Exploring Officer-Involved Shootings With Interaction Effects: A Deeper Understanding of How Race/Ethnicity Interacts With Other Factors in the Use of Deadly Force

Published date01 June 2021
Date01 June 2021
DOI10.1177/0093854821997529
Subject MatterArticles
CRIMINAL JUSTICE AND BEHAVIOR, 2021, Vol. 48, No. 6, June 2021, 755 –775.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/0093854821997529
Article reuse guidelines: sagepub.com/journals-permissions
© 2021 International Association for Correctional and Forensic Psychology
755
EXPLORING OFFICER-INVOLVED SHOOTINGS
WITH INTERACTION EFFECTS
A Deeper Understanding of How Race/Ethnicity
Interacts With Other Factors in the Use of
Deadly Force
SCOTT W. PHILLIPS
DAE-YOUNG KIM
State University of New York–Buffalo State
There has been a substantial body of research examining the reasons behind the police officers’ use of deadly force. Little
research has been done to examine how race and ethnicity interact with other factors in the use of deadly force. With data
collected in Dallas, Texas, the present study examines the influence of individual, situational, and neighborhood characteris-
tics on officers’ decision to use deadly force. The present study also provides an alternative approach to logistic regression
models by estimating predictive probabilities of officers shooting at citizens. The results show that when officers make deci-
sions to shoot at citizens, situational factors are more important than demographic and neighborhood factors. Interactive
effects constructed based on the race/ethnicity of the police officer and citizen showed almost no influence on the decision
to shoot at a citizen. Finally, the present study concludes with a discussion of implications for policy development and future
research.
Keywords: police; use of force; decision-making; law enforcement; quantitative methods
INTRODUCTION
Officer-involved shooting (OIS) incidents have been a subject of increased research in
the past decade. The studies often examined correlates explaining an officer’s decision to
shoot at a citizen1 (Fryer, 2019; Klinger et al., 2016; Nix et al., 2017; Ridgeway, 2016).
Various factors are included in these studies, such as the officer and citizen characteristics
(e.g., race/ethnicity and age), situational factors (e.g., the citizen had a weapon or the officer
gave a command), and neighborhood features (e.g., poverty level or crime rate). Beyond
these scholarly studies examining associations between different variables and the decision
AUTHORS’ NOTE: Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Scott W. Phillips,
Criminal Justice Department, State University of New York–Buffalo State, 1300 Elmwood Avenue, Buffalo, NY
14222; e-mail: phillisw@buffalostate.edu.
997529CJBXXX10.1177/0093854821997529Criminal Justice and BehaviorPhillips, Kim / EXPLORING POLICE SHOOTINGS WITH INTERACTIONS
research-article2021
756 CRIMINAL JUSTICE AND BEHAVIOR
to shoot is an underlying assumption from some quarters that the police target minorities for
the use of deadly force (Goff et al., 2016, as cited in Fridell, 2017; Menifield et al., 2019).
Some have argued that police officers have a separate trigger finger for different races or
ethnicities (Durán & Loza, 2017; Takagi, 1974), that is, the police decision to shoot is based
on prejudice and “driven by racial discrimination by White officers” (Johnson et al., 2019,
p. 15877), or there is “a personal taste for racism” from White officers (Lott & Moody,
2016, p. 6).
The literature review provided below will demonstrate that many, but not all, of the stud-
ies of OIS fail to report a strong association between the decision to shoot and the citizen’s
race/ethnicity. These findings are not the last word on whether prejudicial or discriminatory
decisions occur in the officer’s decisions to shoot. None of these studies consider the inter-
action effects that might illuminate the association between an officer and citizen’s race/
ethnicity and the decision of the officer to shoot. It is possible that a citizen’s race/ethnicity
does not have a direct effect on decision-making but is contingent on the officer’s race/
ethnicity. Researchers need to explore the interaction effects between the citizen’s race/
ethnicity and the officer’s race/ethnicity to understand more clearly the effects of race or
ethnicity on the decision to shoot. This study offers such an approach, suggesting that some
combinations of police officer–citizen characteristics may be stronger predictors of the
decision to shoot compared with the influence of these characteristics independently.
This study intends to contribute to the growing body of OIS research. First, hypotheses
will be provided about the interactive effect of the citizen’s race/ethnicity with the officer’s
race/ethnicity and several other situational and neighborhood variables. Integrating interac-
tive effects in OIS shooting research has been absent. Doing this will allow a comparison of
direct and interactive effects in police officer decision-making. Second, the data used for
this study come from the Dallas Police Department. The data set includes all OIS shooting
incidents regardless of the outcome (e.g., fatal, nonfatal, and misses), as well as when an
officer draws their weapon, but does not shoot. Including a comparison of incidents in
which the officer shot—regardless of the outcome—with those in which the officer did not
shoot, but drew his or her weapon, will further add to the understanding whether police
officers of one race or ethnicity are targeting citizens of another race or ethnicity.
LITERATURE REVIEW
Examinations of OIS incidents have occurred for decades. Several of the early descrip-
tive studies, using city-level data, reported that commonly Black males were frequently
shot (Fyfe, 1982; Geller & Karales, 1981; Meyer, 1980; Robin, 1963), and that the average
age of those citizens who were shot was between 24 years (Milton et al., 1977) and 27 years
(Robin, 1963). More recent studies utilized publicly available data gathered by the
Washington Post to explore patterns within OIS incidents. Shane et al. (2017) found that if
a citizen was armed or attacking the officer, they were likely to be shot and killed. Their
results, however, do not demonstrate higher fatality rates for Black citizens. Tregle et al.
(2019) reported inconsistent outcomes contingent on the benchmark used to calculate OIS
rates. Black citizens were more likely than White citizens to be shot when population,
police–citizen interactions, or total arrests is the benchmark. When they used violent crime
arrests or weapons offense arrests as the benchmark, Black individuals were less likely to
be shot by police officers. It is important to note that the Washington Post data did not

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