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      On Racial Disparities in Recent Fatal Police Shootings

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          Abstract

          Fatal police shootings in the United States continue to be a polarizing social and political issue. Clear disagreement between racial proportions of victims and nationwide racial demographics together with graphic video footage has created fertile ground for controversy. However, simple population level summary statistics fail to take into account fundamental local characteristics such as county-level racial demography, local arrest demography, and law enforcement density. Utilizing data on fatal police shootings between January 2015 and July 2016, we implement a number of straightforward resampling procedures designed to carefully examine how unlikely the victim totals from each race are with respect to these local population characteristics if no racial bias were present in the decision to shoot by police. We present several approaches considering the shooting locations both as fixed and also as a random sample. In both cases, we find overwhelming evidence of a racial disparity in shooting victims with respect to local population demographics but substantially less disparity after accounting for local arrest demographics. We conclude our analyses by examining the effect of police-worn body cameras and find no evidence that the presence of such cameras impacts the racial distribution of victims.

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          Journal
          06 December 2019
          Article
          1912.03018
          c29738fb-9a48-4e3b-9936-2f4fd209ad5e

          http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/

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          Accepted at Statistics and Public Policy
          stat.AP

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