Shooting bias

The term shooting bias, also known as "shooter bias", is an alleged form of implicit racial bias which refers to the supposed tendency among the police to shoot black civilians more often than white civilians, even when they are unarmed.

The concept proposes that the probability of being shot by the police depends on ethnicity more than other known factors like location, the income of the neighborhood and whether or not the person is carrying a weapon as well as the emotions shown by the victim.

Number of deaths

Problems with police reporting practices

Police data could be biased due to police reporting practices. Departments can voluntarily include justifiable homicides in the crime statistics of the FBI's Uniform Crime Reports, which means that a lot of departments don't provide data at all. Some cities haven't reported their data in years. This means that the official data doesn't accurately reflect the number of civilians that are shot by the police.

Newspapers like The Guardian and The Washington Post have started gathering a database of fatal police shootings, revealing that in 2015 twice as many civilians had been fatally shot than the FBI's data suggested. An FBI working group has started working on a proposal for making the reports more accurate, but they would still rely on voluntary data and therefore wouldn't fix the main reporting issue.

Alternative database by The Guardian

The database developed by The Guardian is currently the largest database on fatal shootings available. They gather data through police reports, monitoring of regional news, fact-checked witness statements and other crowdsourced police fatality databases.

Number of deaths

In 2016, The Guardian counted 1093 people who were killed by the police in the United States. Out of these 574 were white and 266 were black. 95 of the white victims were unarmed, 42 of the black victims were unarmed.

More white than black people are shot. It is important to distinguish to differentiate between the number of deaths of an ethnic group and the likelihood of being shot by police. The likelihood of being shot as a black rather than a white person is higher, whether the victim is armed or not.

Likelihood of being shot: Black vs. White

A study carried out at the University of California found "evidence of a significant bias in the killing of unarmed black Americans compared to unarmed white Americans". In this study, the probability of being shot by the police as a black, unarmed person versus as a white, unarmed person was 3.49 times higher. Unarmed Hispanics' likelihood to be shot was 1.67 times higher than for unarmed Whites.

The number vary greatly depending on the county, sometimes reaching a probability of 20 to 1 or more for unarmed blacks to be shot. There are several maps that showcase the distribution of fatal shootings across the country.

Crime rate is often cited as the main factor leading to these outcomes, but it was not considered as a factor to the likelihood of being shot in this study.

A more recent study was conducted by Michigan State University and the University of Maryland, compiling a list of more than 900 fatal U.S. police shootings in 2015 using crowdsourced databases from The Washington Post and The Guardian.[1] Then, they asked police departments for information about the race of the officers responsible for the shootings. They found black police were more likely to kill black civilians than white civilians. However, the same held true for white and Hispanic officers: Each group of police was likelier to shoot civilians of their own race. That’s likely true, the researchers say, because police tend to be drawn from the communities they work in and are thus more likely to have deadly encounters with civilians of the same race. They concluded there were no antiblack or anti-Hispanic disparities across police shootings.[2]

Factors that influence decision to shoot

List of empirically researched factors

Empirical research suggests the following factors to influence the decision to shoot:

• Implicit racial bias, prejudice, and stereotypes
• Status armed/unarmed
• Gender (men are more likely to be shot)
• County
• Income and status of the neighborhood
• Previous experiences of the police officers with the ethnic group
• Previous experiences of the victim with the police
• Emotional facial expression of the civilian
• Fatigue of the police officer

Implicit racial bias

An implicit racial bias refers to unintentional judgments a person makes of a group (e.g. good/bad) of a certain ethnicity. So a person who shows implicit racial bias might not be aware of it. Police officers have been found to show a racial bias against black people in the decision to shoot.

In one of the studies, researchers investigated how stereotypes affected police officers' decisions to shoot. They used a video game and exposed their participants to pictures of either Whites or Non-Whites who were armed or unarmed. During this video game, the participants were asked to choose between "shoot" or "don't shoot" as quickly as possible. The results were that the participants shot armed black people faster than armed white people and chose "don't shoot" faster for unarmed white than unarmed black persons.

The authors explained those findings by the activation of stereotype thinking which lead white people to associate black people with danger. Because of this stereotype, the participants expected blacks to carry a gun and therefore were quicker to make the "shooting" decision. Other studies have found similar results. The time pressure to make a decision in decisions to shoot might magnify the effects of racial bias.

Location and context

The American police officers live and work in a society full of prejudices against minorities. In addition, police officers usually deal with high crime rates in minority neighborhoods. These experiences reinforce their existing prejudices by ignoring that most people with a non-white ethnic background don't become criminals. This leads to discrimination against minorities. Other factors that lead to discrimination by the police are institutionalized language barriers between police and some ethnic groups, experiences with disrespectful or hostile residents in certain minority neighborhoods and low punishment for police officers who misbehave towards minorities.

Those prejudices by the police are of course being noticed by the groups of minorities. So in return, the groups believe that the officers have prejudices against them. This might lead to the findings that Non-Whites are more likely to behave disrespectfully or to insult officers.

To sum up, there may exist a mutual influence between the prejudices that police officers have against minorities and the prejudices that minorities have against officers.

Examples that showcase prejudices among police officers

• Disruptive actions by the police like stopping and questioning citizens on the street are more common in minority neighborhoods
• More cases of Non-Whites are being dropped than of Whites. This may be because the reasons for arresting them were too weak or unjustified in the first place.
• American police officers shoot more easily Non-Whites than Whites

Ways to reduce shooting bias

Possibly the biggest change could be made by holding police officers accountable for their actions. Internal investigations usually don't lead to punishments. The work culture within some police departments has been criticized as racist, in light of many recent scandals.

Knowing the factors that influence police officers decisions to shoot there are a few possible solutions for reducing shooting bias. The main factor is implicit racial bias, which in turn is exuberated by certain factors that could be addressed.

Diversity in police departments might not reduce shooting bias, but reducing fatigue might lower the impact of racial bias on the decision to shoot. Changing the training of police officers so as to not showcase black armed targets more often than white ones could help reduce racial bias.

Training police officers in making decisions under stress as well as assigning officers to certain locations so they can become familiar with its residents could reduce the numbers of civilians killed, says Richmond's police chief, Chris Magnus.

Racial bias can be contagious within a social group or neighborhood. Training police officers to be aware of this might help in reducing this effect.