Police Shootings and Civic Engagement

为了促进公共安全和秩序，并应对他们或其他人受到的威胁，警察有时会使用致命武力伤害平民，包括开枪。警察使用致命武力的时刻提醒我们，政策制定者和公众赋予警察执法和维护公共安全的权力、权威和自由裁量权。这些时刻也提出了关于警察使用致命武力的频率、原因和后果的问题。然而，决策者和公众都不知道警察使用致命武力的频率，特别是他们射杀平民的频率。媒体报道、众包和政府对警察枪击事件的报道描绘了美国警务中致命武力的不完整画面。例如，它经常排除大多数警察枪击事件--非致命枪击事件。此外，政策制定者和公众对警察枪击事件的公民和社区影响知之甚少。因此，决策者和公众需要更多关于警察伤害平民事件的数据。他们还需要以数据为依据，评估警察伤害平民是否对公民生活，包括公众信任和参与产生负面影响。收集、编目、存储和共享有关警察枪击事件的全面数据，无论是致命的还是非致命的，都是必要的。更高质量的数据和分析可能有助于减少警察对平民的伤害，并改善警察与他们所服务和保护的社区之间的关系，而不带偏见。 研究人员将收集2000年至2019年期间美国警察枪击平民的数据。数据的主要来源将是285个最大城市的警察部门（即，2010年人口普查时至少有10万居民的城市）。研究人员将利用每个城市和/或他们所在州的“信息自由”法规，要求提供警察参与枪击平民的每一个案例的公共记录，包括致命和非致命的。他们还将要求提供军官参与枪击事件的日期、时间和地点，沿着军官和平民的人口统计信息。作为补充，研究人员将收集样本城市中有关警察参与枪击事件的报纸报道。他们将对其进行编码，以评估媒体对枪击事件的报道和内容。研究人员将利用他们收集的数据建立一个公共存储库，用于聚合、托管和传播有关警察枪击事件的数据。此外，他们将对警察使用致命武力进行描述性分析。最后，他们将进行多变量分析，以确定警察使用致命武力是否会损害公民参与，包括公民主动联系市政当局的紧急（911）和非紧急（311）服务的倾向。评估是否致命的使用武力的警察，无论是致命的或非致命的，减少公民发起的接触与地方政府将告知理论，经验和公众的理解警民互动。这些数据，包括公开传播的数据，以及对这些数据的分析，将更好地说明警察使用致命武力的程度，并就如何更好地平衡警察为公共安全和秩序使用致命武力的酌处权，同时促进或维持公众对警察的信任提出建议，该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并被认为值得通过使用基金会的学术价值和更广泛的影响评审标准。

In promoting public safety and order, and responding to perceived threats against them or others, police officers sometimes harm civilians, using lethal force, inclusive of shootings. Moments of lethal force by the police remind us of the power, authority, and discretion policymakers and the public grant the police for law enforcement and public security. Those moments also raise questions about the frequency, causes, and consequences of lethal force by the police. Neither policymakers nor the public, however, know how often police officers use lethal force, particularly how often they shoot civilians. Media coverage, crowdsourcing, and government reports of police shootings paint an incomplete picture of lethal force in U.S. policing. It often excludes, for example, the majority of police shootings—non-fatal shootings. Furthermore, policymakers and the public know little about the civic and communal effects of police shootings. Accordingly, policymakers and the public need more data about incidents of police harm of civilians. They also need data-driven assessments of whether police harm of civilians negatively affects civic life, inclusive of public trust and participation. Collecting, cataloging, storing, and sharing comprehensive data about police shootings, fatal and non-fatal, is necessary. Higher-quality data and analyses may contribute to reducing police harm of civilians and bettering relationships between police and communities they are to serve and protect without bias. The researchers will collect data on shootings of civilians by police in the U.S. for the period 2000-2019. The primary sources of data will be the police departments of the 285 largest cities (i.e., cities of at least 100,000 residents as of the 2010 Census). The researchers will use each city’s and/or their state’s “freedom of information” statutes to request public records of every instance of a police officer involved in a shooting of a civilian, both fatal and non-fatal. They also will request the dates, times, and locations of the officer-involved shootings, along with information about the demographics of the officers and civilians. As a supplement, the researchers will collect newspaper stories about the officer-involved shootings in the sample cities. They will code them to assess media coverage and content of the shootings. The researchers will use the data they collect to build a public repository for aggregating, hosting, and disseminating data about police shootings. Additionally, they will produce a descriptive analysis of lethal force by police. Finally, they will conduct multivariate analyses to identify whether lethal force by police harms civic engagement, including the propensity of citizen-initiated contact for emergency (911) and non-emergency (311) services from municipalities. Evaluating whether lethal use of force by the police, be it fatal or non-fatal, decreases citizen-initiated contact with local governments will inform theoretical, empirical, and public understandings of police-civilian interactions. The data, inclusive of its public dissemination, and analyses of it will better illuminate the degree to which police use lethal force and suggest how to better balance police discretion to use lethal force for public safety and order while fostering or maintaining public trust in the police, particularly by communities of color.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.