Abstract
In response to Gabriel Schwartz and Jaquelyn Jahn’s descriptive study, “Mapping fatal police violence across U.S. metropolitan areas: Overall rates and racial/ethnic inequalities, 2013–2017,” I provide three reflections. First, the framing of this issue is vitally important. Second, police-involved fatalities represent a nonrandom sample of all incidents involving police use of deadly force (i.e., physical force that causes or is likely to cause death), and unfortunately, we lack comprehensive data on use of deadly force that does not result in fatalities. Finally, to make sense of who is killed by the police, researchers must also identify who was exposed to the risk of being killed by the police.
Highlights
Gabriel Schwartz and Jaquelyn Jahn analyzed data from Fatal Encounters—the most comprehensive database tracking police-involved deaths in the United States—and uncovered vast differences across metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) in the overall rates of persons killed by police officers, as well as racial inequities in those rates, between 2013 and 2017 [1]
The key contribution of their analysis is that it was conducted at the MSA level, which offers a more precise look at variation in police-involved fatalities across the United States than most prior work
A police sniper shot and killed Reyes, saving the little girl’s life. This was without question a domestic violence incident that ended with police using deadly force
Summary
Citation: Nix J (2020) On the challenges associated with the study of police use of deadly force in the United States: A response to Schwartz & Jahn. PLoS ONE 15(7): e0236158. https://doi.org/ 10.1371/journal.pone.0236158 Funding: The author received no specific funding for this work. Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.
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