Book Review: When police kill

• Author: Taryn Zastrow
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/0734016819858659
• Published date: 01 March 2023
• Date: 01 March 2023

Book Reviews

Zimring, F. E. (2018). When police kill. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 320 pp. $19.95, ISBN 978-0-

6749-7218-6.

Reviewed by: Taryn Zastrow ,George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, USA

DOI: 10.1177/0734016819858659

Late in the summer of 2014, Darren Wilson, a 28-year-old White police officer in the city of

Ferguson, MO, responded to a dispatch call about a theft at a local convenience store. The seemingly

typical call ended with Wilson shooting and subsequently killing Michael Brown, an 18-year-old

Black man. The events that occurred between the call and the shooting have been widely debated

ever since, and the fatal shooting sparked civil unrest almost immediately—captivating the attention

of the media, government agencies, and the nation at large. While not the first high-profile incident

involving the use of lethal force by a police officer, something about this event triggered a nationwide

conversation about the relationship between law enforcement and civilians, specifically African

American men.

In When Police Kill, criminologist Franklin E. Zimring considers this social movement in the

United States and the relatively high rate of civilian deaths at the hands of police officers compared

to similar developed nations. Zimring essentially asks, “What’s going on?”and turns to the aggre-

gated data collected by various sources across the world.

When Police Kill begins with the argument that police killings of civilians are in fact of notewor-

thy concern. While the data on police violence are limited—Zimring estimates that 1,000 Americans

are killed each year by police officers. Given this knowledge, he seeks to understand what provokes

police to kill, who is killed, and what can be done to reduce civilian deaths without sacrificing officer

safety. This is a daunting task given the government’sflawed reporting systems for officer-involved

shootings. Because of the voluntary reporting nature of the Federal Bureau of Investigation supple-

mental homicide and while the National Vital Statistics System is required, it does not always contain

information on law enforcement involved deaths, Zimring supplements the major reporting gaps by

analyzing two national databases created by news organizations: The Washington Post and The

Guardian.

To answer his questions, Zimring breaks the book down into two parts. Part I focuses on the char-

acteristics and causes of police killings. He finds that the official estimates of police killings in the

FBI and BJS reporting programs fail to account for about half of all shootings (these reporting

systems include about 500 incidents annually, while the crowdsourced databases from The

Washington Post and The Guardian estimate about 1,000). Zimring finds that many of these

events gained significantly more news coverage in the aftermath of the Ferguson incident. This is

partly due to the Black Lives Matter movement—which the author finds support for. His analysis

on the proportions of race shows that African Americans make up 26.1% of all fatal police encoun-

ters, while only representing 12.2% of the total population. Also strikingly, Zimring uses The

Guardian sample to show that only 55% of all police killings involved targets with firearms, and

over 10% involved a target that was not armed with any type of weapon. Noting the growing mistrust

Book Reviews

Criminal Justice Review

2023, Vol. 48(1) 128-136

© 2019 Georgia State University

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