Fatal Encounters Research Articles

Deadly Force by U.S. Customs and Border Protection: An Analysis of Fatal Encounters with Latinos

Federal agencies are largely underrepresented when examining the dynamics of officer-involved killings. Amid discussions of police and immigration reform is the underexplored role of U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP). Given the increased focus on reports of deaths at the U.S.–Mexico border, CBP agents’ use of deadly force warrants further scholarly attention. To address this gap in the literature, we rely on data from the Southern Border Communities Coalition and CBP to examine Latino individuals’ fatal encounters involving agents (2010–2023). We qualitatively analyze the characteristics of, and actions within, such encounters. Major findings and implications for theory and policy are discussed.

Excessive Use of Force and Migrant Death and Disappearance in Southern Arizona

Executive Summary In this article, we present a qualitative analysis of the events surrounding death or disappearance in autopsy and missing person reports from the Pima County Office of the Medical Examiner (PCOME) in Arizona to highlight how interactions between border enforcement personnel and migrants can be deadly. We reviewed PCOME records of undocumented border crosser deaths between 2000 and 2023 and observed three main types of deadly U.S. Border Patrol (USBP) practices: reckless motor vehicle pursuits, aggressive strategies used to detain individuals who are on foot, and the use of lethal force. Our findings reveal that these tactics, which we argue constitute forms of “excessive use of force,” represent significant yet overlooked factors contributing to migrant death and disappearance in southern Arizona. We make the following policy recommendations: 1. Immediate measures to prevent the loss of life (A). The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) should mandate a ban on border enforcement methods that provoke fear, panic, or confusion. (B). DHS should take measures to substantially reduce the use of high-speed motor vehicle pursuits by USBP and other immigration enforcement officials. (C). DHS should ensure that USBP officers are compliant with Department of Justice (DOJ) standards on use of deadly force, in particular the policy that “Deadly force may not be used solely to prevent the escape of a fleeing suspect.” 2. Investigate Border Fatalities Involving Border Enforcement Officers (A). We call on the Government Accountability Office (GAO) to conduct an official review of all medical examiner and coroner records along the U.S.-Mexico border for fatality cases in which border enforcement personnel were involved in any way in the circumstances surrounding death. (B). We encourage the formation of civilian review boards in border regions to review medical examiner and coroner records of migrant fatalities involving immigration officials as well as immigration officials’ apprehension strategies immediately preceding fatal encounters with migrants.

Saying more than her name: Characterizing fatal police violence against Black women & girls in the US, 2000–2019

BackgroundBlack women and girls (BWGs) face an elevated risk of being killed by police, yet few studies have focused on the proximal factors increasing their exposure to these deadly encounters. ObjectiveThis paper elucidates the determinants and features of fatal police encounters with BWGs over a 20-year period. We examined (1) the initial cause of police contact, (2) how the encounter unfolded and escalated to a fatality, and (3) trends in factors salient to how each case transpired. MethodsUsing the Fatal Encounters database, we identified 573 BWGs killed between 2000 and 2019. Using a qualitative descriptive approach, we leveraged case descriptions and triangulated with news articles, police reports, legal documents, and other texts about decedents to determine what happened in each case, why, and to what effect. ResultsWhile many fatal police encounters were precipitated by alleged criminal activity, a significant number were due to minor violations, public health crises, and domestic violence. Moreover, most BWGs were not the target of the police activity that ultimately killed them, and their deaths came as collateral damage from the aggressive policing of others. ConclusionAs the US continues to grapple with the role of policing in community safety, this work complicates the understanding of how police operate and impact communities, raising questions about how to effectively address root causes beyond carceral and punitive frameworks.

Neighborhood-level Fatal Police Violence and Severe Maternal Morbidity in California.

Police violence is a pervasive issue that may have adverse implications for severe maternal morbidity (SMM). We assessed how the occurrence of fatal police violence (FPV) in one's neighborhood before/during pregnancy may influence SMM risk. Hospital discharge records from California between 2002-2018 were linked with the Fatal Encounters database (N=2,608,682). We identified 2,184 neighborhoods (census-tracts) with at least one FPV incident during the study period and used neighborhood fixed-effects models adjusting for individual sociodemographic characteristics to estimate odds of SMM associated with experiencing FPV in one's neighborhood anytime within the 24-months before childbirth. We did not find conclusive evidence on the link between FPV occurrence before delivery and SMM. However, estimates show that birthing people residing in neighborhoods where one or more FPV events had occurred within the preceding 24-months of giving birth may have a mildly elevated odds of SMM than those residing in the same neighborhoods with no FPV occurrence during the 24-months preceding childbirth (Odds Ratio (OR)=1.02; 95% Confidence Interval (CI): 0.99-1.05), particularly among those living in neighborhoods with fewer (1-2) FPV incidents throughout the study period (OR=1.03; 95% CI:1.00-1.06). Our findings provide evidence for the need to continue to examine the health consequences of police violence.

Collective bargaining, police pay, and racial differences in police lethality rates

ABSTRACT This study examines the interaction effects of police collective bargaining authorization and police pay on racial differences in police-related fatalities. Using data from Fatal Encounters, the Bureau of Justice Statistics, and other publicly available databases, we applied entropy-weighted regressions to a balanced panel of 282 local police departments from 2000 to 2013 in the United States. We found that collective bargaining authorization is not directly associated with police-caused deaths. However, results indicate that higher median salaries for city police officers directly and meaningfully contribute to fewer people killed by police actions. When considering interactive effects, our findings suggest that police unionization offsets the life-saving benefits of higher relative pay, leading to more Black citizens dying from police intervention as salaries increase in agencies with collective bargaining authorization. Our findings demonstrate authorities should consider the potentially fatal and inequitable consequences for citizens during collective bargaining and salary-setting negotiations.

Estimating the Negative Credit Impacts of Police-involved Fatalities

George Floyd's killing in Minneapolis spotlighted the role of police-involved fatalities that cause immeasurable harm to victims’ families and communities, weaken public trust in government and may lead to civil unrest. Police-involved fatalities place a financial burden on the cities, given the size of awards to victims’ families and the cost of implementing consent decrees. By quantifying the impact of fatal encounters on city credit rating, this study offers evidence for policymakers to make informed decisions regarding policing practices in their cities. Credit ratings incorporate third-party perceptions of local governments’ fiscal, economic, demographic, and political performance. The credit rating agency Moody's has noted “the potential financial impact of ongoing litigation costs” surrounding police-involved fatalities as a driver of downgrading ratings. Our article examines the impact of fatal encounters on the creditworthiness of the 150 largest US cities from 2000 to 2019. We observe a consistent negative correlation between police-involved fatalities and credit ratings among all the model estimates. These correlations remain statistically significant over time. We also estimate that the larger the share of non-white victims of police violence, the lower the cities’ credit ratings are.

Police Violence as Containment of Black Bodies during Urban Renewal: A Spatial Analysis of Civilian Deaths by Police in Florida

abstract: This study presents a geospatial analysis of police killings within two areas in Florida over a twenty-year period. Fatalities were mapped against social and economic characteristics of neighborhoods to ascertain if police violence ending in civilian death was concentrated in areas with high-minority and low-income populations, and those areas in proximity to gentrifying neighborhoods. We evaluated the theory that police violence against minority residents serves as a process of containment and ultimately supports the continued generation of wealth by a specific sector of society through the process of gentrification. The cycle of destruction and renewal in the urban landscape is deeply intertwined with processes of capital accumulation, class differentiation, and racial subordination. Both the West Florida and Southeast Florida areas contained a significantly higher proportion of fatal encounters occurring within tracts that were eligible to gentrify than in tracts that were in the process of gentrifying. Fort Lauderdale in particular had little overlap despite containing concentrated hotspots of incidents in combination with high-minority and low–NSES tracts. This same pattern is apparent in the Lakeland area in west Florida. Our findings are consistent with Laniyonu's observation that police interactions tend to increase in tracts just outside of gentrified areas, but seldom within them.

Lethal use of force surveillance: practical considerations for open-source database linkage

Currently, there remains no reliable and timely government tracking in the USA of deaths caused by law enforcement. Federal efforts to track these events are insufficient, generally missing as many...

Lethal Force Usage by Law Enforcement Officers Against Hispanics, 2011-2020.

Most research on lethal force by law enforcement officers (LEOs) has focused on firearm deaths by LEOs among certain racial groups (e.g., African Americans). Specifically, not much is known about LEOs-induced lethal injuries among Hispanics. The purpose of this study was to characterize LEOs induced fatal injuries, the methods used, among various demographic groups of Hispanics, and the years of potential life lost before the age of 80 years due to lethal force by LEOs. Data from the Web-Based Injury Statistics Query and Reporting System (WISQARS) were analyzed for the years 2011-2020. LEOs killed 1,158 Hispanics; most were males (96.2%) with the majority being shot (89.9%). Two-thirds (66.9%) of those killed were Hispanics 20-39 years of age and from the Western U.S. These Hispanic deaths resulted in 53,320 YPLLs. Males and those ages 20-39 years lost the most YPLLs. The rate of fatal encounters with LEOs for Hispanics grew by 44.4% over the decade, with the highest rate in 2020. Mitigation of unnecessary Hispanic deaths by LEOs needs to include changes in law enforcement agency policies, hiring practices for LEOs, improved data collection for LEOs use of lethal force, improved mental healthcare and training for LEOs, use of less lethal strategies for citizen control by law enforcement, deference education for all young adults, and long-term changes in social forces that have created and maintained disenfranchised communities of color.

The Residual Migrant

Through a focus on corruptive seawater, this essay restores the underwater dimensions of borders – their verticality, reaching into the maritime depths, and their biopolitical devastation of drowned migrant bodies. Intersecting Achille Mbembe’s concepts of “necropolitics” and “borderization” with recent theoretical work in critical ocean studies and feminist new materialism, I examine the kinds of readjustments a focus on water as corrosive agent imposes on readings of the biopolitical foreclosure of “illegalized” life, and on conceptions of the sea as a necropolitical space. I probe the enmeshment of seawater with the regimes of borderization enacted across the space of the sea. Reading the Mediterranean as an aqueous frontier spotlights the fraught relationship between clandestine migrants and the strictly enforced borders on which Europe’s sovereignty rests. Yet seawater represents more than the border space containing the fatal encounters between law and bodies; it is the very substance through which the deadly logic of borderization is enacted. Through seawater, irruptive migrant bodies seeking agency are drowned, dissolved and turned into residue through an amalgamating dynamic that blends them into their more-than-human, aqueous environment. Embracing the borders’ regime of negativity, they become “border-bodies” [corps-frontière] (Mbembe). By effecting the becoming-residue of drowned bodies on the site of the border, water brings to material, hyperbolic completion the logic of obliteration underpinning European sovereignty. Yet it concurrently calls into question the very notion of borderization as the residual ontologies developed in the wake of the drownings reveal sites of resistance and remanence that resist the necropolitics of borders. Through its longue durée assimilation into the geophysical, residuality thus morphs into a locus of contest, one where the power of biopolitical annihilation is interrupted.

Do Sheriff-Coroners Underreport Officer-Involved Homicides?

In the United States, each state sets its own standards for its death investigation system. These may require independent medical examiners and coroners or allow for the sheriff to assume the role of coroner. Motivated by the well-established fact that counts of officer-involved homicides in official data sets grossly undercount the number of these incidents, we examine the possibility that different death investigation systems may lead to different death classification outcomes. To examine the potential differences in officer-involved homicide underreporting by presence of sheriff-coroner and violent death type (gunshot, intentional use of force, pursuit, or other vehicle accident), we compare ratios of incidents from both the Federal Bureau of Investigation's Supplementary Homicide Reports and the restricted Multiple-Cause of Death files from the National Vital Statistics System to the Fatal Encounters data across coroner contexts in California between 2000 and 2018; we quantify differences descriptively and examine bivariate tests of means. We find significantly greater underreporting of officer-involved deaths in sheriff-coroner counties in both official data sets for all incidents compared with non-sheriff-coroner counties, independently of the period considered. These underreporting differences in the National Vital Statistics System are robust to restricting to gunshot and intentional use of force deaths, the type of incident expected to be less prone to misclassification in that data set. Officer-involved death underreporting in sheriff-coroner counties necessitates further scrutiny. Disparities in officer-involved death reporting suggest political pressure may play a role in classifying deaths.

Racialized Backlash: A State-Level Analysis of Black Women’s Homicide Victimization by Black Men, White Men, and Police

Violence against Black women has been overshadowed by gender-based violence against white women and police violence against Black men. We account for how the intersection of racism and sexism produce unique vulnerabilities for Black women in our examination of their homicide victimization committed by Black and white men (Supplementary Homicide Reports, 1986–2019) and by police (Fatal Encounters, 2000–2019). As predicted, analyses show curvilinear relationships between Black women’s relative socioeconomic status to and their homicide victimization by Black men. Further, when Black women hold a greater number of political positions, they are more likely to be killed by white men and police. Thus, Black women’s victimization reflects their vulnerabilities within, and perceived threats to, both gender and racial hierarchies.

태권도 국가대표 선수들의 경기력 요인에 대한 탐색적 접근

The purpose of this study was to explore the performance factors of national taekwondo players and to present improvement and support measures for the factors. Research participants were seven female national team athletes participating in the 2022 World Taekwondo Championships, we used photovocie, participatory action research strategy. The process of photo-voice was categorized in the order of factors of the national Taekwondo players were categorized into internal and external factors. Sub-topics of the inner factors were ‘mirror that shines on me’, ‘fight against weight’, ‘time alone’, and ‘routine that protects me’, and the outer factors were categorized into ‘my own endorphins’, ‘fatal encounters’, and ‘growth in pain’. Based on the results of this study, we discussed on inherent performance factors and offered some suggestions for future improvement and support.

Officer-involved deaths and the duty to intervene: assessing the impact of DTI policy in New York City, 2000–2019

PurposeIn the current study, the authors explore changes in multiple police officer-involved deaths (MOIDs) and on changes in the racial makeup of MOID victims in different stages of implementation of a duty-to-intervene (DTI) policy by the New York City Police Department (NYPD).Design/methodology/approachThe authors use fatal encounters to analyze data on MOIDs involving NYPD officers from 2000 to 2019, including three time periods: pre-DTI, initial DTI, and revised DTI. The authors use non-equivalent dependent variables design and t-tests to determine the significance of differences in MOID occurrence and civilian race between these periods.FindingsThe greatest reduction in MOIDs was observed during the initial DTI period, followed by an uptick in MOIDs during the revised DTI period. We also observed that MOIDs are racialized events that disproportionately impact Black New Yorkers. This remained the case even after the implementation of DTI.Research limitations/implicationsThe authors find mixed support for DTI as an administrative control for preventing MOIDs and reducing racial disparities in MOIDs. DTI implementation period, the significant reductions in MOIDs in the initial DTI period, but not the second also lends support for the notion that community pressure (i.e. resurgence of Black Lives Matter) also impacts officer behavior. This suggests that along with strong administrative controls, the behavior of the public may also be an important factor in controlling officer behavior.Originality/valueThis article contributes to the growing literature on duty to intervene and offers an early investigation into DTI as an administrative control for MOIDs using the NYPD as a case study. The authors examine changes in MOIDs and the racial makeup of civilians who were killed in MOIDs in three DTI periods. To the authors’ knowledge, no other study has done this.

Two Projects from the metaLAB (at) Harvard

The presentation of these two projects the metaLAB (at) Harvard complements Jeffrey Schnapp's interview published in the section Perspectives of this issue of Humanist Studies and the Digital Age. The first project, A Flitting Atlas of the Human Gaze, performs an art historical experiment. The second project, Their Names, is an online Denkmal or monument that visualizes the names of 28,000+ fatal encounters with American police dating from the year 2000 up until the death of George Floyd on May 25, 2020.

The Effect of Civilian Oversight on Police Organizational Performance: A Quasi-Experimental Study

Although civilian oversight has been introduced to make the police accountable to citizens and perform better, its effectiveness has not been thoroughly investigated yet. To better understand civilian oversight of the police, this study explores its theoretical basis as an accountability mechanism and suggests how it holds police agencies accountable even without direct disciplinary authority. The data from Law Enforcement Management and Administrative Statistics (LEMAS) survey, the Uniform Crime Report (UCR) program, and the Fatal Encounters (FE) database are analyzed to estimate the effect of civilian oversight on police organizational performance, using a propensity score matching analysis. Among the dependent variables included in the analysis as performance indicators, civilian oversight turns out to have a significant influence only on police agencies’ clearance rates. The police agencies with civilian oversight have lower clearance rates by 2.71 percentage points on average compared to those without civilian oversight. The implications of civilian oversight's negative impact on police organizational performance are further discussed.

Tract level associations between historical residential redlining and contemporary fatal encounters with police

How does structural racism influence where people are killed during encounters with police? We analyzed geo-located incidents of fatal encounters with police that occurred between 2000 and 2020 in Census tracts that received a classification by the Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC) during the 1930's. Statistical models show that incidents of fatal encounters with police in formerly redlined areas are 66% more likely than in zones that received the most favorable “A” rating. These differences remain even when tract historical and contemporary racial compositions, along with contemporary economic conditions, are taken into account. The effects of contemporary racial composition and economic conditions overshadow the effect of zone classifications only in areas with high proportions of Black residents or residents in poverty (>60% or >30% respectively). These findings provide evidence of structural biases in policing rooted in historical segregation policies.

Fatal encounters: shopkeepers, neo-populism, and the exclusionary city

ABSTRACT The present article analyzes the role that shopkeepers play in the life of cities in terms of space production, cultures, and policies on the use of public space. Shopkeepers are seen as the co-promotors of a revanchist culture that affects liberties in contemporary cities. In the light of such premises, the present theoretical study inquires into the intertwinements between this group and the dominant populist political offer. The combination of power of influence, sense of loss, and exposition to political offers that promise to give back stability, by recreating known worlds made of traditional hierarchies, roles. and sentiments, all of them situated in the locality, appears as the recipe for the re-proposition of historical authoritarian alliances that participated to the making of the contemporary exclusionary city.

Comparing Fatal Encounters, Mapping Police Violence, and Washington Post Fatal Police Shooting Data from 2015–2019: A Research Note

This research note empirically assessed similarities and differences among three open-source data sets from 2015-2019. Fatal police shooting incidents were compared across Washington Post, Mapping Police Violence, and Fatal Encounters data over a five-year period. One-way ANOVAs, bivariate correlations, and proportional percentage differences were used to examine mean differences, correlational strength, and yearly percentage difference trends. No significant mean differences were observed between Fatal Encounters, Mapping Police Violence, and Washington Post. With one exception, bivariate correlations between all three data source dyads were consistently strong. Percentage difference comparisons among data source dyads, however, revealed that the sources are becoming more dissimilar in their reporting of fatal shootings over time. Our results complement existing literature that has compared open-source police shooting data to government sources and suggest that the three data sources were strongly associated with one another from 2015-2019. Increasing differences between sources, however, necessitate continued inspection of the data across the various open-source platforms over time.

Tract Level Associations between Historical Residential Redlining and Contemporary Fatal Encounters with Police

Tract Level Associations between Historical Residential Redlining and Contemporary Fatal Encounters with Police