Talk:Police use of deadly force in the United States

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Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment

This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 11 January 2021 and 13 March 2021. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Vak5757.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 02:29, 18 January 2022 (UTC)

National Use-of-Force Data Collection

Just read about this and thought it might be helpful here:

FBI Announces the Official Launch of the National Use-Of-Force Data Collection

Seahawk01 (talk) 06:42, 24 November 2018 (UTC)

References

Addition of content

An editor continues to remove and trim the following text:

A 2019 study in PNAS concluded from a dataset of fatal shootings that white officers were not more likely to shoot minority civilians than non-white officers: "We did not find evidence for anti-Black or anti-Hispanic disparity in police use of force across all shootings, and, if anything, found anti-White disparities when controlling for race-specific crime". The study found that violent crime rates within a geographic location are "the best predictor we have of fatal police shootings" because "the rate of crime by each racial group correlates with the likelihood of citizens from that racial group being shot". Regarding the victims of police shootings, between 90 and 95 percent were "actively attacking police or other citizens", while 90 percent "were armed with a weapon when they were shot".

The input others would be appreciate. Magnolia677 (talk) 18:14, 2 June 2020 (UTC)

References

This is false. What I did was that I removed the second half of the paragraph (while keeping the first half), which is sourced to a press release and which precedes the correction of the study. The study has been widely criticized and a correction to the study has been published. If we are to cover the findings of the study, it should be sourced to the study itself or to a secondary up-to-date RS covering the study. Snooganssnoogans (talk) 18:23, 2 June 2020 (UTC)

The Cesario/Johnson study was already in the article; all I did was expand it and add a non-primary source to support the study's findings. The Cesario/Johnson study has been cited 23 times in Google Scholar, and was cited in this 2020 article published in the Journal of Criminal Justice which wrote: "The overwhelming majority of offense-related benchmarks (i.e., criminal activity) – using data from a number of sources (e.g., FBI's UCR and the National Incident-Based Reporting System; BJS' NCVS; CDC's WONDER database) – have uncovered no anti-Black/racial disparities in fatal officer-involved shootings (Cesario et al., 2019; Miller et al., 2017; Tregle et al., 2019). This is especially the case for arrests regarding violent crime and weapons offenses". Readers do not benefit when reliably sourced content is removed, or when trivial and commonplace refutations are given more weight. Magnolia677 (talk) 19:03, 2 June 2020 (UTC)

Cannot find simple statistic--how many blacks killed by police per year

It gives numbers for all races around 1000, then says blacks are 2.5 times, or 3.2 times, etc more likely to be killed. Do I have to do algebra to get this simple number?? There should be a clear, prominent table.

This is important. Right now people are saying "black people are dying every day by police. This is more important than Covid-19 risk". I think the number is about 250 per year. But I don't know ... Ttulinsky (talk) 06:45, 4 June 2020 (UTC)

As far as fatal police shootings and race, it is pretty easy to get statistics from the CDC Underlying Cause of Death website https://wonder.cdc.gov/ucd-icd10.html. Under 'Select cause of death', search for 'firearm' and select 'Y35.0 Legal intervention involving firearm discharge' which is a police shooting. Chrisjazz (talk) 19:22, 6 September 2021 (UTC)

I am thinking about adding the following table to the main article. Chrisjazz (talk) 19:42, 6 September 2021 (UTC)

Firearm deaths and fatal police shootings by race (for year 2019)

	White	Black	Asian	Indigenous
Population	255,040,203	46,599,393	21,814,724	4,785,203
% of total	77.7%	14.2%	6.6%	1.5%
All firearm deaths	28,041	10,555	679	432
% of total	70.6%	26.6%	1.7%	1.1%
Fatally shot by police	355	122	23	20
% of total	68.3%	23.5%	4.4%	3.8%

References

@Chrisjazz I removed some of your edit because I think it's original research. The problem with taking government statistics and doing analysis itself is that the relevant information (in this case race) is not available for every incident. Looking at DeGue (2016) for example, only 34% of cases of police using lethal force had race/ethnicity available. It's difficult to estimate because there is a lot of missing information and many classifications are binary (e.g. Black Latinos exist, but may be counted exclusively as Black or Latino). Counting may seem like a simple exercise but the problem is the data requires considerable processing and analysis and that's beyond what we can do as Wikipedia editors. The CDC table could be useful, but rather than discussing how a population makes up X% of the population but Y% of deaths, it would be more prudent to write about the shortcomings in data and the estimated deaths for each population as noted by the existing body of research. This also gets to the IP's question of why it's hard to simply say "X people were killed by police" -- the data are often not available, and when they are they're biased, incomplete, or both, which requires processing and modeling. Citing (talk) 02:48, 10 September 2021 (UTC)

DeGue S, Fowler KA, Calkins C (November 2016). "Deaths Due to Use of Lethal Force by Law Enforcement: Findings From the National Violent Death Reporting System, 17 U.S. States, 2009-2012". Am J Prev Med. 51 (5 Suppl 3): S173–S187. doi:10.1016/j.amepre.2016.08.027. PMC 6080222. PMID 27745606.

Hi, @Citing. Thank you for your feedback.

The original question complained about needing to do algebra to try to get counts of individuals killed from a bunch of "w is x times y" and "z out of 100000" statistics. (I heard several people misinterpret those statistics and become fearful, thinking dozens of black men were being killed by police every day.) So I thought a table with the CDC data would help show the approximate numbers of individuals killed in a simple straight-forward way (no algebra required).

Much of the rest of the article already talks about the under-reporting issue. (Degue, Fowler, Calkins 2016 is already cited in the previous paragraph.) The CDC Wonder database may be incomplete, but at least it gives ballpark counts of individuals killed. And even if under-reported, the estimates of actual numbers are not more than double the CDC numbers. This CDC report also uses the simpler 4-race categories (without hispanic ethnicity) that are less prone to coroner classification errors, and only reports firearm deaths.

As far as some of my post being original research, I probably agree with removing my sentences pointing out that one race represents X% of the population but Y% of deaths.

However, I think we should leave the table. The counts come directly from the CDC database, and the percentage-of-total lines are just simple summary calculations (so the reader does not need to pull out a calculator). I think this table is useful for readers. What do you think?

Thanks. Chrisjazz (talk) 20:54, 10 September 2021 (UTC)

Those are good points, I do think it's useful.Citing (talk) 22:29, 10 September 2021 (UTC)

Corrections and reframing

Hi, rather new to Wikipedia and no particular academic background on this subject. I wanted to propose these changes before editing:

1. Start with the rate of deadly force before racial bias. There's no mention of how anomalous the US is in terms of police killings.
2. Recontextualize Cesario/Johnson. Above, Magnolia677 cited them as saying "white officers were not more likely to shoot minority civilians than non-white officers". This is what they essentially wrote and it's been heavily influential since then (the study has been misinterpreted both in Congress and in this article, where a correction to it is being used to support an entirely different claim in paragraph #3.) The first response from Cesario/Johnson retracts this statement. Johnson further disclaims any racial implications here: https://www.citylab.com/equity/2020/02/police-violence-racial-bias-shootings-by-race-research-data/605866/. Their study doesn't account for things like black cops policing black neighborhoods. It was an 1,800 hour data collection effort, but unfortunately it hasn't been phrased that way, and they've instead just lent academic credibility to self-reported data.
3. Emphasize the lack of information and difficulty calculating racial bias. We need to know (a) the rate at which police encounter black civilians along with (b) the rate at they kill them. Both numbers are estimates.
4. Regarding (a): most studies don't try to calculate this, but the ones that do vary greatly. For quick reference, studies generally include the term "proxy" if they're discussing this.
5. Regarding (b): this number is more reliable now, but still should be flagged as best-effort, self-reported, as well as largely untracked for most of US history to 2014.

I realize Wiki articles condense research which means rounding values, but the statements in this article are much more confident than their citations. My general proposition is to change the tone from "some studies say X, others say ~X" to the more accurate "academia has been prevented from reaching any conclusions so far." Let me know if any of this is unhelpful/unclear. Wunderkiwi (talk) 07:38, 11 June 2020 (UTC)

Hi Wunderkiwi, thank you for this. If you're new to Wikipedia please take a look at the Be bold page. It's great that you picked up on the fact that people often write things on Wikipedia and then cite a source which doesn't really say or only partly says what they claim it does. On a page like this one, that's a real pain but it's really just part of the nature of Wikipedia (lots of double checking other people's "facts"). So my advice is BE BOLD! EDIT! And good luck, this article is a mess and my attempt to create a summary of it for the introduction is not going well.Monopoly31121993(2) (talk) 10:02, 16 June 2020 (UTC)

In light of some recent critiques and major retractions I've taken a stab at some of this. The article has a variety of citations and sources and citation styles so I hope I've managed to keep the citations straight as well as reflected the scientific literature well. There's still a bit of work to be done but hopefully this is a good start.Citing (talk) 18:41, 13 July 2020 (UTC)

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