Police Bias, Use of Deadly Force, Public Outcry

• Date: 01 February 2017
• Published date: 01 February 2017
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/1745-9133.12293

EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION

CIVILIANS KILLED BY POLICE

Police Bias, Use of Deadly Force,

Public Outcry

Vicious Cycle?

Hyeyoung Lim

University of Alabama at Birmingham

Implications about racial ized ,biased,selective,andunequal policing are longstanding

national discussions in American policing. The history of racialized policing has been

rejuvenated since the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri:Stories about

shootings of Black citizens by White officers, public protests, and ambush killings of police

officers have become front and center in the news. There has been a lack of transparent

and reliable data to improve our empirical understanding of the nature of this longstanding

issue. Even the findings of empirical studies on police use of force, especially on racial effect,

are inconclusive. As a result, the President’s TaskForce for 21st Century Policing (established

in December 2014) as well as scholars, practitioners, and civilians have called for more data

collection on police shootings and civilians’ attitudes toward the police to find out the truth

of racial disparity in police-involved shootings. In an effort to collect more data, the Bureau

of Justice Statistics, The Washington Post, The Guardian, and other crowd-sourcing projects

have tracked people shot and killed by police since 2015. Although there are statistical

gaps between the government data and the nongovernment data and some methodological

concerns of using those data, it is clear that we have moved one step closer to reaching the

truth and to resolving the issue.

Studying Civilians Killed by Police

In their article, “A Bird’s-Eye View of Civilians Killed by Police in 2015: Further Evidence

of Implicit Bias,” Justin Nix, Bradley Campbell, EdwardByers, and Geoffrey Alpert (2017,

this issue) analyzed 990 police fatal shootings, which were compiled by The Washington Post

in 2015, to answer the following three research questions: (1) What are the individual-, city-,

Direct correspondence to Hyeyoung Lim, Department of Justice Sciences, University of Alabama at

Birmingham, UBOB 215, Birmingham, AL 35294-4562 (e-mail: hyeyoung@uab.edu).

DOI:10.1111/1745-9133.12293 C2017 American Society of Criminology 305

Criminology & Public Policy rVolume 16 rIssue 1