Deadly Force: Police Shootings in Urban America

Police violence has motivated public protests in the U.S. for decades. Incidents such as the murder of George Floyd have received global attention, and resulting public discourse has ranged from calls to classify anti-police violence as hate crimes to calling for police abolition. What does data say about police violence? This trio of political science professors sought to find out and clarify. Coauthors Clark (political science, Univ. of Chicago), Adam S. Glynn (political science and quantitative theory and methods, Emory Univ.), and Michael Leo Owens (political science, Emory Univ.) focus their research on police shootings only (both fatal and nonfatal) and on U.S. cities with populations of 100,000 or more. There is no national standard for reporting quality or transparency among police districts, which means that this book must synthesize information from several sources. While the resulting data is incomplete, it is also singularly comprehensive. The book’s plain language makes for a highly accessible analysis, and the authors move carefully through several possible implications of the data. Ultimately, their findings illustrate both a complex picture of police shootings and demonstrable patterns to these events, hopefully laying the groundwork for effective conversations about reforms.