About | HeinOnline Law Journal Library | HeinOnline Law Journal Library | HeinOnline
LOG IN
LOG IN

100 B.U. L. Rev. 951 (2020)
Race and Reasonableness in Police Killings

handle is hein.journals/bulr100 and id is 969 raw text is: RACE AND REASONABLENESS IN POLICE KILLINGS JEFFREY FAGAN* & ALEXIS D. CAMPBELL** ABSTRACT Police officers in the United States have killed over 1000 civilians each year since 2013. The constitutional landscape that regulates these encounters defaults to the judgments of the reasonable police officer at the time of a civilian encounter based on the officer's assessment of whether threats to their safety or the safety of others requires deadly force. As many of these killings have begun to occur under similar circumstances, scholars have renewed a contentious debate on whether police disproportionately use deadly force against African Americans and other nonwhite civilians and whether such killings reflect racial bias. We analyze data on 3933 killings to examine this intersection of race and reasonableness in police killings. First, we describe the objective circumstances and interactions of police killings and map those event characteristics to the elements of reasonableness articulated in case law. Second, we assess whether inherently vague constitutional regulation of lethal force is applied differently by officers depending on the civilian's race, giving rise to a disproportionate rate of deaths among racial and ethnic minority groups. We then assess the prospects for remediation of racialized police killings by testing the effects of an existing evidence-based training curricula designed to reduce police use of deadly force towards persons experiencing mental illness. We find that, across several circumstances of police killings and their objective reasonableness, Black suspects are more than twice as likely to be killed by police than are persons of other racial or ethnic groups; even when there are no other obvious circumstances during the encounter that would make the use of deadly force reasonable. Police killings ofLatinx civilians are higher compared to whites and other racial or ethnic groups in some but not all circumstances. We find no evidence that enhanced police training focused on mental health crises can reduce the incidence offatal police shootings ofpersons in mental health crisis or racial and ethnic disparities generally in police * Isidor and Seville Sulzbacher Professor of Law and Professor of Epidemiology, Columbia University. We thank participants at the 2019 Empirical Critical Race Theory Workshop, Boston University Law School, and the 2020 Annual QuantLaw Conference at the Rogers College of Law at the University of Arizona, for insights and comments on earlier versions of this Article. The editors at the Boston University Law Review provided outstanding editorial support. Generous research support was provided by Columbia Law School and the Columbia Human Rights Law Review. All views and any mistakes are those of the authors. ** J.D., Columbia Law School, 2020; Notes Editor, Columbia Human Rights Law Review, 2019-2020. 951

What Is HeinOnline?

HeinOnline is a subscription-based resource containing thousands of academic and legal journals from inception; complete coverage of government documents such as U.S. Statutes at Large, U.S. Code, Federal Register, Code of Federal Regulations, U.S. Reports, and much more. Documents are image-based, fully searchable PDFs with the authority of print combined with the accessibility of a user-friendly and powerful database. For more information, request a quote or trial for your organization below.



Short-term subscription options include 24 hours, 48 hours, or 1 week to HeinOnline.

Purchase Access

Contact us for annual subscription options:

Contact Us

Already a HeinOnline Subscriber?

Log In

profiles profiles most