Evidence-Based Policing and Fatal Police Shootings: Promise, Problems, and Prospects

• Date: 01 January 2020
• Published date: 01 January 2020
• DOI: 10.1177/0002716220902073
• Subject Matter: Introduction

8 ANNALS, AAPSS, 687, January 2020

DOI: 10.1177/0002716220902073

Evidence-Based

Policing and

Fatal Police

Shootings:

Promise,

Problems, and

Prospects

By

LAWRENCE W. SHERMAN

902073ANN THE ANNALS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMYEVIDENCE-BASED POLICING AND FATAL POLICE SHOOTINGS

research-article2020

The promise of evidence-based policing is to reduce

harm with better research for targeting, testing, and

tracking police actions. The problems of using

evidence-based policing to reduce harm are found in

the emotional dimensions of ethics and risk. These

problems are most pronounced with fatal police shoot-

ings, where the risks of injury to American police are

often framed as a zero-sum choice in relation to the

ethics of taking citizens’ lives. Yet evidence-based polic-

ing offers good prospects for reframing the debate over

fatal police shootings, in ways that could reduce harm to

both police and citizens. This volume offers substantial

new evidence for initiatives at all levels of U.S. govern-

ment that could help to save lives in police encounters

with citizens. Putting that evidence to work remains the

major challenge facing the American police.

Keywords: evidence-based policing; fatal police shoot-

ings; guns; race; normal accident theory;

police recruitment; training and govern-

ance; emergency medicine; mental health

Around 7:30 a.m. on a recent Monday in a

large city, groups of young protesters placed

food crates and other obstacles on main roads to

block the rush hour traffic. When two traffic

officers arrived, they ran at the protesters to

move them up to the sidewalk. When one

Lawrence W. Sherman is director of the Cambridge

Centre for Evidence-Based Policing, where he serves as

editor-in-chief of the Cambridge Journal of Evidence-

Based Policing. He is also Wolfson Professor of Criminology

Emeritus at the University of Cambridge Institute of

Criminology, where he is chair of the Cambridge Police

Executive Program. Until 2019, he served as a distin-

guished university professor at the University of Maryland.

He was president of the American Academy of Political

and Social Science and editor of The ANNALS from 2001

to 2005 and was elected a Thorsten Sellin Fellow of the

Academy in 2009. He edited his first volume of The

ANNALS in 1980, on Police and Violence. In 2017, he

received Yale University’s Wilbur Lucius Cross Medal, in

recognition of his work as a pioneer of evidence-based

practices.

Correspondence: ls434@camb.ac.uk

EVIDENCE-BASED POLICING AND FATAL POLICE SHOOTINGS 9

protester ran back into the street, one officer poked the barrel of his pistol into the

protester’s chest, then grabbed the protester with his left arm, while waving the

pistol with his right hand. As they struggled, another protester—who was

unarmed—ran toward the officer, who then shot the second protester in the abdo-

men. Later that day at police headquarters, high-level commanders announced

that the shooting had been in compliance with the department’s policy.1

The most striking fact about this shooting is that it happened in a city of 7.4

million people in which police killed no one at all in 2019. In general, cities where

police shoot unarmed citizens with official approval tend to have high rates of

shooting civilians. Given the total of 933 people killed by police shootings across

the United States in 2019 (Washington Post 2020), the expected rate of fatal police

shootings in the United States for that year was 2.8 deaths per million residents.

In the city where the protester was shot, that rate translated to an expected num-

ber of twenty-one civilian deaths from police shootings for 2019. But that pro-

tester was not shot in the United States. He was shot by police in Hong Kong. He

was shot in the one city that was declared by an Act of the U.S. Congress (2019),

signed by the U.S. president, to be of concern to the United States because “the

human rights of the people of Hong Kong are of great importance to the United

States.” Despite many good reasons for that concern, one of them cannot be the

rate at which Hong Kong police kill residents of that city, which was zero in the

year the president signed the law. The available evidence shows that U.S. resi-

dents are far more likely to be killed by their own police than Hong Kong resi-

dents are by theirs. Yet Hong Kong police have far lower public approval ratings

than U.S. police, primarily over public reaction to police use of force.

While Hong Kong police were infinitely less likely to kill people in 2019 than U.S.

police, the comparison points to three challenges that form the focus of this volume:

1. The central problem of police using lethal force in the United States is not

legality, but perceived necessity: why can’t more injuries from police use of

force be avoided?

2. “Unnecessary” shootings have causes well beyond the split-second decision

to shoot, found in wider systems and contexts that allow such moments to

occur.

3. Police legitimacy can be lost even with low rates of fatal police shootings.

All three of these points show how understanding emotional reactions to policing

can be central to the development and use of evidence to reduce overall harm

from violence.

The Challenge of Fatal Police Shootings

Perceived necessity, not legality, of fatal police shootings

Evidence matters. But so do emotions. The taking of any human life is, and

should be, a matter of great emotional significance. Even when police lives are at