Lethal Force in the Rural West

The rate of fatal incidents involving law enforcement officers is higher in Western states than in the rest of America, and policing in rural areas has a lot to do with it. This is the argument made by Kate Schimel in an article written for the High Country News and republished in the Denver Post on Saturday. And it’s true that Western states see more killings by law enforcement per capita per year than most of the rest of the country (Oklahoma excepted).  Of the five states with the highest numbers of lethal force incidents between January 1, 2014 and June 30, 2015, four of them are Western states (New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, Montana, ranked 2, 3, 4, and 5, respectively. High Country News names these four, plus California, Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Utah, Wyoming and Colorado, as Western states).

Rate of lethal force incidents per million per year by state, January 2014 through June 2015

But this doesn’t say much about the how often people in rural areas get killed by a police officer’s use of force. Schimel used the story of Idaho rancher Jack Yantis in her article as an anecdote of a rural officer-involved shooting. Yantis was shot and killed by Adams County sheriff’s deputies after they alerted Yantis to a situation with a bull of his that had been injured after it wandered onto the highway. Yantis showed up with a shotgun in order to shoot the injured bull, but according to bystanders, words (and possibly bullets) were exchanged between the deputies and Yantis.

But cattle-based officer-involved shootings are very rare, and they are not the reason that officer-involved shootings happen at a higher per capita rate in the west than elsewhere in America.  While stating that “rural areas have been equally bloody” as cities in the West, Schimel acknowledges that “the lack of comprehensive long-term data makes it difficult to know how the rate of rural fatalities compares to urban zones, but their frequency is notable.” We may not have long term data, but as part of the Lethal Force Database, we do know the rates of lethal force incidents (LFI) in each metropolitan statistical area (MSA) in the time frame examined, currently January 2014 through June 2015.

A few notes about this table: first, the metro population listed for each state is the sum of the population within all metropolitan statistical areas with a central city based within that state, not for all parts of the state within a metropolitan statistical area. This makes a difference in the east, where metro areas frequently cross state lines, but there are only a handful of metro areas that cross state lines in the west (Portland, Oregon; Logan, Utah; Lewiston, Idaho). Second, metropolitan statistical areas coincide with county boundaries, and often include land that most people would consider rural. Similarly, areas outside of metropolitan areas contain many small cities (the threshold for a city to be considered a metropolitan area is about 100,000 people) whose police forces interact with the public in the same ways as mid-sized cities.  This is all a way of saying that this table may not reveal answers about the rural American police force in quite as clear cut of a way as it is presented due to certain issues central to the structure of census-defined metropolitan statistical areas.

The idea presented in Schimel’s article is that the rural areas of eleven Western states may be plagued by as many (and perhaps more) fatal acts of force by police as the attention-grabbing incidents in Ferguson, Chicago, North Charleston and elsewhere. This idea is partially borne out by the data. The difference between the non-metropolitan rate of lethal force per million per year and the metropolitan rate of lethal force was largest in Arizona, where nine people have been killed by police in Arizona’s non-metropolitan counties, for an annual rate of 12.5 people killed by police per million population. Three out of the top four states ranked by this difference are Western states (Arizona, Colorado and Idaho). Only eighteen states had rural rates of lethal force higher than urban rates (defined by metropolitan statistical areas), and six of them were Western states. But five Western states saw urban rates of lethal force greater than the rate in rural areas (Oregon, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico and Montana).

According to Schimel, only two out of the 21 lethal force incidents in the state of Washington in 2015 were committed by Seattle police officers. This was seen as evidence that rural areas must be responsible for the rest. But this isn’t actually the case. From January 2014 through June 2015, the annual rate was about 3 people killed per million residents of the Seattle metro area. (For reference, the national average during this time was 3.17 deaths per million population per year.) Non-metropolitan Washington experienced a rate of 4.3 deaths per million, a rate modestly higher than Seattle’s. But the small metropolitan areas of Yakima and the tri-cities of Richland, Kennewick and Pasco experienced a rate of 13.6 and 14.8 deaths per million, more than four times higher than Seattle’s rate and more than three times higher than the state’s non-metropolitan rate.

Indeed, the smallest metropolitan statistical areas around the nation account for the highest rates of lethal force incidents. While very large metropolitan statistical areas (New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, etc.) account for substantially fewer officer-involved deaths per capita than the rest of the country, the rate of lethal force per capita in rural areas is also less than the national average.

There are a few different explanations for this. One is simply that non-metropolitan areas have less crime per capita than metropolitan areas, and fewer criminals means fewer chances that a person with a weapon gets killed by police. Another theory is that the database is simply missing people killed by police in rural areas.  The incidents in the Lethal Force Database were gathered from sources that find media reports about officer involved shootings, tasings, and physical force that result in fatalities. There is no guarantee that this is a complete list, and it is possible that small town media slips through the algorithms (small newspapers are more likely to have paywalls and non-searchable archives, I’ve found).

What is definitely true is that urban areas of Western states lead the nation in lethal force incidents. But crime in rural areas seems to be on the rise, and drug overdose deaths in rural areas are becoming more plentiful. While there is conflicting evidence of higher rates of lethal force incidents in rural areas, long term studies may show us that more crime and drugs will bring more officer involved shootings to America’s rural communities.