When police kill

321 Pages·2017·13.754 MB·English

by  Zimring, Franklin E

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,