Photography by Sarah Kloepple
A protester in downtown St. Louis on September 15, 2017, the day that the Jason Stockley verdict was announced.
Odis Johnson, a professor of education and sociology at Washington University, recently released the first report from the Fatal Interactions with Police research project. Among the key findings: “The odds that black Americans will be killed by police when unarmed are nearly 7 to 1—more than double the odds found in research to date—and due primarily to the unarmed status of black women.” Yet cases involving unarmed women often go overlooked by news outlets, he notes. "We don’t see women getting the same type of attention in the media," says Johnson. Here's an overview of the findings and potential next steps.
Why did researchers decide to study police shootings involving unarmed civilians? Johnson and other public health and biostatistics experts wanted to “test some of the claims of social protest activist groups about the ‘hands up, don’t shoot’ phenomenon." “We understand it to mean that black males are targeted with excessive force by police officers,” Johnson says. “Of course, there was [another message] put out there by Say Her Name activists” regarding police brutality toward women. But “we have very few women in the data set,” he says. Despite all of the attention that police shootings have received, Johnson says “there is not a lot of science out there on these issues.”
How did the researchers collect the data? The study was launched in 2016. The group began by looking at the websites Fatalencounters.org and Killedbypolice.net and finding corroborating documents—court records, coroners’ reports, obituaries—to ensure the person was actually killed by police, Johnson says. Researchers found a sample of 1,762 such deaths in the U.S. between May 2013 and January 2015. They then broke down that data by race and gender, as well as by the agency and location where the shooting occurred.
What did researchers find? The study found that fatalities involving unarmed African-Americans were more than seven times as likely as those involving unarmed Caucasians. Studying data regarding women, in particular, proved an “estimation challenge,” Johnson says, because there were only 115 women in the sample. But when researchers compared the number of unarmed African-American men who were killed to the total number of unarmed African-American people (including women) killed, ”the odds that black individuals would be killed when unarmed more than doubled in magnitude, suggesting that the proportion of women who were unarmed when killed shouldered a majority of the burden for their racial group as a whole.” “Our analysis finds that the ‘hands up, don’t shoot’ slogan of the post-Ferguson movement becomes most relevant when you also ‘say her name,’” Johnson stated in a news release. Johnson also highlighted the group's findings in regards to Hispanics, who were five times as likely to be killed by police while unarmed as white Americans.
What's next for researchers? The researchers plan to release reports regarding the odds for males of color to have fatal interactions with police. “And there we do find that black males have the highest odds,” Johnson says. In a third study, the group looked at people under age 25 and found that Hispanics have the highest odds of a fatal interaction with police. Scientific journals are reviewing the first study for publication, Johnson says.
“Hopefully, we will begin conversations in the St. Louis region of how to institutionalize the collection of data by third parties of police-involved injuries,” Johnson says. “We would like [emergency departments] and shock trauma units within hospitals to be the primary data collectors for those type of injuries.”
Johnson says he'd also like to see “a broader conversation happen with law enforcement because I don’t know that they have been aware of the character of police actions. These studies that look at the use of deadly force are just now becoming available.” Johnson then hopes that police departments will incorporate the data into training programs.
What practical steps could be taken to improve police departments? Heather Taylor, president of the Ethical Society of Police, says she "wasn’t that surprised by the numbers at all” when she saw the report. She recommends police departments increase diversity, hiring officers who “don’t have preconceived notions about other races—and that goes for white and black officers,” she says. Taylor suggests police departments do more thorough background checks, considering candidates’ social media activity and whether an officer has frequently shifted to different municipalities. Finally, she emphasizes the importance of officer wellness.
“We have a powder keg,” she says. “You have a gun; you have the authority to arrest, and a lot of times, in our occupation, we have the ability to take someone’s life. If you have officers who are already struggling mentally with the job and you bring in a lack of understanding with someone else based on their race or gender—or whatever the case may be—it’s going to explode.”
