When police kill PDF
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WHEN POLICE KILL When Police Kill Franklin E. Zimring Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England 2017 Copyright © 2017 by Franklin E. Zimring All rights reserved Printed in the United States of Amer i ca First printing Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data Names: Zimring, Franklin E., author. Title: When police kill / Franklin E. Zimring. Description: Cambridge, Mas sa chu setts : Harvard University Press, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016036666 | ISBN 9780674972186 (alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Police shootings— United States. | Police— Vio lence against— United States. | Police administration— United States. | Police- community relations— United States. Classification: LCC HV8031 .Z56 2017 | DDC 363.2 / 32— dc23 LC rec ord available at https:// lccn . loc . gov / 2016036666 For Hans Zeisel, who taught me how Contents Preface ix Part I The Character and Causes of Police Killings 1. The Double Transformation of Police Killings in Amer i ca 3 2. Killings by Police: The Numbers Game 23 3. Who Dies, Where, and Why? 41 4. Only in Amer i ca? Police Killings in Other Modern Nations 74 5. The Prob lem of Police Safety 91 6. Trends over Time in Killings of and by Police in the United States 105 7. Public Costs and Consequences 118 viii Contents Part II Prevention and Control of Police Killings 8. The Missing Links: Reporting, Documentation, and Evaluation in a Federal System 143 9. Mission Impossible? The Limits and Potential of Criminal Law in Police Vio lence 166 10. Cops and Cameras 202 11. The Heart of the Matter: Governance and Training for Local Policing 219 12. American Possibilities, American Limits 246 Appendix 1: Ele ments of a National Reporting System with Required Information and Contacts for Police Shootings and Injury Reports from Departments of Police 253 Appendix 2: Notes on Killings of and by the Police in Canada 257 Appendix 3: The Guardian Six- Month Sample 259 Notes 287 References 289 Acknowl edgments 295 Index 299 Preface The explosion of anger and concern that followed the 2014 shooting of Michael Brown by a local police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, was a surprise to the mass media, to public officials, to po liti cal leaders, and not least a surprise to scholars and policy experts on criminal justice and crime. Here was a civil rights crisis that nobody had seen on the horizon: the phenomenon of killings by police in the twenty- first century as a statistical and public policy mystery. How many such killings take place annually in the United States? (It turns out that nobody knew, despite the national estimates provided by three dif er ent government departments.) Who gets killed and why? Is this phenomenon a special prob lem in the United States or a common by- product of urban po- licing in modern nations? Are the police also at substantial risk of death from violent assaults in the United States? If so, why? Has the rate of killings by police been g oing up in recent years or g oing down? What about the death rate of police officers over time? What sorts of attacks threaten the lives of police officers? Are t hose the same sorts of threats that provoke police to shoot in confrontations? Most of the empirical questions just mentioned have not been the subject of serious research eforts in the recent past, though a generation ago scholars and prac ti tion ers such as James Fyfe, Lawrence Sherman,
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