Shea Streeter - Lethal Force in Black and White: Assessing Racial Disparities in the Circumstances of Police Killings

Date
-
Location
Encina Hall West, Room 400 (GSL)
Speaker

Shea Streeter, Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Michigan

 

Abstract

African Americans are nearly three times as likely to be killed by police as whites. This paper examines whether this racial disparity is due in part to racial differences in the circumstances of police killings. To assess whether and how these circumstances predict the race of a decedent, I use machine learning techniques and a novel data set of police killings containing over 120 descriptors. I find that decedent characteristics, criminal activity, threat levels, police actions, and the setting of the lethal interaction are not predictive of race, indicating that the police—given contact—are killing blacks and whites under largely similar circumstances. The findings suggest that the racial disparity in the rate of lethal force is most likely driven by higher rates of police contact among African Americans rather than racial differences in the circumstances of the interaction and officer bias in the application of lethal force.

 

Biography

Shea Streeter is a President’s Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Michigan. Her research examines how race and gender shape the ways that people experience, perceive, and respond to incidents of violence. Her current body of work explores the racial politics of police violence in the United States, applying a Comparative Politics framework to the American case. This research agenda has produced several new discoveries regarding the differences and similarities in the circumstances of police killings among Blacks and Whites, the ways that personal racial identity defines perceptions of police violence, and the large racial gap in the rate of protest following police killings.