Latest research study shows there’s racial bias in deadly police shootings

According to a new research study, there is racial bias in police shootings indicating black people are more than twice as likely as their white American counterparts to be unarmed when they’re shot and killed by police.

The study published in the Criminology & Public Policy journal finds that racial bias is a contributing factor in police shootings.

While this topic has been a long standing debate between the community and police departments, and lack of data has made it difficult to justify, the journal was able to put the pieces together in a detailed research to determine racial bias.

To determine whether racial bias could account for the discrepancy, Justin Nix, lead study author and assistant professor at the University of Louisville, analyzed 900 fatal police shootings that occurred in 2015, collected from The Washington Post’s two-year-old database of fatal police shootings

Michael Brown

There is no government database on police shootings, so Justin Nix had to rely on the Washington Post’s impressive database on it. State and local jurisdictions aren’t required to collect information about officer-involved shootings, and they’re also not required to submit that information to the federal government if they do track it. Non-fatal officer-involved shootings are particularly difficult to study.

Because there’s no solid national database on police shootings, racial bias has been measured using lab simulations to test officers in hypothetical scenarios ― something researchers want to move beyond to determine whether racial discrimination is a factor in police shootings in the real world.

In his analysis, Nix found that even after controlling for factors such as age, mental illness, region, crime rate in that jurisdiction and city size, black citizens shot and killed by police were still more likely to be unarmed than citizens of other racial groups.

“Long story short, we think some of these findings are suggestive of implicit bias,” Nix said.

Justin Nix also stressed that his work has limitations and that implicit racial bias isn’t the only possible explanation for racial disparities in fatal police shooting.

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