Monday, June 7, 2021, 11:30 AM – 1 PM EDT
Tom Clark, Charles Howard Candler Professor of Political Science
“Are Police Racially Biased in the Decision to Shoot?”
Tom Clark is best known as a scholar on the subject of judicial decision-making, with two acclaimed books on the subject, the most recent, in 2019, focused on the Supreme Court. But much of his current research focuses on policing and law-enforcement in American cities. And today, he’ll report on the results of the study of racial bias in policing that has been undertaken by the Politics of Policing Lab (PoPL) that Tom co-directs here at Emory. He’ll explain how that study has yielded a theoretical model that has real predictive value, given that it’s based on facts derived from rigorous collection and analysis of data:
We present a theoretical model predicting that racially biased policing produces 1) more use of potentially lethal force by firearms against Black civilians than against White civilians and 2) lower fatality rates for Black civilians than White civilians. We empirically evaluate this second prediction with original officer-involved shooting data from nine local police jurisdictions from 2005 to 2017, finding that Black fatality rates are significantly lower than White fatality rates, conditional upon civilians being shot by the police. Using outcome test methodology, we estimate that at least 30% of Black civilians shot by the police would not have been shot had they been White.
Join us to hear more from Tom about the study that is providing a nuanced answer to the question so central in political discourse today: “Are police racially biased in the decision to shoot?”