Police Killings as a Problem of Governance

Abstract

Police kill more than a thousand civilians each year in the United States, a much higher death rate than occurs in any other developed nation. One important cause of the epidemic of civilian deaths is the larger risk that the police who patrol American communities face from civilian assaults with firearms, widely owned and often not visible. Yet many hundreds of killings each year of civilians in the United States are not necessary to protect either police or others from life-threatening attacks. Governments in the United States have failed to collect reliable data, investigate the causes of high death rates, or develop administrative standards to reduce unnecessary killings. The power and expertise vacuums that govern the current ignorance and overkill in the police use of deadly force are the direct, if unintended, consequences of state and federal government failures to assert authority over the many thousands of local police forces that are progeny of the American federal system.