On Shooting Justification and Race/Ethnicity

According to the Lethaldb.com Shooting Justification Rating, police officers who kill civilians most frequently achieve a rating of 3, which is right in the middle (the scale is 1 to 5). This is the rating for people brandishing handguns or approaching officers with knives.

The average rating is 3.43, on the more justified side of the scale. But it varies by race/ethnicity.

Part of the reason behind developing the Lethaldb.com Shooting Justification Rating was to investigate the differences in the perception of threats presented by white people versus the perception of threats presented by Hispanic and black people. It turns out that Hispanic people, who accounted for only 18% of people killed by a police officer’s use of force between January 2014 and June 2015, accounted for 39% of the killings rated 1 (least justified) in the Shooting Justification Rating. Black people were slightly overrepresented in the two lowest categories of justification as well.

71 of the 1403 fatal shootings of a civilian by a police officer in America between January 2014 and June 2015 categorized by the Shooting Justification Rating were rated 1, 28 of which happened to a Hispanic person and 23 of which happened to a black person. Given the racial composition of the 1403 fatal shootings, a random sample of 71 incidents would include 23 or more black people only 14% of the time, but it would include 28 or more Hispanic people 0.003% of the time. It is possible, therefore, that the overrepresentation of black people in the lowest justification rating is just a random chance. But it is unlikely that the overrepresentation of Hispanic people in the lowest justification rating is random.