Does racial congruence between police agencies and communities reduce racialized police killings of civilians?

• Published date: 01 November 2021
• Author: Shytierra Gaston,Matthew J. Teti,Matheson Sanchez
• Date: 01 November 2021
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/1745-9133.12567

DOI: ./- .

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Does racial congruence between police agencies

and communities reduce racialized police

killings of civilians?

Shytierra Gaston1Matthew J. Teti2Matheson Sanchez1

Department of Criminal Justice and

Criminology, Georgia State University,

Atlanta, Georgia, USA

School of Criminology and Criminal

Justice, Northeastern University, Boston,

Massachusetts, USA

Correspondence

ShytierraGaston, Department of Criminal

Justiceand Criminology, Georgia State

University,PO Box , Atlanta, GA

,USA.

Email:sgaston@gsu.edu.

Abstract

Research Summary: In response to highly publicized,

controversial police killings of Black Americans, poli-

cymakers and advocates have proposed several police

reforms, including a recurrent, decades-long demand

for police departments to diversify their forces to better

match the racial composition of the communities they

serve. We draw on a unique police agency-level dataset

comprising , local police agencies and regress mea-

sures of police killings of Black, Hispanic, and White

Americans from  to  onto racial congruence

ratios and other theoretically relevant predictors. The

results provide support for the hypothesis, revealing

a negative association between racial congruence and

police killings among Black and Hispanic victims.

Policy Implications: Our results suggest that for at

least some local police departments, increasing the

racial/ethnic representation of officers might lower

police killings of people of color. This implication offers

some optimism amid impassioned demands to decrease

police killings of Black Americans, specifically, and

reform policing.

KEYWORDS

fatal force,police organization, race and policing, racial disparities,

racial representation, violence

Criminology & Public Policy. ;:–. ©  American Society of Criminology 665wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/capp

666 GASTON  .

Conflict between policeand communities of color—especially Black Americans—has endured

since the inception of U.S. policing. Though longstanding, this tension has commanded inter-

national attention in recent years due to a policing crisis stemming from a spate of high-profile

police killings of Black men, women, and children. These fatal force incidents have raised con-

cerns about whether officers administer their duties in a fair, reasonable, racially just manner as

well as aroused widespread public outcry and demands for police reform.

A recurrent demand for reform calls for agencies to diversifytheir White male- dominatedpolice

forces so that the racial composition of officers better reflects that of the communities they serve.

The underlying assumption is that such racial representation might help officers and residents

better relate to and trust one another and ultimately allay police–community tensions and racial-

ized policing. Indeed, police diversification was endorsed by President Obama’s Task Force on

st Century Policing in  amid civil unrest following several controversial police killings of

Black civilians, including Officer Darren Wilson’s murder of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mis-

souri in  (President’s Task Force on st Century Policing, ). This endorsement echoed

recommendations by two major commissions nearly  years earlier during another era marked

by civil unrest and contentious police–Black community relations. Sponsored by President John-

son, the President’s Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice ()and

the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders () both called for increased represen-

tation of Black Americans in law enforcement.

Despite being a popular and persistent recommended reform, the validity of whether racialcon-

gruence between police agencies and communities reduces racialized policing, especially fatal

force, remains inconclusive in the empirical literature. This knowledge gap is due to a paucity

of studies that examines this relationship directly and at the appropriate unit of analysis. Extant

understandings of the impact of police diversification largely stem from individual-level studies—

and a small number of city- or neighborhood-level studies—that examine the influence of officer

race on a range of policing outcomes and yield mixed findings. To date, the literature comprises

three agency-level studies (Holmes et al., ; Legewie & Fagan, ; Smith, ). All three

focused on fatal force that occurred sometime between  and June  and restricted their

samples to agencies in areas with populations with more than , residents. This restriction

resulted in sample sizes of up to  and precluded understandings of racialized police killings

that occur in smaller jurisdictions. Moreover, some of these studies excluded Hispanic officers

and victims (Legewie & Fagan, ; Smith, ) or relied on the FBI’s Supplemental Homicide

Reports (SHR) data on “felons killed by police” (Holmes et al., ; Smith, ), a source that

has been critiqued as unreliable in research on fatal force (Campbell et al., ; Loftin et al., ;

Williams et al., ). Importantly, findings from the three studies are mixed, as we later detail,

requiring further investigation into this policy-relevant topic. The current study, therefore, con-

stitutes an additional analysis that adds to this growing literature by employing recently available

crowdsourced data to study racialized police killings from  to —a period that includes

the “post-Ferguson” era of policing—among a broader sample of agencies. Police agencies are

a critical unit of analysis because policing patterns, including fatal force, stem from organiza-

tional structure, policies, culture, and practices—along with community structural factors. Find-

ings from studies at the micro level or other units might be unable to inform agency-level research

questions, which can result in an aggregation bias and drawing incorrect ecological inferences.

The current study aims to fill empirical gaps and investigate a deeply held assumption that

underlies decades-long demands to diversify police forces. Specifically, our analysis tests the

hypothesis that racial congruence between police agencies and communities decreases racialized

fatal force by police. Toassess these macrolevel, organizational contextual processes, we develop a