The Role of Individual Officer Characteristics in Police Shootings

Datos Bibliográficos

ID5742012
AutoresGreg Ridgeway (0000-0001-6911-0804, autor de correspondencia)
Año2020
Volumen687
Número1
Páginas58-66
Fecha de publicación2020-01-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaThe Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0002-7162 • E-ISSN: 1552-3349
EditorialSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1177/0002716219896553
OpenAlexW3006247169
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas13
Referencias citadas7

Assessing whether individual characteristics of police officers such as age, race, and prior performance influence police behavior has been a long-standing topic of social science research. The effect of officer characteristics on their risk of shooting people is confounded by police assignments and by the environmental factors associated with those assignments. This article provides a method to separate out the influence of individual officer characteristics from environmental factors. Using data from the New York City Police Department (NYPD) and the Major Cities' Chiefs Association (MCCA), the analysis finds that police officers who join the NYPD later in their careers have a lower shooting risk: for each additional year of their recruitment age, the odds of being shooters declines by 10 percent. Both officer race and prior problem behavior (e.g., losing a firearm, crashing a department vehicle) predict up to three times greater odds of shooting, yet officers who made numerous misdemeanor arrests were four times less likely to shoot

Criminology · Misdemeanor · Odds · Officer · Police department · Political science · Race (biology) · Sociology · Crime Patterns and Interventions · Demography · Gender Studies · Gun Ownership and Violence Research · Law · Medicine · Policing Practices and Perceptions · Psychology