The Latest Research Shows There's Racial Bias In Deadly Policing Shootings

Black Americans are more than twice as likely as white Americans to be unarmed when they’re shot and killed by police officers, according to a study published Wednesday in the journal Criminology & Public Policy. And the new study finds that racial bias is a likely contributing factor. While this point is a well-known issue of contention between police departments and many of the communities they work in, it has been very difficult to actually study due to a lack of data. 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.  There’s no government database on fatal police shootings, so relying on a journalism source was Nix’s alternative. 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 good national data on police shootings, racial bias has frequently been measured using lab simulations to test officers in hypothetical scenarios ― something researchers want to move beyond to determine whether racial bias is a factor in ...
Source: Healthy Living - The Huffington Post - Category: Consumer Health News Source Type: news