Race and the Use of Force by Police Revisited: Post-Ferguson Findings From a Large County Police Agency

• Published date: 01 December 2023
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/10986111221139442
• Author: Michael R. Smith,Rob Tillyer,Robin S. Engel
• Date: 01 December 2023
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article

Police Quarterly

2023, Vol. 26(4) 411–440

© The Author(s) 2022

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DOI: 10.1177/10986111221139442

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Race and the Use of Force by

Police Revisited:

Post-Ferguson Findings From

a Large County Police Agency

Michael R. Smith

1

, Rob Tillyer

1

, and Robin S. Engel

2

Abstract

This study examines racial and ethnic disparities in the use of force by the Fairfax

County, VA Police Department using post-Ferguson data and after the adoption of

modern training and use of force policies on de-escalation. White civilians were

overrepresented as subjects of force compared to a variety of benchmarks, while

Hispanics were underrepresented. Black and Asian civilians also were overrepresented

using some benchmarks but not others. Multivariate models revealed that Black ci-

vilians experienced more severe force, higher average force levels, and more total

force than Whites. We discuss possible reasons for the overrepresentation of Blacks

and Whites as subjects of force, as well as the disparities in force levels and the totality

of force experienced by Black civilians. We conclude with suggestions for policy

change, training, and deployment changes to help reduce the potential inf‌luence of

unconscious bias in the application of force by the FCPD and other law enforcement

agencies.

Keywords

police use of force, racial disparities, benchmarking

1

University of Texas, San Antonio, TX, USA

2

National Policing Institute, Arlington, VA, USA

Corresponding Author:

Michael R. Smith, University of Texas at San Antonio, 501 W. Cesar E. Chavez Blvd, San Antonio, TX 78207,

USA.

Email: m.r.smith@utsa.edu

In the latter half of the 20th century and continuing to present day, the use of force by

police has been a frequent f‌lashpoint with communities and has periodically served as a

catalyst for social movements and calls for reform. Most often these calls for change

came from African-Americans who historically bore the brunt of police excesses. By

the 1960s, ongoing racial inequality and clashes with the police led to widespread urban

unrest and a report from a National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (1968)

that laid bare the role that excessive force by police played in the riots that took place in

the summer of 1967. Twenty-f‌ive years later, another massive riot in Los Angeles

followed the acquittal of LAPD off‌icers accused of assaulting Rodney King. More

recently, national protests and calls for reform erupted after Michael Brown was killed

by a police off‌icer in Ferguson, Missouri. Finally, public demands for change and state-

level policing reforms have accelerated in the wake of George Floyd’s murder at the

knee of a Minneapolis police off‌icer in 2020.

At about the same time the civil rights movement was gaining momentum in the

early 1960s, a body of academic scholarship seeking to understand the causes and

correlates of the use of force by police emerged and grew over the ensuing 50-year

period (Friedrich, 1980;Garner et al., 2002;Reiss, 1971;Worden, 1995). Race was

often a central focus of this work as scholars sought to better understand the inf‌luence of

civilian race/ethnicity on the decisions by police to use force, the types and severity of

force used against these populations, and whether individual, situational, socioeco-

nomic, or crime-related factors explained higher rates of force often experienced by

minority groups (Garner et al., 2002;Smith, 1986;Terrill & Mastrofski, 2002). This

study contributes to that body of knowledge by examining the force used by off‌icers

from one of the nation’s largest county police agencies, the Fairfax County, VA Police

Department (FCPD), which is comprised of approximately 1500 off‌icers who serve a

rapidly growing suburban county in Northern Virginia about 10 miles south of

Washington, D.C. It also adds to the evolving body of scholarship on the use of force by

police in three additional ways. First, the analysis reported here covers the post-

Ferguson period of 2016-2018, which saw the establishment of a Presidential Task

Force on 21st Century Policing (2015) and a signif‌icantly increased focus by pro-

fessional law enforcement organizations and police agencies on de-escalation training

and tactics, including by the FCPD itself (Engel et al., 2020a). Second, the research

takes place in a diverse community whose population changes demographers suggest

may represent the multicultural future of the U.S. as a whole, and thus it may serve as

barometer for the challenges other communities and their police forces may one day

face. Finally, we use multiple risk-based benchmarks as comparators for the rates of

force experienced by the different racial and ethnic subpopulations in Fairfax County,

and we model force severity among these groups as well.

We f‌ind that White civilians were overrepresented as subje cts of force compared to

the benchmarks while Hispanics were underrepresented. Black and Asian civilians

were also overrepresented as subjects of force using some benchmarks, but not others.

Additionally, the variability in disparities was also prevalent across police district

stations. Beyond benchmarking analyses, multivariate models revealed that Black

412 Police Quarterly 26(4)