Prior to 2014, the official word on the number of homicides committed by police officers in the line of duty came from the FBI and their annual reports on crime statistics. But thanks to the work of the people who run databases like killedbypolice.net and Fatal Encounters, it was shown that the FBI was vastly undercounting the number of people killed by police officers in the line of duty. This was once again the case in 2014 when the official count from the FBI showed 444 people dead from officers in the line of duty[1].
But the true number, according to my research, was 1,004, including 939 deaths from officer involved shootings, 39 taser-related deaths, and 26 deaths from other means.
Only 55% of police killings from January 2014 through June
2015 involved people armed with a gun. 18% of people killed by police were
unarmed.
Even when isolating the killings that occurred when police
officers used lethal force (guns), one out of every eight people (12%) were
unarmed at the time they were shot.
Black Lives Matter activists have done a good job of
bringing attention to police shootings of unarmed black men, and this has
reinforced the belief that police officers disproportionately target unarmed
black men. There is some truth to this. Even though 26% of people who died from
police gunfire were black, 35% of unarmed people who died from police gunfire
were black. Including deaths from tasers and physical struggles, black people
made up 39% of all civilian deaths from police officers from January 2014 to
June 2015.
But the circumstances by which police end up shooting
unarmed people are not similar. Michael Brown was unarmed when he was killed by
Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson, but he was charging threateningly at
Wilson when Wilson pulled the trigger. Ezell Ford was unarmed when he was
killed by Los Angeles police officers Sharlton Wampler and Antonio Villegas,
but he was also allegedly in a physical struggle with the officers when they
shot him. These officers responded to a threat of physical harm by using lethal
force. Shooting an unarmed person in a fistfight is a disproportionate
response, of course, but at least the threat in these instances was real and
not perceived. Other unarmed people held
objects (cell phones, remote controls, power drills, etc.) in order to fool
police into shooting them. In these instances, the threat to officers was
merely perceived, but good arguments have been made saying that a reasonable
officer should not be found criminally culpable for believing the decedent in
these types of situations had a weapon.
However, 55 people from January 2014 through June 2015 were
killed by police even though they had no weapon, real or perceived, and posed
no physical threat to officers or bystanders. Most of these types of shootings
happen because police officers are unable to see the hands of the suspect they
are pursuing. But in these shootings, police officers decided to shoot the
suspect first rather than wait for a suspect to present a threat either to
officers or bystanders.
This sort of quick response is what officers train for, and
they are often commended for quick action by their superiors. But by removing
the idea that a threat must be imminent before lethal force is used, it allows
police officers the right to deprive a person of life without due process of
law.
While it is true that these 55 police shootings made up only
a tiny percentage of the total number of shootings in this time frame
(specifically 4%), the shootings happened often enough to be able to make
statistical inferences from them. And what I found was intriguing.
While black people made up 26% of the total police shooting
deaths from January 2014 through June 2015, black people who were unarmed and
not a threat were 31% of the total number of people who were both unarmed and
not a threat (17 of 55). This is only a modest increase, however, and it is
possible that this could just be due to random chance. If a random group of 55 people
were selected from the 1,403 people who lost their lives due to a police
shooting from January 2014 through June 2015, the probability that 31% or more
would be black is about 1 in 4. This would be an unlikely result, but not an
uncommon one.
But, despite making up only 18% of total police shooting
deaths from January 2014 to June 2015, Hispanic people made up 40% of the
police shooting deaths (22 out of 55) of people who were unarmed and posed no
threat. If a random group of 55 people
were selected from the 1,403 people who were shot and killed by police from
January 2014 through June 2015, the probability that 40% or more would be
Hispanic is 0.02% or about 2 in 10,000.
It seems highly unlikely therefore that this result is due
to random chance. But then that gets to the question of why. Why is it that
Hispanic people are more often the victims of fatal police shootings of unarmed
non-threatening people than any other race or ethnicity? It could be that
police departments with loose rules governing their use of force policies also
happen to be located in areas with high populations of Hispanic people. It
could still be a crazy statistical anomaly, and that data from the next 18
months will show that it was just a fluke.
Or it could be that officers are more likely to believe that
Hispanic people have weapons when they really don’t. This would be highly
problematic if true.
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