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13 Homicide Stud. 3 (2009)

handle is hein.journals/homcst13 and id is 1 raw text is: February 2 0W9 3-20 'W 2009 SagPblicaitions Reassessing Political Explanations 1 1 hosted at for M urders of Police http:/onualiicAgepub.com Robert J. Kaminski University of South Carolina Thomas D. Stucky School of Public and Environmental Affairs, Indianapolis The article discusses how Jacobs and Carmichael, drawing on the racial threat thesis, argue that the overrepresentation of Blacks among felons who murder police is in part explained by Blacks' conscious or unconscious responses to political subordination by the State. In testing this argument, Jacobs and Carmichael find that their key theoretical variable-the presence of a Black mayor-is inversely related to police homicides and injurious assaults across many model specifications. This article describes a limited reanalysis of Jacobs and Carmichael's homicide data and additional analyses with a larger sample of cities. The findings suggest that the significance of the Black mayor variable may have been an artifact of model specification. Instead, there is evidence that Black city council representation may be associated with reduced homicides of police by Blacks. Further research is needed, however, because of the limited explana- tory power of the key factors highlighted in past research. Keywords: homicide; police; racial threat; political subordination; economic subordination A lthough common in other criminological research, few researchers have drawn on conflict theory and the racial threat thesis to explain violence against the police (Chamlin, 1989). A recent analysis by Jacobs and Carmichael (2002), how- ever, increased attention to this perspective. In their article, Jacobs and Carmichael posited that the overrepresentation of Blacks among felons who murder police' is in part explained by their economic and political subordination by the state. According to this view, many killings of police by Blacks are a response to subordination in the form of inarticulate protest or primitive rebellion directed against repressive state agents, that is, law enforcement officers. Accordingly, homicide rates are expected to be higher in jurisdictions in which Blacks are most politically and economically repressed, and lower in jurisdictions in which Blacks attain or surpass political and Authors' Note: This research was supported in part by a National Science Foundation grant (SES-0002291). We thank David Jacobs for providing us with his dataset and model command statements. Please address correspondence to Robert J. Kaminski, Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC 29208; e-mail: kaminskb@mailbox.sc.edu. 3

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