Righteous Shoot or Racial Injustice? What Crowdsourced Data Can(not) Tell Us About Police-Caused Homicide

• Published date: 01 January 2022
• DOI: 10.1177/2153368719900357
• Author: Malcolm D. Holmes
• Date: 01 January 2022
• Subject Matter: Future Directions Series

Future Directions Series

Righteous Shoot or

Racial Injustice? What

Crowdsourced Data

Can(not) Tell Us About

Police-Caused Homicide

Malcolm D. Holmes

1

Abstract

Social scientists have developed various theoretical perspectives to explain the dis-

proportionate incidence of police-caused homicide involving Black citizens in the

United States. A common approach focuses on structural characteristics (e.g., percent

Black) of cities. Such research relies primarily on Uniform Crime Reports’ Supple-

mental Homicide Reports, which poses two problems for researchers. Undercounting

raises concerns about the reliability of findings, and the data are not amenable to

testing influential alternative hypotheses. Recently, efforts to more accurately count

police-caused homicides have been undertaken, with these new crowdsourced

databases increasingly being used in research. When me rged with structural-level

data, they may allow the estimation of multilevel statistical models that include city-

level and event-level predictors of police-caused homicide. These databases also pose

methodological challenges, but they hold out the promise of providing a more reliable

answer to a fundamental question that has yet to be adequately addressed. Is the racial

disparity in police-caused homicide primarily attributable to the objective threats

posed by Black citizens or the subjective biases of police officers? This article evaluates

the degree to which the new crowdsourced databases can help resolve this

conundrum.

Keywords

racially biased policing, police-caused homicide, crowdsourced police killings data,

theories of police violence, measurement of police-caused homicide

1

Department of Criminal Justice and Sociology, University of Wyoming, Laramie, WY, USA

Corresponding Author:

Malcolm D. Holmes, Department of Criminal Justice and Sociology, University of Wyoming, 1000 E.

University Ave., Laramie, WY 82071, USA.

Email: mholmes@uwyo.edu

Race and Justice

ªThe Author(s) 2020

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DOI: 10.1177/2153368719900357

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2022, Vol. 12(1) 204–\ 225

Modern democracies charge the police with primary responsibility for controlling law

violators. The police are empowered to employ force, including deadly force, to

protect citizens and officers from dangerous people (Bittner, 1970). The legitimacy of

the police rests in large part on the principle that officers treat all citizens fairly and

equally, but many Black citizens in the United States believe the police treat them

unfairly (e.g., Brunson, 2007; Weitzer, 2017). Police-caused homicide is a special

concern with respect to questions about racial disadvantage at the hands of police.

Several well-publicized police killings of Black citizens during 2014–2016 involved

questionable circumstances and allegations of impropriety by officers. Such cases

undermine the legitimacy of police and sometimes trigger civil disorder in response to

perceived injustices. Yet, it remains unclear whether the disparate treatment suggested

by a few highly visible incidents reflects a systemic pattern of racially biased policing.

Despite long-standing scholarly concern about police violence in minority

communities (e.g., Johnson, 2003; Myrdal, 1944; Westley, 1970), surprisingly little

research has examined racial disparities in the incidence of police-caused homicide

during the past quarter century or so. The available evidence indicates that Black

citizens experience a disproportionately high incidence of police-caused homicide

relative to Whites. But a key question has yet to be answered satisfactorily: Is this

disparity primarily attributable to the objective threats posed by Black citizens or the

subjective biases of police officers? Certain limitations of existing studies preclude

reaching more than a tentative conclusion about this issue . One significant problem

is that the data available in the past are not amenable to comprehensive tests of

theories about the disproportionate killing of Blacks. Much recent scholarship has

relied on Supplemental Homicide Reports (SHR) data on police-caused homicide

contained in the Uniform Crime Reports (UCR) to test racial threat theory using

city-level data (e.g., Holmes et al., 2019; Jacobs & O’ Brien, 1998; Smith, 2003,

2004; Sorensen et al., 1993; Willits & Nowacki, 2014). This perspective maintains

that relatively large Black populations are perceived as criminal threats by White

citizens and the police, which results in a higher incidence of police-caused homi-

cide involving Black citizens. Although this theoretical perspective finds support in

existing studies, the SHR do not contain the information necessary to test influential

alternative explanations.

Additionally, some criticize that work because of concerns about the reliability of

SHR data (Klinger, 2012). Significant methodological issues involve coverage and

undercounting (Klinger, 2012; Loftin et al., 2003, 2017). These issues may be less

relevant to research on larger cities, the focus of racial threat studies, as larger police

agencies do a better job of reporting police-caused homicide data. Moreover, the focus

of such studies is patterns of racial bias across cities, which does not depend on

complete counts. Nonetheless, concern about undercounting, along with highly pub-

licized and criticized killings of Blacks by police, has fueled efforts to develop

databases that provide more accurate tallies of police-caused homicide. These new

crowdsourced databases may proffer new opportunities to assess the validity of past

city-level research and test alternative theories. Being able to simultaneously test

competing hypotheses is essential to answering questions about how objective dangers

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Holmes