The Role of Individual Officer Characteristics in Police Shootings

• Date: 01 January 2020
• DOI: 10.1177/0002716219896553
• Author: Greg Ridgeway
• Published date: 01 January 2020
• Subject Matter: Patterns of Fatal Police Shootings

58 ANNALS, AAPSS, 687, January 2020

DOI: 10.1177/0002716219896553

The Role of

Individual

Officer

Characteristics

in Police

Shootings

By

GREG RIDGEWAY

896553ANN THE ANNALS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMYROLE OF INDIVIDUAL CHARACTERISTICS IN POLICE SHOOTINGS

research-article2019

Assessing whether individual characteristics of police

officers such as age, race, and prior performance influ-

ence police behavior has been a long-standing topic of

social science research. The effect of officer character-

istics on their risk of shooting people is confounded by

police assignments and by the environmental factors

associated with those assignments. This article provides

a method to separate out the influence of individual

officer characteristics from environmental factors.

Using data from the New York City Police Department

(NYPD) and the Major Cities’ Chiefs Association

(MCCA), the analysis finds that police officers who join

the NYPD later in their careers have a lower shooting

risk: for each additional year of their recruitment age,

the odds of being shooters declines by 10 percent. Both

officer race and prior problem behavior (e.g., losing a

firearm, crashing a department vehicle) predict up to

three times greater odds of shooting, yet officers who

made numerous misdemeanor arrests were four times

less likely to shoot.

Keywords: police use of force; lethal force; condi-

tional likelihood

During the October 20, 2014, fatal police

shooting of Laquan McDonald, Chicago

Police Officer Jason Van Dyke fired sixteen

rounds. Officer Joseph Walsh stood a few feet

to Van Dyke’s right and fired no rounds. On

November 25, 2006, Sean Bell, unarmed on

the morning before his wedding, was fatally

shot in his car by five New York City police

officers who discharged a total of fifty rounds.

Detective Isnora, who is black, fired first, ulti-

mately discharging eleven rounds. Detective

Headley, also black but seven years older, fired

Greg Ridgeway is an associate professor of criminology

and statistics at the University of Pennsylvania. His

research focuses on the development and use of statisti-

cal methods for improving understanding of crime and

the justice system. He is an elected fellow of the

American Statistical Association.

Correspondence: gridge@upenn.edu