve violence, they are more likely to

compromise their personal safety at least some of the time. This idea is supported by

Cardarelli (1968) who found that most deaths of officers occur when an officer attempted

to arrest an offender engaged in some criminal activity. In short, these studies indicate

that when police must deal with violent criminals and other disorderly behavior, they face

a greater chance of lethal assault.

Early quantitative studies reported bivariate correlations between crime and

homicides of police. Lester (1978) and Cardarelli (1968) found that states with a higher rate of police officers killed by citizens also had high rates of civilians killed by police

officers, and higher rates of murder in general. Lester (1982) found this same positive

association in a sample of 31 major U.S. cities. More sophisticated multivariate studies

(Peterson and Bailey 1988; Jacobs and Carmichael 2002) found little to no support for a

relationship between killings of police and violent crimes but this association may be

present in more recent years not covered by their analyses. Based on theory and prior

research and because homicides are the most reliably measured violent crime, I

hypothesize that cities with the highest murder rates will have more killings of police

officers.

A more specific way to gauge the violent nature of the populations police

encounter is to examine the frequency of recent police-citizen encounters that resulted in

the use of deadly force by police against a civilian. Studies of the situations surrounding 93

police use of force found that the majority of police killings involved use or threatened use of weapons by those were killed (Binder and Fridell 1984). Because violent criminal activity is hypothesized to lead to killings of police, the likelihood that police experience lethal violence may increase when killings of citizens by police occurred in the prior year. Another possible explanation for more homicides of police after previous increases in police killings would suggest that citizens respond to violence in kind or retaliate to recent police killings by targeting the police. While previous studies do not find a relationship between these two types of violence (Jacobs and Carmichael 2002), the possibility is worth testing. If either of these interpretations is correct, I predict that places with high rates of killings of citizens by police should have more killings of police by citizens a year later.

It is probable that other environmental characteristics that lead to violent acts not enumerated in official crime rates capture variation in homicides of police. Urban conditions such as high rates of unemployment are associated with increases in interpersonal violence and public disorder. But much of the interpersonal conflict in cities is not reported to the police and will therefore not be included in official crime reports. As a result, environmental problems such as unemployment contribute to disorderly behavior that may influence the amount of violence police are subjected to in the course of their work in addition to violence associated with the general crime rates

(Jacobs and Carmichael 2002). If high unemployment rates lead to additional violent crime not captured by official statistics, it is probable that in cities with high unemployment there will be more lethal violence directed at the police.

Other environmental characteristics that may contribute to interpersonal violence not included in the FBI’s crime reports include correlates of social disorder and decay.

Social disorganization theory provides a basis for claims that increases in interpersonal violence stem from factors such as family disruption that plague urban neighborhoods

Stouthamer-Loeber 1986). This influence is largely due to the fact that intact families are more likely to have stronger organizational and network ties to the community than broken families. Intact families, for example, are much more likely to participate in formal community groups such as church, sports, and volunteer groups that can assist in control efforts (Kellam et al. 1982). Additionally, family disruption may reduce the size of informal networks that can provide valuable supervision of youth and guardianship of property. Studies suggest, for instance, that divorced mothers have less contact with neighbors than married mothers (Alwin, Converse, and Martin 1985). Hence, communities characterized by high levels of family disruption are likely to have higher rates of crime and disorder because formal and informal control mechanisms that could reduce such antisocial behavior are undermined by this situation. In support of this claim, Sampson (1987) showed that family disruptions at the city level had a large direct effect on crime.

But much of the interpersonal violence produced by social disorganization is not offensive enough to warrant arrest and therefore will not be included in official measures 95

of crime. For example, because high rates of family disruption produce large numbers of unsupervised adolescents, unruly behaviors and interpersonal violence should ensue.

Although these disorderly acts will sometimes require police intervention and therefore may threaten officer safety, this delinquent behavior is not included in official violent crime rates.

Police intervention is also necessary in many domestic violence incidents that are often resolved without arrest. If family breakdowns contribute to the number of potentially violent domestic disputes to which police must respond, violence against the police should be more likely in these situations. In order to be sure that this violence is accounted for, the characteristics that produce this violence should be considered.

Prior studies find some support for these claims. Peterson and Bailey (1988) found that independent of violent and property crime rates, states with the highest divorce and poverty rates also had the most killings of police and in their national time series analysis of killings of police they again found a positive effect of divorce rates (Bailey and Peterson 1994). Because they found no support for violent or property crime rates they concluded that “Police work is more hazardous in jurisdictions with high levels of poverty and divorce (social integration/disorganization), regardless of the general crime rates.” (p.230). If social disorganization does lead to additional unmeasured violent acts that require police intervention, killings of police should be more frequent in cities with high levels of social disorganization.

Additional Explanations

Several additional explanations should be tested. Killings of police should be less probable in places where the perpetrator is likely to be caught. Studies provide evidence that violent crime is more prevalent in the largest cities (Mayhew and Levinger 1976), probably because increased anonymity in populous places makes identification and arrest more difficult. If this anonymity decreases the chances that perpetrators will be apprehended, I expect lethal crimes against the police to be more numerous in the cities with the largest populations.

In addition to larger populations, killings of police should be greater in cities with the most police as this measure taps the size of the population at risk in this analysis. The literature on organizations suggests that larger departments have more administrative overhead that results in a higher proportion of officers assigned to administrative positions. This means that compared to smaller departments, in large cities there is a smaller percentage of officers on the street. This suggests that department size should be specified using the natural log of the number of sworn police. Finally, I control for

unmeasured regional and panel-specific effects by entering dummy variables for 3 out of

4 census-defined regions and 2 out of 3 of the census years covered in this analysis.

Data and Measures

In order to test these hypotheses, I’ve compiled a three panel dataset for the years 1980,

1990, and 2000 that includes information for all U.S. cities whose population was greater than 100,000 in 1980. Limiting the sample to only large cities is acceptable because previous research finds that the largest cities pose the greatest danger for the police

(Cardarelli, 1968).

Dependent Variable Measurement

Violence directed at the police is measured using the number of homicides of police in the line of duty from the FBI’s Law Enforcement Officers Killed and Assaulted Series available from the University of Michigan’s Inter-University Consortium for Political and

Social Reseach (ICPSR).

Explanatory Variable Measurement

All explanatory variables are from the decennial census years 1980, 1990 and 2000. The measures for these variables are as follows:

Community disorder or social disorganization is measured using:

- The percentage of female-headed family households obtained from the United

States Census Bureau

- Unemployment: Percentage of the population over age 15 that is unemployed

from the U.S. Census Bureau.

The violent nature of city residents is measured using:

- Murder rates: Number of homicides per 100,000 persons from the Federal Bureau

of Investigation’s Uniform Crime Reports.

- Use of Deadly Force by Police: Number of killings of citizens by police from the

FBI’s Supplementary Homicide Report series available from the University of

Michigan’s Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Reseach (ICPSR)

Political explanations are measured using several indicators measuring relative power by race, racial threat and direct political explanations:

- Relative racial economic resources: Median income of black households divided

by the median income of white households calculated from U.S. Census figures.

This variable is reverse coded because most values range from an extremely small

number (indicating near-perfect inequality) to one (perfect equality).

- Segregation: The index of dissimilarity measures the probability that a white

resident will encounter a black citizen in the census tract in which they reside.

This index is available from the U.S. Census Bureau’s Mumford Center.

- Racial threat is gauged with the percentage of blacks.

- Specific racial threat: The rate of killings of whites committed by African-

Americans per 100,000 African-Americans from the Uniform Crime Reports

Supplemental Homicide Reports

- The ethnic threat variation is assessed with the natural log of the percentage of

Hispanics (some variables are in natural log form to correct skewed distributions,

eliminate outliers, and account for modest departures from linearity).

- Black political power: Dummy variable coded 1 for cities with an African-

American Mayor available from the National Association of Black Mayors.

Additional explanations are operationalized as follows:

- Number of Police: The size of a city’s police force is measured using the natural

log of the total number of sworn police obtained from the FBI’s Crime in the

United States yearly series.

- City size: Total resident population

- Dummy variables for two of the three periods are included in the models to cap-

ture cross state trends.

- Regional dummies are entered to capture otherwise unmeasured factors like

culture.

Estimation

I use explanatory variables in 1980, 1990, and 2000 to explain counts of homicides of police in states in 1981-82, 1991-92 and 2001-02. By summing these counts over three two-year periods, idiosyncratic events will be less likely to distort the findings. In addition, including periods separated by multiple years in a pooled time-series design substantially reduces serial correlation and the effects of measurement error (Johnston and DiNardo 1997). To eliminate serial correlation I use a version of random effects called population averaged models.

Because killings of police officers are infrequent and because there are important reasons to avoid rates when analyzing rare events (Osgood 2000), I use a specialized statistical procedures designed to estimate unusual events (see discussion below). Ordinary 100

Least Squares provides inconsistent estimates when there are many zero limit scores in a count dependent variable with a modest mean, but estimators designed specifically for count outcomes will provide consistent estimates (Cameron and Trivedi 1998; Long

1997).

Discussion of Estimation Options

Before outlining the specific models for the multivariate analyses of homicides of police, it is useful to note the problems of alternative estimation techniques. I use negative binomial regression to test the hypothesized relationships because this technique is the most appropriate to use with a count dependent variable and is superior to Ordinary Least

Squares regression for several reasons. First, OLS assumes a normal distribution but because there are no or few police killings in most cities the distribution of police killings is skewed. Because counts with low means follow a Poisson distribution, estimators that assume this distribution are most appropriate. But the biggest problem with OLS is that produces biased and inconsistent estimates when the dependent variable contains many zero values, which is often the case in count models (Long 1997). Using negative binomial regression instead should produce more accurate results that those from studies that use OLS to analyze rates of rare events, but there are several other possible estimation techniques worth considering.

Previous studies that examined rare events such as police killings of blacks in rate form overcame some of the problems associated with OLS by running tobit analyses

(Jacobs and O’Brien 1998). But using rates to measure rare events causes problems despite the choice of estimation procedure. For example, Jacobs and O’Brien (1998) in a 101

study of police use of lethal force against blacks in U.S. cities measured the dependent variable with the number of police killings of blacks per 100,000 black residents. They found that a few cities including Torrance and Sunnyvale, California had a relatively low number of African Americans (fewer than 1,000) and 1 (Sunnyvale) or 2 (Torrance) killings of African-Americans by police in the time period under study. The result was an extremely high rate of police killings in these two cities. These two outliers distorted the results and led to heteroskedasticity across cities. This example shows how using rates increases the possibility that extreme outliers due to only a few events causes large changes in estimation. To deflate these rates, the authors weighted cities with fewer blacks. While this technique represents an alternative to models designed for counts, count estimators are preferable because outliers caused by ratios based on rare and potentially idiosyncratic events are not present.

An alternative to the Negative Binomial regression model is the Poisson

Regression Model, which is also designed for count outcomes. The Poisson regression model, however, is more restrictive that the negative binomial in several ways. First, it is based on the assumption that events occur independently over time (see Xekalaki 1983 for examples). This may not be a valid assumption in the case of murders of police officers because the occurrence of one may precipitate additional homicides, especially if the original event is highly publicized or the original offender is not apprehended.

Second, the general Poisson model assumes that the conditional mean and variance of the dependent variable are equal and thus fails to account for overdispersion (the variance is greater than the mean) that is present in many data sets. Using Poisson when overdispersion is present produces underestimated standard errors for the coefficients and 102

overly optimistic significance tests (Cameron and Trivedi 1986). I chose negative binomial regression which is an alternative procedure because it adjusts for these departures from Poisson assumptions. According to the POISGOF test in STATA version 8, overdispersion is present in the data. Negative binomial regression is therefore preferable over Poisson regression because the former allows for oversidpersion.

The Estimation Model for Killings of Police Using Negative Binomial Regression

The following model provides a general specification of the total police killings model:

OFFKILLED2Y = b0 + blPERBLKL + b2PERHISPL +b3POLKILSRT +

b4BWMURDRT + b5MURDRTL + b6SEG + b7BLKMAYOR + b8BWMDINC +

b9UNEMPRT + b10PERFHFAM + b11NPOLICEL + b12POP + b13WEST +

b14MIDWST + b15SOUTH + b16Y90 + b17Y20 + e where OFFKILLED2Y is an outcome variable consisting of raw counts of killings of police officers, PERBLKL is the city percent black in natural log form, PERHISPL is the city percent Hispanic in natural log form, BWMURDRT is the rate of murders of whites by African-Americans per 100,000 African-Americans in square-root form, MURDRTL is the number of murders per 100,000 population in natural log form, SEG is the residential dissimilarity index between blacks and whites, BLKMAYOR is a dummy coded 1 for cities with an African-American Mayor, BWMDINC is the ratio of black median family incomes divided by white median family incomes, UNEMPRT is the percentage of the population that is unemployed, PERFHFAM is the percentage of female-headed family households, NPOLICEL is the number of sworn police, POP is the city population, WEST, MIDWST and SOUTH are dummies coded one for cities in these 103

respective census-defined regions, Y90 and Y20 are dummies coded one for the years

1990 and 2000 respectively.

Descriptive Statistics

Table 3.1 provides a summary of the expected signs of relationships between the explanatory variables and killings of police officers. Also in this table are the means and standard deviations for all variables including overall cross-sectional and over-time variation in these statistics and the minimum and maximum values. Positive relationships are expected between most explanatory variables and the dependent variable. Only the presence of a black mayor and the ratio of black-to-white median incomes (because it is reverse coded) are hypothesized to have a negative effect on killings of police.

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Variable Predicted Sign Mean Std. Dev. Min Max

Killings of Police Officers overall 0.304 1.511 0.000 29.000 over time 0.900 0.000 9.667 X-sect. 1.215 -9.363 19.637

Ln % Black + overall 2.507 1.246 -2.526 4.431 over time 1.228 -1.306 4.360 X-sect. 0.223 1.287 3.757

Ln % Hispanic + overall 1.785 1.291 -0.941 4.504 over time 1.229 -0.447 4.428 X-sect. 0.403 0.875 3.346

Police Killings Rate + overall 70.929 103.247 0.000 792.465 over time 72.523 0.000 415.991 X-sect. 73.628 -214.256 578.209

√Rate of Black Killings of Whites + overall 0.056 0.061 0.000 0.491 over time 0.038 0.000 0.209 X-sect. 0.049 -0.107 0.383

Ln Murder Rate + overall 2.280 0.930 -0.693 4.354 over time 0.841 -0.142 4.074 X-sect. 0.422 0.828 4.029

Segregation + overall 59.754 14.507 16.850 88.700 over time 13.423 21.950 85.440 X-sect. 5.793 25.081 79.441

1 if Black Mayor - overall 0.090 0.287 0.000 1.000 over time 0.217 0.000 1.000 X-sect. 0.188 -0.576 0.757

Black/White Median Income - overall 0.807 0.149 0.380 1.583 over time 0.110 0.595 1.224 X-sect. 0.101 0.535 1.166

Unemployment Rate + overall 6.205 2.814 1.300 19.700 over time 2.241 2.833 15.333 X-sect. 1.708 -2.128 10.972

% Female-Headed Families + overall 27.867 9.633 9.282 53.182 over time 7.051 10.153 49.020 X-sect. 6.578 18.064 45.005

Ln # of Sworn Police + overall 6.183 0.935 4.511 10.591 over time 0.922 4.947 10.305 X-sect. 0.167 5.457 6.850

Population + overall 3.609 6.794 0.820 80.083 over time 6.782 0.972 74.675 X-sect. 0.588 -0.546 9.017

Table 3.1: Predicted Signs, Means, and Standard Deviations

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The Dependent Variable

An examination of the data suggests that there is sufficient over-time variation in the dependent variables to conduct panel analyses. Killings range from a minimum of zero in many city-years to a high of 29. Most of the other cities with high numbers of homicides of police are also those that reported the most police killings of citizens, lending some support to the retaliation argument. The sample contains 249 city-years

(73%) with no killings of police and 45 city-years (13%) with only one killing of a police officer, suggesting that the distribution is skewed toward fewer killings.

Figure 3.2 presents the mean number of homicides of police by year in order to illustrate the numerical changes in the dependent variables over time. These results suggest that the frequency of lethal assaults against the police have decreased over time.

Specifically, the average number of killings of police per city decreases from .18 in 1980 to .05 in 2000. These results do not support claims that recent increases in restrictions on police use of force against citizens lead to more lethal assaults on police. On the other hand, if police technology and training focusing on averting violence has developed over the last few decades perhaps increased use of bullet-proof vests and better training account for these declines.

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Average Killings of Police

0.2000 0.1800 0.1600

d 0.1400

ille 0.1200

K 0.1000 e

lic 0.0800 o

P 0.0600 0.0400 0.0200 0.0000 1980 1990 2000 Year

Fig. 3.2: Average killings of police over time

Regional Variation in Killings of Police

To get a better overall picture of killings of police officers in U.S. cities, it is important to look for differences in cities by region. Tables 3.2 and 3.3 illustrate regional differences over time in the raw number of homicides of police and the average homicides of officers for cities located in each region.

Region Cities 1980 1990 2000

Midwest 39 9 8 4

Northeast 18 11 4 0

South 61 8 4 4

West 52 3 4 1

Table 3.2: Regional variation in raw numbers of Officers killed over time 107

Region % of cities 1980 1990 2000

Midwest 23 0.67 0.26 0.13

Northeast 10 0.94 0.61 0

South 36 0.25 0.26 0.1

West 31 0.71 0.13 0.1

Table 3.3: Regional variation in average number of Officers killed over time

The results suggest that while the raw number of killings of police has decreased in cities in all areas of the country, the average number of police killed is highest in

Northeastern cities in 2 out of the 3 time periods and lowest in southern cities.

Interestingly, this finding does not correspond with previous studies that found the lowest rate of police homicides in the northeast and the most homicides in the South (Cardarelli,

1968). In order to examine this finding in more detail, I present the average homicides of

police over time for cities located in both formerly Confederate and non-Confederate

states in Figure 3.3.

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0.8

0.7

0.6

d 0.5 ille Confederate K

s 0.4 r

e Other c i f

f 0.3 O 0.2

0.1

0 1980 1990 2000

Fig. 3.3: Average number of Killings of Police by Confederacy Status

Compared to homicides of officers in cities in former Confederate states, it is

apparent that while non-Confederate cities have a higher mean number of police killed in

1980, the average among both these cities and those in Confederate states are nearly

equal in 1990 and 2000. This more general comparison of southern versus all other cities suggests minimal regional differences. Crimnologists who study homicide trends often report that overall murder rates are higher in the South, but this finding suggests that specific homicides of police officers do not follow this pattern (FBI Uniform Crime

Reports).

Racial Composition and Killings of Police

Because this study tests race-based explanations, it is important to examine the proportions of African-Americans in cities with the most killings of police. In order to

109

introduce the relationship between racial composition and killings of officers in the line

of duty, Table 3.4, presents the cases or city-year combinations with the most killings of

police and the percentage of their population that is African-American.

City-years with the highest number of officers killed

City year # killings % black

Seattle, WA 1980 29 9.43

Omaha, NE 1980 9 12.06

Rochester, NY 1980 7 25.75

New York, NY 1990 7 28.71

New York, NY 1980 4 25.29

Minneapolis, MN 1980 4 7.67

Philadelphia, PA 1980 4 37.84

Chicago, IL 1990 4 39.07

Philadelphia, PA 1990 3 39.86

Cincinnati, OH 1980 3 33.85

Table 3.4: City-years with the highest number of officers killed and their percentage of African-Americans

These figures tentatively support claims that cities with more racial minorities for whatever reason have more homicides of police (compared to the average of .30 killings) because nearly all of these cities have percentages of African-Americans that are well above the national average (12%) and most are above the mean percent black for cities in this analysis (21.02%). These findings support national statistics that report that blacks kill police officers at a rate that is higher than expected compared to the proportion of

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African-Americans in the general population (Jacobs and Carmichael 2002).

Multivariate analyses should clarify whether political explanations fueled by racial and economic disadvantage or other factors are better predictors of homicides of police.

Additional Bivariate Correlations

Other zero-order correlations between explanatory factors and the dependent variable are presented in Table 3.5. The results show that there are high correlations between killings of police and the size of the city as well as the total number of sworn police. Although these tests do not control for other factors, they tentatively suggest that homicides of police officers are more likely in the largest cities with the most officers. A more theoretically-interesting finding is that racial residential segregation has a positive effect on this dependent variable. This tentatively suggests that violence against the police is more likely in places where blacks reside apart from whites. The next set of analyses will determine if these results persist after holding constant the effects of other explanations.

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0 13 1.00 0 2 12 0.73 1.00 0 5 2 11 1.00 0.10 0.00 0 4 0 3 10 0.39 0.10 0.05 1.00 0 8 7 9 5 9 0.55 0.25 1.00 -0.02 -0.02 0 6 4 6 9 8 1.00 0.13 0.30 0.16 0.31 0.171 0 6 4 8 8 6 7 0.291 0.00 0.31 0.51 0.45 0.28 1.00 0 4 7 5 6 8 2 9 6 0.66 0.36 0.05 0.40 0.41 0.37 0.16 1.00 0 2 6 7 6 2 3 4 4 5 1.00 0.24 0.15 0.03 0.21 0.18 0.14 0.09 0.06 0 2 6 7 0 7 7 3 4 0.151 0.26 0.16 0.12 0.07 0.07 0.28 0.101 1.00 -0.01 0 9 6 5 7 8 5 7 5 5 5 3 0.06 0.12 0.07 0.21 0.24 1.00 -0.04 -0.22 -0.02 -0.06 -0.22 0 6 8 5 7 6 9 0 8 4 6 8 2 1.00 0.15 0.64 0.68 0.31 0.30 0.47 0.31 0.09 -0.30 -0.00 -0.15 0 6 4 5 8 7 0 8 2 4 7 6 1 0.04 0.05 0.10 0.111 0.18 0.02 0.10 0.07 0.14 0.22 0.22 1.00 -0.01 Rate of Black Killings of Whites of Killings Black of Rate Officers Killed LnBlack % Ln % Hispanic Rate Killings Police √ Ln Murder Rate Segregation Mayor Black 1 if Black/White Median Income Rate Unemployment Families Female-Headed % Police Sworn # of Ln Population 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 Table 3.5: Zero-Order Correlations for Killings of Police Analyses Police of Killings for Correlations Zero-Order 3.5: Table

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Table 3.5 provides the correlation matrix for all explanatory variables and the dependent

variable. These figures indicate that all of the correlations between explanatory variables

but one are modest, suggesting that multicollinearity may not be a problem.

Negative Binomial Regression Results

Tables 3.6 and 3.7 present the Negative Binomial Regression results for counts of homicides of police officers in the line of duty regressed on the explanatory variables.

The first model includes the most obvious predictors including indirect political explanations and personal threat to officer safety along with controls for the number of sworn police, city size, and region and year-specific effects. In this model I find some support for race-specific political explanations. While the percentage of the population that is African-American, and the percentage Hispanic are not significant predictors of the number of killings of police, the more specific indicator of race-specific threat, the rate of homicides of whites committed by African-Americans, does have a positive effect on the dependent variable, controlling for measures of community violence.

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Model 1 Model 2 Model 3 bSEbSEbSE Ln % Black 0.033 0.250 -0.175 0.326 -0.123 0.332 Ln % Hispanic -0.264 0.235 -0.207 0.208 -0.224 0.217 Police Killings Rate 0.110 1.766 0.477 1.923 0.628 1.822 √Rate of Black Killings of Whites 6.515 *** 1.940 6.097 ** 2.059 6.023 ** 2.111 Ln Murder Rate 0.007 0.222 -0.109 0.231 -0.006 0.224 Segregation 0.037 0.036 0.035 0.036 1 if Black Mayor -0.568 * 0.282 Black/White Median Income Unemployment Rate % Female-Headed Families Ln # of Sworn Police 1.047 *** 0.252 0.871 *** 0.198 0.865 *** 0.203 Population -0.012 0.012 -0.013 0.013 -0.010 0.013 Location in West 0.477 1.089 0.522 1.106 0.584 1.153 Location in Midwest 0.126 0.582 0.038 0.574 0.058 0.585 Location in South -0.211 0.558 -0.179 0.597 -0.205 0.607 1990 -0.939 * 0.415 -0.654 * 0.340 -0.561 * 0.339 2000 -1.824 *** 0.503 -1.389 ** 0.532 -1.303 ** 0.537 Constant -7.659 *** 1.511 -8.231 *** 1.997 -8.479 *** 2.089

Notes: Coefficients and SE's for Population multipied by 100,000 Coefficients and SE's for Police Killings Rate multipied by 1,000 Significance: * < .05 ** < .01 *** < .001 (standard errors to the right of coefficients; 2-tailed tests on intercepts and period dummy variables).

Table 3.6: Negative binomial estimates of the total number of killings of police in U.S. cities

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Model 4 Model 5 bSEbSE Ln % Black -0.221 0.325 -0.410 0.312 Ln % Hispanic -0.227 0.193 -0.199 0.204 Police Killings Rate 0.941 1.697 0.976 1.404 √Rate of Black Killings of Whites 5.513 ** 2.020 4.446 * 2.039 Ln Murder Rate -0.003 0.216 0.060 0.189 Segregation 0.046 0.036 0.032 0.030 1 if Black Mayor -0.710 * 0.325 -0.949 *** 0.310 Black/White Median Income 2.729 1.958 2.295 1.854 Unemployment Rate -0.078 0.062 % Female-Headed Families 0.081 ** 0.027 Ln # of Sworn Police 0.762 *** 0.184 0.890 *** 0.208 Population -0.002 0.011 0.003 0.011 Location in West 0.695 1.115 1.073 0.969 Location in Midwest 0.157 0.584 0.423 0.516 Location in South 0.222 0.651 0.815 0.552 1990 -0.442 0.332 0.542 0.375 2000 -0.656 0.608 -0.486 0.541 Constant -10.821 *** 3.129 -12.879 *** 2.804

Table 3.7: Negative binomial estimates of the total number of killings of police in U.S. cities

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At this point I find no support for violence-based explanations as the natural log of the murder rate and the rate of police killings of citizens do not effectively predict the number of killings of officers. Finally, the natural-log transformed number of sworn police has a strong positive effect on killings of officers, suggesting that places with more police experience more killings of officers. So far it appears that the most salient predictor of homicides of police is the amount of lethal black-on-white violence.

In Model 2 I add an additional variable that captures the political context, the racial residential segregation index and in Model 3 I add the variable measuring direct political effects, the race of the Mayor. While segregation does not account for killings of police, the dummy indicating the presence of a black mayor has a negative effect on killings of police as predicted. The final two models will ascertain whether an additional political explanation and measures of structural disadvantage add to the variation in killings of police in the line of duty.

In Model 4 I enter the final political variable, the ratio of black-to-white median income, and find that it has no effect on killings of police. In the final model I include the unemployment rate and the percentage of female-headed family households and find mixed support for these structural variables because unemployment has no effect on killings of police but the proportion of female-headed families is a significant positive predictor of killings of police at the .01 significance level.

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Additional Tests

In other models not shown, I find that an additional political variable, the type of city government, has no effects on the conclusions. Substituting violent and/or property crimes in place of murder rates does not affect the results so murder rates are included because they are assumed to be more reliably measured. If I instead use factors such as crowding, divorce rates, percent born in state (residential stability) or population density to gauge social disorganization, the findings persist, but model explanatory power is reduced. Additional statistical interactions do not explain this outcome.

The persistence of these results after using diverse specifications in the count models imply that these findings represent the most important underlying processes that determine the number of homicides of police. The results always suggest that cities with high rates of black killings of whites and the most police officers are more likely to experience killings of police officers in the line of duty while cities with black mayors have less of these killings. In sum, these analyses support political explanations, but also suggest that some indicators of community violence contribute to the number of killings of police in the line of duty. In the next section I discuss the findings in more detail.

Discussion

Political Explanations

As a whole the findings provide mixed support for political explanations with more direct political factors having the most influence on killings of police. Indirect political hypotheses that racial economic differences affect the number of killings of police and predictions about other indicators of the threat to police safety posed by large numbers of 117

racial or ethnic minorities were not supported by these analyses. Yet the consistent finding that the rate of black killings of whites positively affects killings of police suggests that violence against the police is an extension of general black-on-white crime.

While the data on the race of the offender and victim officers in these killings is available from the Supplemental Homicide Reports, the proportion of missing information on this variable precluded inclusion in this analysis. Yet this strong finding suggests that future research should consider disaggregating homicides of police by race of the offender and officer. In addition, this positive relationship between black-on-white violence and black violence directed at (mostly white) police officers suggests that despite claims that racial conflict has diminished over the last few decades, sociological consideration of race- precipitated violence should not be ignored.

The arguably most direct measure of political efficacy used to predict killings of police in this analysis was the only other important political explanation. Consistent with prior studies of lethal assaults against the police (Jacobs and Carmichael 2002), cities with black mayors had less killings of police officers lending support to the supposition that when democratic efficacy is apparent, citizens will feel less inclined to use violence to accomplish political ends. Unfortunately, African-Americans presently hold relatively few of these important city-level political positions and so violence directed at government officials may still be the most available outlet for grievances in many urban areas.

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From the standpoint of those who aim to understand racial conflict against the

state, these results suggest that more efforts should be made to encourage racial minority

candidates with the hope that other minorities will recognize the potential for increased

political efficacy. Increased political influence should reduce alternative avenues that threaten the personal safety of government agents such as the police.

Violence and Social Disorganization

The results indicate that the specific measures of violence, murder rates and the rate of

police killings of citizens, do not affect homicides of police. This finding is consistent

with the most advanced prior studies that also find null relationships between these

factors and homicides of police (Peterson and Bailey 1988; Jacobs and Carmichael 2002).

On the other hand the results of this study do suggest that unmeasured disorder and

delinquency associated with the structural conditions of disadvantage lead to more

homicides of police officers. The studies noted above found that factors such as poverty

and broken homes are consistent predictors of killings of police and this study

corroborates these findings.

It appears that some urban conditions that are correlated with disorderly behavior

not enumerated in official crime rates are better predictors of killings of police than FBI

reported murder rates. While this study finds a null relationship between unemployment

rates and killings of police, the finding that female-headed households predict killings of

police provides support for the social disorganization perspective. These results are

consistent with previous studies of homicides of police that found little to no effect of

official crime rates but found a consistent effect of indicators of social disorganization. 119

The only additional consistent explanation supported by these analyses was the prediction

that cities with more police will have more killings of police in the line of duty probably

because the population at risk is large in these cities.

Broader Implications

The results corroborate some of the findings of recent investigations of homicides of

police. First, the claim that overall violence increases the likelihood of killings of police

was partially supported. I do not find an effect of total homicide rates on killings of

police, but a positive relationship between black killings of whites and homicides of

police exists. Parallel to findings from prior studies, I isolated relationships between

measures of social disorganization that produce disorder and delinquency not enumerated

in the crime rates (Peterson and Bailey 1988; Jacobs and Carmichael 2002).

In addition to strengthening violence-based explanations, these results also add to

the utility of political explanations for police homicides by introducing a new finding. It

appears that killings of police follow the same pattern as general black homicides of

whites (note that these interracial killing rates do not include homicides of police).

Researchers who have isolated the determinants of black killings of whites concluded that these killings are precipitated by interracial conflict and by racial differences in political power (Jacobs and Wood 1999). If this political explanation has merit, it is likely that homicides of police are also partly explained by political factors.

120

This claim is strengthened by national-level reports from the Bureau of Justice

Statistics that 43 percent of the felons who murdered police from 1976 to 1998 were

African-American. This argument therefore adds to the plausibility of my finding that

cities with black mayors can reduce homicides of police by increasing racial minorities’

feelings of political efficacy.

More generally, this study isolated some robust relationships between macro-level

characteristics and killings of police that were undetected in previous micro-level studies

that examined individual motivations for violent behavior. It is therefore clear that homicides of police are not the sole product of the performance characteristics of individual officers in certain situations. Instead, this investigation suggests that killings of police have a definite structural basis.

This study also represents one of few attempts to assess conflict explanations for reactions to state control efforts. Sociologists and criminologists have expended considerable effort testing conflict explanations for the behavior of social control efforts.

These researchers isolated conflict hypotheses that predict arrest rates (Gove, Sullivant and Wilson 1998), the size of prison populations (Chiricos and Delone 1992; Jacobs and

Helms 1996) and police forces (Jacobs and Helms 1997; Kent and Jacobs 2004), and the frequency of the use of deadly force by the police (Sorenson, Marquart and Brock 1993;

Jacobs and O’Brien 1998). In sum, many investigations have studied variations in the application of social control as a result of shifts in the economic and racial structure of society but few have considered whether these politically-based factors affect those who represent or apply social control. This study shows that the usual targets of social control

121

efforts do not passively accept state coercion. Instead, the findings suggest that these same conflict-based factors help explain the lethal violence used against the police.

122

CHAPTER 4

CONCLUSIONS

Theoretical background

Theoretical developments in the sociology of law provide a basic explanation for the role of coercion in the maintenance of social order. These sociologists argue that social control agents favor the privileged (Dahrendorf 1959; Turk 1969). Black (1976), for example, argues that government agents such as the police apply the law against some groups more than others based on differences in class, race, and the relative social distance between parties in police-citizen interactions. According to this view, criminal law is used to control groups who are viewed as threatening to the social order.

Conflict theory provides additional support to this argument by introducing propositions that define how some groups are more able than others to shape the enforcement of laws and the amount of coercion used against citizens. By recognizing that it is the government that holds the majority of coercive force in modern societies, we can account for the influence of segments of society on social control outcomes by noting the degree to which they can pressure the government to act on their behalf.

123

Using the police to study coercion and control

The police represent the front line of governmental law enforcement authority. Because studying how the government uses coercion tests the usefulness of conflict theory, examining the use of force by the police should refine the hypotheses offered by conflict theorists. This study concentrated on a specific type of police coercion – the use of lethal force against citizens – because it represents the most extreme form of social control the government can impose.

But there are other reasons to study the use of lethal force. When compared to other forms of state-based coercion, the use of deadly force by the police may represent the most understudied form of lethal control. Many researchers have examined the use of the death penalty because it is the most extreme and the only irreversible form of legal punishment. But those who study the government’s right to take life have concentrated disproportionately on the issue of capital punishment even though many more people are killed by police than are executed in the United States. While the stated impetus behind police use of deadly force is not to punish offenders, claims are often made that police killings are a form of summary justice applied to the segments of society that are viewed as the most criminal (Sherman, 1980). In this sense, police killings may be likened to executions without trial as they do not allow for due process. This problem is exacerbated when comparing the crimes for which capital punishment is imposed to those that result in police use of lethal force. While the death penalty is only imposed for the most brutal and heinous of murders, police use deadly force (albeit not always legally) in response to a wide variety of situations that include unarmed non-threatening suspects, aggravated robbery suspects, and those who directly threaten the lives of officers. 124

Despite the progressive policies of many police departments, many other departments still allow their officers a large amount of discretion to use their legal power to kill (Davis

1975; Adams 2005). As a result of extensive sociological research on capital punishment, the national trend is a move toward a decreased use of the death penalty. In comparison to the vigorous controls on the post-trial death penalty and approved in

Gregg v. Georgia (428 U.S. 153 1976) the use of deadly force by police is largely uncontrolled. In order to ensure that these executions without trial are applied only when absolutely necessary, more research on the mechanisms that determine these killings is needed. Equal importance should therefore be given to the study of police use of lethal force.

Reactions to lethal social control

In addition to testing conflict-based explanations of police use of lethal force, this dissertation examined reactions to state-based social control efforts. Prior research has treated the targets of social control as passive figures, but in order to fully understand the processes that surround the use of coercive force by the state, the responses to social control should not be neglected. This study therefore tested conflict-based and other reactive explanations for lethal force against police officers.

Comparing and contrasting the outcomes

In addition to providing a refined test of conflict theory, a primary goal of this dissertation was to determine if the same factors contribute to both of these violent outcomes. While previous research on these parallel outcomes suggest that they are 125

unrelated, only bivariate correlations based on data from only a few cities in one time period were considered in Lester’s (1982) study. Instead I used a large sample of U.S. cities over three decades to find the factors that explained to test the use of lethal force by the police and police use of deadly force against African-Americans. I then isolated the characteristics of cities that influence homicides of police officers. Table 4.1 below offers a summary of the findings from this dissertation. When variables were not considered, the cell is marked NA (not applicable) and when I found no substantial effect of a variable on the outcome, I labeled this “no effect”. The signs (+) and (-) indicate the direction of relationships that were significant at at least the .05 level.

126

Total police Police killings of

Variable killings blacks Killings of police

Black presence + + No Effect

Black killings of whites + No Effect +

Hispanic presence + NA No Effect

Segregation + No Effect No Effect

Officers killed in the line of duty + + NA

Police killings of citizens NA NA No Effect

Murder Rate No Effect + No Effect

% Divorced + NA NA

% families in Poverty No Effect NA NA

% Female-Headed Families NA NA +

% Black Female-Headed Families NA No Effect NA

Black/White Median Income No Effect No Effect No Effect

City Manager Government No Effect No Effect NA

Black Mayor NA NA -

Size of population at risk + + No Effect

Police strength No Effect + +

Table 4.1: Summary of findings

127

This summary suggests both similarities and differences in the factors that predict police killings of citizens and killings of police in the line of duty. In order to address each set of findings and their implications I offer a set of conclusions about killings of and by the police. I then offer some speculations on the reasons for each of these results and their implications for research on the use of lethal force by the police and homicides of police officers.

First, Many theoretically-motivated tests did not explain either outcome:

1. Racial income inequality does not contribute to the outcomes

2. Racial residential segregation minimally affected the outcomes

3. Poverty rates were not useful in predicting any outcome

Several explanations received mixed support:

4. City political characteristics were useful in explaining homicides of police but did

not predict the use of lethal force by the police.

5. Some measures of social disorganization were important factors while others had

null effects on the outcomes

6. The size of the population at risk was a strong predictor of police use of lethal

force

7. Murder rates were positive predictors of police killings of blacks and homicides

of police, but did not influence overall police use of lethal force

8. Larger police departments experienced more homicides of officers and had higher

numbers of police killings of blacks

128

9. Cities with more homicides of officers had higher numbers of police killings of

citizens a year later but the use of deadly force by police did not predict

subsequent homicides of police.

Explanations based on conflict theory had the most consistent effects across outcomes:

10. The size of the African-American population and Hispanic populations were

strong predictors of police use of lethal force

11. The rate of black lethal violence against whites influenced both the use of lethal

force by the police and homicides of police officers

Specific conclusions about these findings:

Racial income inequality does not contribute to the outcomes

Previous research that tested conflict explanations reported that high racial income inequality led to both more police killings (Jacobs and O’Brien 1998) and increased homicides of police (Jacobs and Carmichael 2002) but my findings do not support these conclusions. Many theorists focus on the importance of race-based explanations for conflict rather than class differences (see Liska 1992 for a thorough discussion). Perhaps the extensive controls for race-based political factors in this study accounted for the variation in the outcomes that was attributed to economic inequality in earlier studies.

Racial residential segregation had minimal effects on police killings of blacks and did not affect the other outcomes

Based on racial threat and race-based interaction theories (Blau and Blau 1982), I expected that violence that disproportionately involves offenders and victims of different 129

races would be diminished in cities where the races live apart. Yet racial residential segregation had no impact on police killings of blacks. Segregated cities were also not more likely to report more homicides of police officers. Because killings of police officers are committed by blacks more often than expected given their proportion of the population, I predicted that these homicides would be less likely in cities where blacks and whites live apart but the findings did not support this hypothesis. The null effect of segregation on these outcomes suggests that the racial composition of neighborhoods is not an important factor in predicting violence by and against the police.

This conclusion is complicated, however, by the significant effect of racial residential segregation on total police use of lethal force. Counter to expectations, segregation had a positive effect on the overall police use of lethal force but only in the final models. A possible interpretation of this positive effect is that segregation results in a concentration of racial minorities that poses greater difficulties for police in primarily

African-American neighborhoods. This interpretation is consistent with studies of police behavior that suggest that officers associate neighborhoods with the degree to which they encountered suspicious persons. If some neighborhoods are viewed as more threatening than others, then it is plausible that the most segregated cities will experience more police use of deadly force.

Poverty rates were not useful in predicting any outcome

Research in criminology suggests that absolute deprivation is associated with disorderly behaviors that may require additional police attention. While many criminal acts including juvenile delinquency are not enumerated in the official crime rates, police must 130

nevertheless respond to disorderly situations which may result in violent officer-citizen confrontations that lead to the officer using lethal force or the suspect using violence against the officer. In order to account for these additional disorderly acts that may require police attention, I included tests for the potential effects of poverty. While some prior studies of police use of lethal force found that police killed citizens more often in places with a high proportion of impoverished families, I did not find this effect.

Similarly, poverty rates did not predict homicides of police. These findings suggest that these violent outcomes do not result from police responses to additional delinquency and disorderly behaviors that partly stem from poverty.

City political characteristics were useful in explaining homicides of police but did not predict the use of lethal force by the police.

While city manager governments had no effect on the police use of deadly force, the presence of a black mayor reduced homicides of police, suggesting that direct political explanations may be more useful in predicting violence against the state rather than coercive force used by law enforcement agents. One possibility for this difference is that previous researchers who used this indicator were interested in explaining the population- corrected number of police officers (Kent and Jacobs, unpublished manuscript). City managers are arguably concerned with fiscal issues related to the hiring of officers but may be less influential in changing actual department policies.

131

Some measures of social disorganization were important factors while others had null effects on the outcomes

I found that cities with high proportions of female-headed families had more homicides of officers. The proportion of female-headed families is one of the more important indicators of social disorganization (Sampson 1987) so this finding should be a reliable measure of this perspective. But this measure did not explain police killings of African-

Americans. In the race-specific analyses of police use of lethal force I measured social disorganization with the percentage of African-American female-headed families but this variable did not explain police killings of blacks. One possible reason for this anomaly is that the race-specific rate of female-headed families is so high in many cities that residents have adapted to this disadvantaged situation. After controlling for the influence of political factors, a null effect of female-headed families suggests that citizen violence against the police is a response to political rather that social disadvantage.

On the other hand I found that a different measure of social disorganization predicted the overall police use of lethal force. A positive relationship between divorce rates and total police killings is an indication that police may be required to use more lethal force to control the unmeasured interpersonal violence located in areas characterized by high divorce rates and single-parent households.

132

Perhaps the choice of measure produced the disparate effects of social disorganization on these outcomes. For example, the positive relationship between divorce rates and police use of lethal force is consistent with the findings from previous studies, yet no studies have identified a link between female-headed families and police killings. This suggests that divorce rates may be a better measure of social disorganization at least as it affects the police use of lethal force.

The size of the population at risk was a strong predictor of police use of lethal force

The size of a city’s population has a strong consistent effect on police killings, supporting the notion that police killings should be more frequent in places with more people at risk.

Murder rates were positive predictors of police killings of blacks and homicides of police, but did not influence overall police use of lethal force

The most violent cities as indicated by the murder rates had more police killings and more homicides of police. These findings suggest that in general, killings by and of the police are more likely in cities where the police encounter violent populations.

An interesting contrast is that homicide rates did not affect the overall use of lethal force by the police, but the black murder rates had a positive effect on police killings of African-Americans. This discrepancy may be explained by situational factors not considered in this study but which are included in the Supplemental Homicide

Reports data set. For example, research on the circumstances surrounding police use of lethal force reports that a substantial proportion of police shootings of citizens occur in response to disturbance calls, robberies, and other violent situations in which the suspect 133

is carrying a potentially deadly weapon (Alpert and Fridell 1992). If African-Americans are more likely to be involved in the circumstances that most often result in the use of deadly force by the police, then situational factors may explain this discrepancy. Future research might disaggregate police killings according to the events surrounding the

shooting in order to see if police killings of blacks are more likely in situations that

involve violence.

Larger police departments experienced more homicides of officers and had higher

numbers of police killings of blacks

The null effect of the size of the police force on officers’ use of lethal force suggests that

cities with more police per capita do not necessarily have a higher number of police

killings of citizens. On the other hand, cities with more police had more killings of police

probably because the population at risk is large in these cities.

Cities with more homicides of officers had higher numbers of police killings of citizens a

year later but the use of deadly force by police did not predict subsequent homicides of police.

Interestingly, the notion that police killings and use of lethal force against the police are related received limited support. Cities with the most homicides of officers had higher numbers of police killings of citizens a year later but the use of deadly force by police did not predict subsequent homicides of police.

134

A tentative conclusion is that police respond to violence in kind but that citizens do not kill police in response to the lethal coercion used against them. But future research should examine this relationship further by studying the micro-level processes that shape reactions to individual incidents of lethal force by and against the police in

U.S. cities.

The size of the African-American population and Hispanic populations were strong predictors of police use of lethal force

Robust relationships between the presence of racial and ethnic minorities and police killings indicates that race-based explanations are integral in identifying variations in the application of lethal social control in the United States. The finding that police kill more

African-Americans in cities with large black populations supports conflict-based claims that the threat posed by minority populations leads to increased use of social control, especially against African-Americans. Because this effect was the strongest in the earliest time period analyzed, it appears that the importance of minority threat as gauged by the size of the black population has diminished over time. One possible reason for this reduced influence is that the inclusion of an additional measure of racial threat in my models may have captured a portion of this explanatory power. Previous studies measured racial threat using only the size of the African-American population but I include a more direct measure of the criminal threat attributed to racial minorities. The strong influence of the rate of black lethal violence against whites on police killings of blacks provides additional support for claims that whites respond punitively to the criminal threat posed by racial minorities (see next statement). 135

An interesting finding is that Hispanic presence predicts police use of lethal force

but not killings of the police. In addition, while the positive effect of a large Hispanic

population on police use of lethal force provides additional evidence for minority threat,

its effects are weaker than the racial threat alternative. These contrasting results are not

surprising considering the history of violent race disputes regarding African-Americans that do not characterize the assimilation of ethnic groups. The Hispanic populations in most large U.S. cities are modest, but if the proportion of Hispanics continues to grow at its current rate, future studies may find that the relationship between such threats and police use of lethal force may become stronger.

The rate of black lethal violence against whites influenced both the use of lethal force by the police and homicides of police officers

Interestingly, the size of minority populations was not an effective predictor of killings of police but homicides of police were more numerous in cities with high rates of black killings of whites. Researchers who have isolated the determinants of black killings of whites concluded that these killings are precipitated by interracial conflict and by racial differences in political power (Jacobs and Wood 1999). If this political explanation has merit, it is likely that homicides of police are also partly explained by political factors.

This claim is strengthened by national-level reports from the Bureau of Justice Statistics that 43 percent of the felons who murdered police from 1976 to 1998 were African-

American. The consistent influence of black killings of whites in the analyses of killings of police officers supports political explanations for these homicides.

136

I also found that black killings of whites precipitate police use of lethal force.

The importance of this additional measure of racial threat suggests that more direct

measured of threat should be considered when studying the application of social control.

It is difficult to speculate on why these interracial killings influenced both killings of and

by the police but a simple explanation is that the social characteristics found in some U.S.

cities may lead to a variety of forms of violent behavior including black killings of

whites, police use of lethal force and homicides of police officers.

The usefulness of conflict-based explanations

Although I found that some measures of community violence and disorder

influenced both killings of citizens by the police and homicides of officers, probably the

most important findings have to do with the usefulness of conflict-based explanations in

explaining these outcomes. I hypothesized that if political explanations based on conflict

theory have any merit, they should at least partly predict variation in killings of citizens

by the police. I predicted that more progressive political arrangements would be less

responsive to public demands for increases in social control but cities with city manager

forms of government were not more likely to have higher numbers of police killings. Yet

indirect political explanations were supported. Cities with high proportions of African-

Americans and Hispanics had more incidents of police use of lethal force and a larger

black presence led to more police killings of blacks. According to the racial threat perspective, whites respond punitively to the threat of large racial or ethnic populations.

In addition, findings from the political science literature suggest that minority groups

have less political influence than whites for a variety of reasons. The strong influence of 137

minority threat measures on the use of force by the police therefore supports claims that a

political system that favors whites may result in more violent social control that also

target racial minorities.

In addition, conflict-based theories were integral to explaining variation on

homicides of police. Cities with more black killings of whites also had more homicides

of police. If these homicides of officers stem from the political grievances of disadvantaged, largely minority populations, then this finding may be partly attributable to differential political influence that follows racial lines. This finding partly supports conflict-based arguments that disadvantaged groups are less likely to have the political power necessary to express grievances through conventional channels and must resort to violence to make their political opinions known (Jenkins and Schock 1992; Tilly 1974).

Summary

This dissertation investigated the use of lethal violence by and against the police. I tested hypotheses derived from conflict theory and related political explanations. Based on findings from prior research I also considered theories that focus on violent reactions to the difficult conditions of urban areas. I found that these reactive hypotheses contributed to both police killings and killings of police but political explanations also mattered.

After testing many different factors I found that indirect political explanations based on minority threat theory best predict police killings. Race-based indicators were also the strongest predictors of police killings of African-Americans. A final important finding is that cities with black mayors had less homicides of officers, suggesting that these killings are partly shaped by political arrangements. 138

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