research on police brutality

What works to reduce police brutality

Psychologists’ research is pinpointing the factors that lead to overly aggressive, biased policing—and intervention that can prevent it

Vol. 51, No. 7 Print version: page 30

• Physical Abuse and Violence
• Forensics, Law, and Public Safety
• Racism, Bias, and Discrimination

When the Las Vegas Police Department applied a psychology-informed “hands off” policy for officers involved in foot chases, use of force dropped by 23%. In Seattle, officers trained in a “procedural justice” intervention designed in part by psychologists used force up to 40% less. These are just a few examples of the work the field is doing to address police brutality.

“There’s much more openness to the idea of concrete change among police departments,” says Joel Dvoskin, PhD, ABPP, a clinical and forensic psychologist and past president of APA’s Div. 18 (Psychologists in Public Service).

That shift is backed by support from the public. Since 2016, the share of Americans who say that police use the right amount of force, treat racial and ethnic groups equally and hold officers accountable for misconduct has declined substantially, according to the Pew Research Center ( Majority of Public Favors Giving Civilians the Power to Sue Officers for Misconduct , 2020).

Psychologists have already played a critical role in the reform process—from collecting data on biased police stops, searches and use of force to designing and delivering interventions that reduce the chances that police will rely on stereotypes, for instance by limiting the amount of discretion officers have during searches.

Now, psychologists are promoting those interventions to more police departments, conducting research to determine how well they work and continuing to collect and organize data on police behavior and department culture.

“Criminal justice—police, courts, prisons—has been called an evidence-free zone,” says Tom Tyler, PhD, a professor of psychology at Yale Law School and an expert in the psychology of justice. “People in positions of power tend to make policy decisions based on intuition and common sense—presumptions that we as psychologists recognize are often in error.”

“What’s really needed is an evidence-informed model of criminal justice,” he says. “And a lot of that evidence can come from psychologists.”

Psychological research in action

In 2015, President Obama’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing reviewed scientific data on policing, recommending major policy changes at the federal level to improve oversight, training, officer wellness and more ( Final Report of the President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing , 2015).

Federal efforts have slowed in recent years, with most changes happening at the local level. But with around 18,000 police departments nationwide, that response has been fragmented and inconsistent ( National Sources of Law Enforcement Employment Data , Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2016).

Still, psychologists have forged ahead with efforts that are making a difference. One key contribution involves spurring policy changes and interventions based on psychological insights.

“One of the most influential approaches coming from psychology is training in procedurally just policing,” says Calvin Lai, PhD, an assistant professor of psychological and brain sciences at Washington University in St. Louis.

That approach aims to increase the public’s trust in police by drawing on psychological research on justice and fairness. It involves teaching officers strategies such as explaining to citizens why they’ve been stopped and how it will benefit public safety ( Principles of Procedurally Just Policing , The Justice Collaboratory at Yale Law School, 2018).

“We know that the policing model of using force to compel compliance lowers the crime rate but does not build trust,” says Tyler, who has developed and studied models of procedurally just policing. “The crime rate has declined about 75% in the last 30 years, but public trust in the police hasn’t increased at all.”

His research has shown that what community members really want is for police to treat them with respect and to give them a voice—a chance to explain their situation before action is taken. People also want to know that police are sincere, care about the well-being of their community, and act in an unbiased and consistent way—for example, by explaining the rules they use and how they’re applying them.

A study in Seattle randomly assigned officers to receive training in procedurally just policing, leading to a reduction in use of force of between 15% and 40%, depending on the situation (Owens, E., et al., Criminology & Public Policy , Vol. 17 , No. 1, 2018).

“It seems to be doing what we’d hope in terms of promoting better relationships between police officers and community members,” says Lai.

The Center for Policing Equity (CPE), led by psychologist Phillip Atiba Goff, PhD, of Yale University, has also led a number of psychology-driven policy changes in police departments around the country. In an effort to cut down on high-adrenaline encounters—where police officers are more likely to rely on stereotypes—Goff urged the Las Vegas Police Department to bar officers involved in a foot pursuit from handling suspects when the chase ends. The policy led to a 23% drop in use of force at the department, an 11% reduction in officer injury and a simultaneous drop in racial disparities in use of force data. CPE has also pioneered efforts to recruit racially and ethnically diverse officer candidates and to make immigration enforcement more consistent.

Another key area that psychological interventions target is implicit bias, which has been documented across a range of domains and populations ( State of the Science: Implicit Bias Review , Kirwan Institute, 2017). One study led by Jennifer Eberhardt, PhD, professor of psychology at Stanford University, reviewed body camera footage and found that police officers in Oakland, California, treated Black people with less respect than whites (Voigt, R., et al., PNAS , Vol. 114, No. 25, 2017).

Eberhardt and others, including Lorie Fridell, PhD, a professor of criminology at the University of South Florida, have designed and begun to deliver training programs on implicit bias to law enforcement agencies around the country (“ Producing Bias-Free Policing: A Science-Based Approach ,” Springer Publishing, 2017).

Those programs, which typically mix instruction, discussion and role-playing, aim to help agencies reduce high-discretion policing and hold officers accountable for biased practices. But there’s no standardized curriculum—and experts say more research is needed to determine whether implicit bias training has a lasting impact and how such training can work alongside other agency reform efforts.

“There seem to be some forms of training that are effective, but the studies on these interventions are still pretty limited,” says Lai. “We just don’t know that much one way or the other.”

The power of peer intervention

Another intervention that has shown promise for reducing violence among police is known as  Project ABLE , or Active Bystandership for Law Enforcement. Based on the work of psychologist Ervin Staub, PhD, an emeritus professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and past president of APA’s Div. 48 (Society for the Study of Peace, Conflict and Violence), the program promotes a culture of peer intervention. It teaches officers to prevent their peers from perpetrating unnecessary violence, which can save both lives and careers. Developed by the New Orleans Police Department in 2014 and originally named Ethical Policing Is Courageous (EPIC), Project ABLE is now being adopted by all police departments in New Hampshire and Washington state, as well as those in Baltimore, Boston, Philadelphia, several other cities and the FBI National Academy.

When an officer commits an act of unnecessary violence, his colleagues face a tough choice, Dvoskin says. Report the act and get a reputation as a “rat”—which may mean your next call for backup goes unanswered—or lie, which is a crime.

“What if, instead, you can prevent the bad thing from happening in the first place?” he says. “What if you manifested your loyalty to a fellow officer by helping him or her stay out of trouble?”

Staub says minor interventions can be highly effective. During recent protests of confederate monuments in New Orleans, an officer stopped a peer from attacking demonstrators by putting an arm around his shoulder. Trainees also apply strategies taught by the program to themselves. One officer in New Orleans reported using EPIC to avoid retaliating against a protester who had spit in her face.

That sort of behavior requires culture change. Police officers need to get comfortable both giving and receiving such interventions—and that culture must be modeled and supported by the highest levels of leadership within an organization, Dvoskin says.

To test his model of active bystandership, Staub studied examples of group violence, such as genocide, observing how hostility and violence evolve progressively. He has also conducted experimental research to understand how people respond to emergencies depending on the actions of those around them. In one study, participants’ helping behavior in response to a simulated emergency ranged from 25% to 100% of the time depending on a confederate’s response to the emergency. He also found that those who are asked to help once are more likely to volunteer later (Staub, E., “ The Roots of Goodness and Resistance to Evil ,” Oxford University Press, 2015).

Now, Project ABLE has support from Georgetown University and the international law firm Sheppard Mullin, which will help fund free training in active bystandership for any interested U.S. police department—and they’ve had hundreds of inquiries since June. Dvoskin, Staub and their team are now working to standardize lesson plans and policy guidelines.

“If this training is introduced in many police departments and done effectively, I believe that policing in America will be transformed,” Staub says.

Understanding and changing officer behavior

Psychologists are also helping agencies collect, report and understand data on their officers’ behavior—data that can point to further policy changes to reduce unnecessary violence and racial bias.

Simply changing the definition of a “police stop,” for instance, can help identify patterns of racial profiling that might otherwise be missed, says social psychologist Jack Glaser, PhD, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy. Glaser has advised the California attorney general’s office on how to collect policing data, including revising the regulations on police stop reporting.

“Some police-civilian encounters are very casual and are not typically recognized as stops—but they are done with investigatory intent and can escalate to a detention,” he says.

For example, a pedestrian might voluntarily speak with a police officer who says, “Hi, can I ask you a question?”—but that conversation could lead to a search and even an arrest. Those stops typically aren’t reported, so racial bias in such practices could go unchecked.

Glaser has also partnered with CPE for a nationwide effort to aggregate data on police behavior with the  National Justice Database , which draws from nearly 100 police departments representing more than a third of the U.S. population. He has worked to standardize and harmonize that data—which includes hundreds of thousands of entries on police stops, searches and use of force and can vary a lot from one agency to the next—so that researchers can start making comparisons and looking for larger trends.

Glaser says reporting officer behavioral data in different ways can paint a very different picture about whether racial disparities exist—so it’s important to get it right. For example, some departments consider officer presence or unholstering a weapon instances of police use of force, while others do not.

Goff, Glaser and their team delved into police use of force data to explore why some researchers, such as economist Roland Fryer, PhD, of Harvard University, have reported no racial differences in officer-involved shootings (Fryer, R.G.,  Journal of Political Economy   , Vol. 127, No. 3, 2019). Their preliminary analysis shows that racial disparities may not exist in all officer-involved shootings, but that there’s a clear bias against African Americans when the victim is unarmed.

“Given that the protest movement is overwhelmingly about unarmed people getting killed by police, that seems to be the most important data point—but it seems to be getting lost,” Glaser says.

One major takeaway from the National Justice Database so far is that police are more likely to display racial bias when they conduct a “high-discretion search”—usually done on a hunch in ambiguous circumstances—versus a “low-discretion search,” a more routine activity, for instance when a person has already been detained for a crime. When the California Highway Patrol banned high-discretion searches, racial disparities began to level off (   Racial & Identity Profiling Advisory Board Annual Report   , 2020).

“The obvious implication there is to try and minimize high-discretion searches,” Glaser says. “The tremendous amount of discretion given to police promotes decision-making under ambiguity and uncertainty, which psychologists know is ripe for stereotype influence.”

Screening officer candidates

Other psychologists have worked to adapt the police selection process to address the issue of implicit bias. Portland-based forensic psychologist David Corey, PhD, ABPP, has urged departments to add “cultural competence” as a criterion for screening law enforcement officers. “On the surface, the implicit bias literature is dismally depressing, because it tells us that everybody has automatic stereotypes that operate unconsciously and affect behavior,” says Corey, who also founded the  American Board of Police and Public Safety Psychology .

Because of measurement issues, it’s not practical to screen candidates for policing jobs based on their implicit biases. But studies show that some personality dimensions can help officers temper those biases (Ben-Porath, Y.S., “ Interpreting the MMPI-2-RF ,” University of Minnesota Press, 2012). Specifically, people high in executive functioning, emotional regulation skills and metacognitive abilities are better able to prevent implicit biases from affecting their behavior. A capacity for theory of mind formation—the ability to anticipate how others will behave based on their actions or tone of voice—also helps officers learn to bypass their initial instincts.

“Those competencies render implicit bias more malleable,” says Corey. “So, my focus, and that of a growing number of colleagues around the country, is to evaluate applicants for those qualities.”

The Portland Police Bureau, as well as several other agencies in the Pacific Northwest, have added such measures to their selection battery.

Answering more questions

Looking ahead, psychologists are working to address gaps in the data in crucial areas such as use of force, says Shauna Laughna, PhD, ABPP, a Florida-based police and public safety psychologist and chair of APA Div. 18’s Police and Public Safety section. She adds that recruitment, training, discipline and retention of personnel can vary greatly across the 18,000 law enforcement agencies in the United States. That points to a need for more data, standardized measures—for instance, what constitutes excessive use of force—and a comprehensive national database on policing incidents.

“Attempting to generalize from data gathered at one agency to another may not always be prudent,” she says.

As reform efforts continue at the local and state levels, there’s one other essential thing the field can do, says Colby Mills, PhD, a clinical psychologist who works with the Fairfax County Police Department in Virginia: Provide more formal training opportunities for police psychologists, including during graduate school and in the form of continuing education. The limited police psychology coursework currently available within forensic psychology programs often does not include adequate training on the culture, ethics and special skills required to do such work, he says.

“It takes a lot of courage for a police officer to reach out to a mental health professional, because of the stigmas and the pressures they experience,” Mills says. “But once they do it, we owe it to them to provide a qualified professional who knows what they face and understands their culture.”

Critical incident response

In addition to their involvement with department-wide training efforts, psychologists are also increasingly providing ongoing mental health services, for instance after an officer-involved shooting occurs, says Colby Mills, PhD, a clinical psychologist who contracts with the Fairfax County Police Department in Virginia.

Along with peer support officers and the station’s police chaplain, Mills deploys immediately after a critical incident occurs and delivers Stress First Aid, a model developed for the military that can support officers in processing emotions ( Stress First Aid for Law Enforcement , National Center for Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, 2016).

“We want to strike a balance where we offer support without implying that an officer will automatically need help to recover,” Mills says.

The Fairfax County Police Department works with about a dozen psychologists who provide critical incident response, therapy, psychoeducation, consultations and pre-employment screenings.

“In general, police and public safety agencies are starting to embrace these sorts of psychological services more and more,” Mills says.

Further reading

A Meta-Analysis of Procedures to Change Implicit Measures Forscher, P.S., et al. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology , 2019

The Science of Justice: Race, Arrests and Police Use of Force Goff, P.A., et al. Center for Policing Equity, 2016

Preventing Violence and Promoting Active Bystandership and Peace: My Life in Research and Applications Staub, E., Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology, 2018

Recommended Reading

Apa’s recommendations for police reform.

• Promote community policing
• Ban chokeholds and strangleholds
• Invest in crisis intervention teams
• Increase the number of mental health professionals in law enforcement agencies
• Involve psychologists in multidisciplinary teams to implement police reforms
• Encourage partnerships between mental health organizations and local law enforcement
• Discourage police management policies and practices that can trigger implicit and explicit biases
• Strengthen data collection
• Bolster research

Read more about APA’s recommendations online .

Contact APA

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Police Brutality Statistics: What the Data Says About Police Violence in America

Were you or a loved one a victim of police brutality.

Attorneys that work with Police Brutality Center may be able to assist you.

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Content Last Updated: July 10, 2024

The killings of Michael Brown, George Floyd, and Breonna Taylor, among many other unarmed Black men and women, have placed police violence at the center of the national conversation. This heightened awareness of wrongful police killings of civilians also exposed a disturbing deficit in the federal government’s collection of policing data.

Media groups like The Guardian , The Washington Post , and others rushed to fill this data void. By creating independent databases from local news reports and online sources, the researchers found that the federal government counted less than half of all officer-involved shooting deaths. Then-FBI director James Comey admitted that the Bureau’s shortcomings were “ridiculous” and “embarrassing.”

This article will reveal the most vital police brutality statistics on deaths from police violence by examining the most authoritative, independent data sources. It will include statistics describing the disparate impacts of police violence on communities of color. We’ll conclude with recommendations to help stop killings by police , and throughout the piece, try to answer these and other frequently asked questions about police violence.

• Are police brutality rates increasing?
• In which cities, states, and countries are police shootings most and least likely to occur?
• Which racial and ethnic groups are most impacted by police misconduct and violence?
• What happens to police officers after they kill civilians?

Note: This article primarily focuses on police-related killings rather than non-fatal police violence. That exclusion doesn’t minimize the problem of excessive police force causing severe injuries and personal trauma. It only reflects the scandalous lack of reliable data provided by local, state, and federal police agencies.

Regional Overview: Police Violence in the United States & Abroad

Despite the increased data visibility into the problem in recent years, police killings of civilians continue to occur at an astonishing rate. We’ll examine which groups of people are most likely to be killed by the police in the following section. But we’ll begin with a high-level view of the problem at the national, state, and international levels.

According to The Washington Post’s tracking database , at least 1,096 people were shot and killed by the police in 2022. And according to Mapping Police Violence , a leading police violence research project, police killed a minimum of 1,200 people that same year. That includes victims shot by police or another cause of death — such as tasers, physical restraints, or police vehicles.

The Mapping Police Violence analysis, which pulls data from the longstanding Fatal Encounters database , also noted a disturbing observation. In 2022, there were only 10 days when police did not kill someone in the US.

Have the rates of police killings increased over the years?

While smartphones and social media have made the problem of police violence more visible, about 1,000 people in the U.S. population are killed by police every year. According to Mapping Police Violence and The Washington Post, those figures have been remarkably consistent since they started tracking data in 2013 and 2016, respectively.

In other words, police killings are not increasing. But they’re not decreasing either, which reflects the continuing crisis of policing in America.

Which US states have the highest rates of fatal police violence?

The prestigious medical journal The Lancet analyzed mortality rates of people killed by race and state in the United States from 1990 to 2019. Likely the most comprehensive analysis on the topic, they compared data from the USA National Vital Statistics System (NVSS) to three previously mentioned police violence databases — Mapping Police Violence, Fatal Encounters, and The Guardian’s “The Counted” database.

The states with the highest mortality rates of people killed by police during the 2010s time period are

Which US states have the lowest rates of fatal police violence?

According to the Lancet data mentioned above, the states with the lowest mortality rates of people killed by the police during the 2010s time period are

Which US police departments have the highest rates of fatal police violence?

According to Mapping Police Violence, from 2013 through June 2023, the U.S. police departments with the highest rates of people killed by police were

• St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department: 15.2 deaths per 1 million
• Tulsa Police Department: 9.3 deaths per 1 million
• Albuquerque Police Department: 9.1 deaths per 1 million

The Chicago Police Department deserves special mention. The overall annual rate of people killed by police in Chicago is below average at 3.3 deaths per million. Taking a closer look at the numbers, CPD kills Black people at an annual rate of 8.6 per million and white people at 0.3 per million.

The Chicago Police Department, on average, kills about 26 times more Black people than white people every year. To put these sky-high fatality rates into perspective by comparing them against sizable municipal police departments with significantly lower rates of police killings.

Which US police departments have the lowest rates of fatal police violence?

• Chesapeake Police Department: 0.8 deaths per 1 million
• Arlington Police Department: 0.8 deaths per 1 million
• Buffalo Police Department: 1.0 deaths per 1 million

The key takeaway is that rates of fatal shootings by police vary considerably across police departments, with some being more than ten times as likely to kill civilians as others.

So how does America’s police violence compare to that of other countries?

American police kill civilians at extraordinarily higher rates than police in other high-income democracies. According to the Prison Policy Initiative , a criminal justice think tank, in 2019, U.S. police killed 3.35 per 1 million people. Canadian police, the next highest on the list, killed 0.98 for every 1 million. And police in England and Wales rarely kill civilians, at a rate of .05 per 1 million.

In other words, police in the U.S. kill people at a rate at least three times higher than Canadian police do and at least 60 times the rate of police in England and Wales. And according to an analysis by The Guardian, U.S. police killed more people in the first 24 days of 2015 than cops in England and Wales did throughout the previous 24 years .

Who are the most common victims of police violence?

Now that we’ve looked at police brutality from a regional perspective, we’ll analyze its victims. Revisiting The Washington Post’s database, which has tracked more than 8,600 fatal police shootings since 2015 , the data shows that police brutality is a problem that affects people across demographic groups.

Although about half of the estimated 1,000 people shot and killed by police every year in the United States are white — the proportional weight of police violence hits communities of color the hardest.

So what’s the risk of being killed by police violence by race?

The Washington Post’s database breaks down the stark racial disparities for people in the United States killed by police shootings since Jan. 1, 2015.

• Police killed white people at a rate of 2.3 per million per year
• Police killed Hispanic people at a rate of 2.5 per million per year
• Police killed Black people at a rate of 5.8 per million per year

In other words, Black Americans are more than 2 times as likely to be killed by the police than white people.

And according to the 2022 Police Violence report , a product of the Mapping Police Violence team, Black Americans were not only more likely to be killed by police than other races. They were also more likely to be unarmed and less likely to be threatening someone when killed.

Which US police department has the highest rate of deadly force against Black Americans?

Police brutality in St. Louis is particularly prevalent against the Black community. According to Mapping Police Violence, from 2013 through June 2023, the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department killed 48 people, including 41 Black people. That equates to an average annual rate of killings of Black people by police of 30.4 per 1 million. Moreover, Oklahoma PD officers killed Black people at 10.3 times the rate of white people.

What’s the risk of being killed by police violence by age and gender?

According to The Washington Post, among the 8,613 people shot and killed by the police, 8,191 — or over 95% — are male. And more than half of the victims are between 20 and 40 years old.

So overall, the profile of people killed by the police tends to be overwhelmingly male, mostly young, and disproportionately Latino and Black men.

Mental health risks

According to the 2022 Police Violence Report, police killed 111 people after receiving reports of someone behaving erratically or having a mental health crisis.

What happens to police after they kill someone?

Philip Stinson, a criminal justice expert at Bowling Green State University, maintains the most comprehensive database of officers charged with crimes . His national database contains information on 13,214 arrest cases from 2005 to 2016 involving 10,901 individual law enforcement officers.

When police kill someone, how likely are they to be prosecuted and convicted for murder?

In short, not very. According to Professor Philip Stinson, U.S. prosecutors in 2021 charged only 21 police officers with either murder or manslaughter resulting from deadly use of force. While 21 might not seem like many, it was a record-high number of officers charged.

For comparison, prosecutors in 2020 charged 16 police officers with murder or manslaughter from an on-duty deadly force incident. Twelve were charged in 2019, ten in 2018, and seven in 2017.

When police officers kill someone, how likely are they to be charged with a crime?

Based on Professor Stinson’s data on police crimes — only a tiny minority, less than 2% of officers who killed civilians in the line of duty, were charged with a crime. The vast majority of officers who killed people while on duty, 98.2%, were not charged with a crime.

When police who kill are charged with murder or manslaughter, how likely are they to be convicted?

The April 2021 murder and manslaughter conviction of Derick Chauvin, the Minneapolis police officer who killed George Floyd, was an extraordinary event. As mentioned above, it’s rare for DAs to charge officers who kill. And according to Stinson’s police crimes data, of the 155 officers prosecuted for murder or manslaughter since 2005, only about one-third resulted in a criminal conviction. One-third were acquitted in court, and another one-third of cases are still pending.

What are the leading causes of police brutality in the United States?

Various factors contribute to police violence in America. While high rates of gun ownership among Americans likely contribute to higher rates of fatal shootings by police, rates of violent crime in cities did not determine rates of killings by police. For example, the Buffalo and Newark police departments had relatively low rates of fatal police violence despite high crime rates. On the other hand, Spokane and Orlando had relatively low crime rates with higher rates of deadly police violence.

There is also a long history of police violence in the United States . White men initially created police departments to control enslaved people and Native Americans, and violence has been a part of American police forces since their inception.

Another challenging characteristic of American policing is the decentralization of agencies. According to a 2016 Department of Justice survey , at least 12,200 local law enforcement agencies and 3,000 sheriff’s offices operate independently with minimal oversight. About 90% of those agencies employ fewer than 50 officers. And nearly 50% of local departments have fewer than ten officers.

That fragmentation makes it nearly impossible to mandate consistent standards in police training, data collection, use of force policies, and accountability for officers who repeatedly use excessive force. As a result, police officers in the United States are often poorly trained to practice de-escalation in stressful situations. And when agencies fail to collect or release public records of excessive force and fatal police shootings, that contributes to a culture of unseen and unchecked officer misconduct and vicious cycles of community despair.

Recommendations to prevent police killings

These sobering numbers suggest that policing in the United States requires fundamental transformation. The frequency of police killings and the racial disparities pervading those police brutality statistics is a public health crisis that needs urgent action. 

Civil rights organizations have long called for police accountability in the US. And the brutal killing of George Floyd accelerated a cultural and political revolution against unjust police violence targeting African-Americans and other people of color. If you’ve been a victim of police brutality, getting legal help to file a lawsuit can help hold police departments accountable for brutality and excessive force.

To help reduce fatal police encounters and increase public safety, Congress and all 50 states should pass police reform bills to provide the following interventions:

• Improve use of force standards , including rules mandating when law enforcement officers can and cannot use deadly force
• Collect and publish detailed data on officer arrests, use of force injuries and deaths, and racial bias data during police stops
• Ensure independent and transparent investigations into all cases of excessive force and severe misconduct to ensure that officers are held accountable for their actions
• License and track “wandering officers” to prevent agencies from hiring officers dismissed for misconduct by other agencies
• Abolish qualified immunity , which often shields officers from liability for many constitutional violations, including fatal use of force.

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• Research & Reports

Protecting Against Police Brutality and Official Misconduct

Amendments to the criminal civil rights law could provide the federal government with a powerful tool to pursue law enforcement accountability.

• Eric H. Holder Jr.
• Download Report
• Download Annotated Proposal

The protest movement sparked by George Floyd’s killing last year has forced a nationwide reckoning with a wide range of deep-rooted racial inequities — in our economy, in health care, in education, and even in our democracy — that undermine the American promise of freedom and justice for all. That tragic incident provoked widespread demonstrations and stirred strong emotions from people across our nation.

While our state and local governments wrestle with how to reimagine relationships between police and the communities they serve, the Justice Department has long been hamstrung in its ability to mete out justice when people’s civil rights are violated.

The Civil Rights Acts passed during Reconstruction made it a federal crime to deprive someone of their constitutional rights while acting in an official capacity, a provision now known as Section 242. Today, when state or local law enforcement are accused of misconduct, the federal government is often seen as the best avenue for justice — to conduct a neutral investigation and to serve as a backstop when state or local investigations falter. I’m proud that the Justice Department pursued more Section 242 cases under my leadership than under any other attorney general before or since.

But due to Section 242’s vague wording and a series of Supreme Court decisions that raised the standard of proof needed for a civil rights violation, it’s often difficult for federal prosecutors to hold law enforcement accountable using this statute.

This timely report outlines changes to Section 242 that would clarify its scope, making it easier to bring cases and win convictions for civil rights violations of these kinds. Changing the law would allow for charges in cases where prosecutors might currently conclude that the standard of proof cannot be met. Perhaps more important, it attempts to deter potential future misconduct by acting as a nationwide reminder to law enforcement and other public officials of the constitutional limits on their authority.

The statutory changes recommended in this proposal are carefully designed to better protect civil rights that are already recognized. And because Black, Latino, and Native Americans are disproportionately victimized by the kinds of official misconduct the proposal addresses, these changes would advance racial justice.

This proposal would also help ensure that law enforcement officers in every part of the United States live up to the same high standards of professionalism. I have immense regard for the vital role that police play in all of America’s communities and for the sacrifices that they and their families are too often called to make on behalf of their country. It is in great part for their sake — and for their safety — that we must seek to build trust in all communities.

We need to send a clear message that the Constitution and laws of the United States prohibit public officials from engaging in excessive force, sexual misconduct, and deprivation of needed medical care. This proposal will better allow the Justice Department to pursue justice in every appropriate case, across the country.

Eric H. Holder Jr. Eighty-Second Attorney General of the United States

Introduction

Excessive use of force by law enforcement, sexual abuse by public officials and others in positions of authority, and the denial of needed medical care to people in police or correctional custody undermine the rule of law, our government, and our systems of justice.

When public officials engage in misconduct, people expect justice, often in the form of a federal investigation and criminal prosecution. In 2020 alone, instances of police violence, including the killings of George Floyd, Rayshard Brooks, and Breonna Taylor and the shooting of Jacob Blake, led to demands for increased police accountability and federal civil rights investigations. footnote1_uoYUstT3pHsS 1 See Rashawn Ray, “How Can We Enhance Police Accountability in the United States?,” in Policy 2020 , Brookings Institution, 2020, https://www.brookings.edu/policy2020/votervital/how-can-we-enhance-police-accountability-in-the-united-states/ [ https://perma.cc/8Z9S-GRCU ]; and Elliot C. McLaughlin, “Breonna Taylor Investigations Are Far from Over as Demands for Transparency Mount,” CNN, September 24, 2020, https://www.cnn.com/2020/09/24/us/breonna-taylor-investigations-remaining/index.html [ https://perma.cc/4SR6-FG85 ]. See also, e.g., U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of California, “Federal, State and Local Law Enforcement Statement on the Death of George Floyd and Riots,” press release, May 31, 2020, https://www.justice.gov/usao-edca/pr/federal-state-and-local-law-enforcement-statement-death-george-floyd-and-riots [ https://perma.cc/V69J-49JR ]; and U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Wisconsin, “Statement Regarding Federal Civil Rights Investigation into Shooting of Mr. Jacob Blake,” press release, January 5, 2021, https://www.justice.gov/usao-edwi/pr/statement-regarding-federal-civil-rights-investigation-shooting-mr-jacob-blake [ https://perma.cc/5GCM-WJ7H ].

For almost all incidents involving violence by law enforcement, there is one federal criminal law that applies: 18 U.S.C. § 242. Unlike nearly all other criminal laws, the statute does not clearly define what conduct is a criminal act. It describes the circumstances under which a person, acting with the authority of government, can be held criminally responsible for violating someone’s constitutional rights, but it does not make clear to officials what particular actions they cannot take. footnote2_wDrtnmvjF0qH 2 Throughout this report, people who could be charged under § 242 are most often referred to as “public officials” or “law enforcement.” The Supreme Court has held, however, that § 242 may also be used to prosecute private actors whose authority to act in a given situation is derived from the state, such as a guard at a privately run prison. United States v. Price, 383 U.S. 787, 794 (1966), https://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-supreme-court/383/787.html [ https://perma.cc/V6FU-ZQR6 ] (“To act ‘under color’ of law does not require that the accused be an officer of the State. It is enough that he is a willful participant in joint activity with the State or its agents.”).

It need not be this way. The federal government must renew our national commitment to civil rights by enacting a criminal statutory framework that protects the fundamental constitutional rights of people who come into contact with public officials, including those who are being arrested or are in custody. footnote3_ukJ6OiJ0n0jC 3 This report proposes changes to federal criminal civil rights laws that would apply to any public official who is acting with governmental authority, including police, prosecutors, judges, correctional officials, and more. Even though the law would apply to any public official who violated it, this report frequently uses the term “law enforcement” or “police” instead of “public officials” in discussions of violence and use of force since law enforcement officers — including police, correctional officials, sheriffs and their deputies, and federal agents — are the public officials most frequently involved in these incidents.

Recent instances of racialized police violence have made this matter all the more urgent. In 2020 alone, police killed more than 1,100 people. footnote4_c4ThIUEBHioI 4 Mapping Police Violence, last accessed February 5, 2021, https://mappingpoliceviolence.org/ . Black Americans are three times more likely to be killed by a police officer than white Americans and nearly twice as likely to be killed as Latino Americans. footnote5_iXkYD4vI2hLK 5 Mapping Police Violence. See also Timothy Williams, “Study Supports Suspicion That Police Are More Likely to Use Force on Blacks,” New York Times , July 7, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/08/us/study-supports-suspicion-that-police-use-of-force-is-more-likely-for-blacks.html (“African-Americans are far more likely than whites and other groups to be the victims of use of force by the police, even when racial disparities in crime are taken into account.”). Police killing is a leading cause of death for Black men in the United States — one in every 1,000 Black men will die at the hands of police. footnote6_zvPnsmc4fBlc 6 Frank Edwards, Hedwig Lee, and Michael Esposito, “Risk of Being Killed by Police Use of Force in the United States by Age, Race-Ethnicity, and Sex,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 116, no.34 (2019): 16793, 16794, https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/116/34/16793.full.pdf [ https://perma.cc/8W88-XWR9 ]. In 2019, Black people represented 24 percent of those killed, despite making up only 13 percent of the population, and although Black people are 3 times more likely to be killed by the police than white people, they are 1.3 times more likely than whites to be unarmed in such incidents. footnote7_cMf7PKBGPneQ 7 Mapping Police Violence. These disparities have led unprecedented numbers of Americans to demand justice for victims of police violence and changes to our criminal justice system. footnote8_khAqnS8nvQga 8 Associated Press–NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, “Widespread Desire for Policing and Criminal Justice Reform,” June 15, 2020, https://apnorc.org/projects/widespread-desire-for-policing-and-criminal-justice-reform/ [ https://perma.cc/HYU2–8J9R ].

In addition to law enforcement brutality, other types of official misconduct shock the conscience. These include sexual misconduct by public officials; officials’ failure to provide medical treatment to people who are under arrest or in jail or prison; and pervasive violence by correctional officers in jails and prisons, where excessive force against incarcerated people is often shielded from public view. footnote9_pPFcR3F045P3 9 Lauren Brooke-Eisen, “The Violence Against People Behind Bars That We Don’t See,” Time , September 1, 2020, https://time.com/5884104/prison-violence-dont-see/ [ https://perma.cc/GLP4-Y9XP ]. The “shocks the conscience” standard is the long-established test for a Fourteenth Amendment violation under Rochin v. California , 342 U.S. 165 (1952), https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/342/165 [ https://perma.cc/ZJ6S-UEDZ ]. Yet cases are rarely prosecuted under § 242. footnote10_shSbjySPLwzk 10 TRAC Reports, “Police Officers Rarely Charged for Excessive Use of Force in Federal Court,” June 17, 2020, https://trac.syr.edu/tracreports/crim/615/ [ https://perma.cc/9LTD-VN9N ] (reporting that “between 1990 and 2019, federal prosecutors filed § 242 charges about 41 times per year on average, with as few as 19 times (2005) and as many as 67 times in one year”). See also U.S. Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division Highlights: 2009–2017 , January 2017, 32–34, https://www.justice.gov/crt/page/file/923096/download [ https://perma.cc/Q3Y3-FQCB ] (reporting that the Civil Rights Division prosecuted 580 law enforcement officials for committing willful violations of civil rights and related crimes between 2009 and 2016); Brian R. Johnson and Phillip B. Bridgmon, “Depriving Civil Rights: An Exploration of 18 U.S.C. 242 Criminal Prosecutions 2001–2006,” Criminal Justice Law Review 34, no. 2 (2009), 196, 204 (observing that prosecutions under § 242 are a relatively rare event, and identifying a very small number of sexual misconduct cases); and Paul J. Watford, “ Screws v. United States and the Birth of Federal Civil Rights Enforcement,” Marquette Law Review 98, no. 1 (2014), 465, 483, https://scholarship.law.marquette.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=5229&context=mulr [ https://perma.cc/737F-XGW4 ].

Congress should make structural changes to our laws to help protect the civil rights of all people. If passed, the legislation recommended in this report would impact how law enforcement, corrections, and other public officials operate nationwide. By more specifically defining what actions violate civil rights, the law would put officials on clearer notice of what is forbidden. In addition, the proposed statute would specifically codify the authority to prosecute fellow officers or supervisors who know a civil rights violation is occurring but fail to intervene something the law already allows. footnote11_w6ZlFOXodn0h 11 See U.S. Department of Justice, “Law Enforcement Misconduct,” updated July 6, 2020, https://www.justice.gov/crt/law-enforcement-misconduct [ https://perma.cc/LW5V-HZ8G ] (“An officer who purposefully allows a fellow officer to violate a victim’s Constitutional rights may be prosecuted for failure to intervene to stop the Constitutional violation. To prosecute such an officer, the government must show that the defendant officer was aware of the Constitutional violation, had an opportunity to intervene, and chose not to do so. This charge is often appropriate for supervisory officers who observe uses of excessive force without stopping them, or who actively encourage uses of excessive force but do not directly participate in them.”). These changes to § 242 should result in modifications to police and law enforcement training across the country and also deter civil rights violations. footnote12_udsroLSugWzc 12 Local law enforcement policies often provide vague, imprecise direction on use of force. These policies may focus on the extent of what is legally permitted rather than on best practices. Police Executive Research Forum, Guiding Principles on Use of Force , 2016, 15–16, https://www.policeforum.org/assets/30%20guiding%20principles.pdf [ https://perma.cc/AQ5S-3Q5F ]. For those public officials and law enforcement officers who do deprive someone of his or her civil rights, these changes would lower some of the barriers to federal prosecutions and civil lawsuits. footnote13_g51EfhO4VM9B 13 The amendments proposed herein could also be made to 42 U.S.C. § 1983, although the specifics of § 1983 are beyond the scope of this report. In either event, a clarification of the civil rights protected by the Constitution and laws of the United States would make more plain which rights are “clearly established” in the context of civil lawsuits. See discussion of qualified immunity below at notes 47–49 and in accompanying text.

What It’s Going to Take to Fix Policing

The former director of President Obama’s community oriented policing strategies office warns that incremental reforms will not be enough.

Biden’s Budget Steps up Spending for Criminal Justice Reform

The administration is leveraging Justice Department grants to state and local governments to try to improve outcomes.

What the Federal Government Can Do to Help Fix Policing in America

Policing is local, but the need for change is so vast that it is a national project.

Informed citizens are democracy’s best defense

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• 04 September 2019

What the data say about police shootings

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Protesters march after a fatal shooting by police in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, in 2016. Credit: William Widmer/New York Times/eyevine

On Tuesday 6 August, the police shot and killed a schoolteacher outside his home in Shaler Township, Pennsylvania. He had reportedly pointed a gun at the officers. In Grants Pass, Oregon, that same day, a 39-year-old man was shot and killed after an altercation with police in the state police office. And in Henderson, Nevada, that evening, an officer shot and injured a 15-year-old suspected of robbing a convenience store. The boy reportedly had an object in his hand that the police later confirmed was not a deadly weapon.

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Edwards, F., Lee, H. & Esposito, M. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 116 , 16793–16798 (2019).

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Mapping Police Violence

Law enforcement agencies across the country are failing to provide us with even basic information about the lives they take. So we collect the data ourselves. Scroll to explore.

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Police have killed 809 Victim people in Location the U.S. so far in Years 2024 .

A live tracker by campaign zero.

Last updated 07/31/2024

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There have been 10 days so far in Victim 2024 when police did not kill Victim people in Location the U.S. .

Killings by police in 2024.

Police killed 7 people on January 01, 2024

Police killed 0 people on January 02, 2024

Police killed 3 people on January 03, 2024

Police killed 0 people on January 04, 2024

Police killed 6 people on January 05, 2024

Police killed 3 people on January 06, 2024

Police killed 1 people on January 07, 2024

Police killed 3 people on January 08, 2024

Police killed 8 people on January 09, 2024

Police killed 4 people on January 10, 2024

Police killed 4 people on January 11, 2024

Police killed 5 people on January 12, 2024

Police killed 3 people on January 13, 2024

Police killed 6 people on January 14, 2024

Police killed 0 people on January 15, 2024

Police killed 0 people on January 16, 2024

Police killed 3 people on January 17, 2024

Police killed 4 people on January 18, 2024

Police killed 0 people on January 19, 2024

Police killed 2 people on January 20, 2024

Police killed 2 people on January 21, 2024

Police killed 2 people on January 22, 2024

Police killed 2 people on January 23, 2024

Police killed 7 people on January 24, 2024

Police killed 5 people on January 25, 2024

Police killed 4 people on January 26, 2024

Police killed 3 people on January 27, 2024

Police killed 3 people on January 28, 2024

Police killed 3 people on January 29, 2024

Police killed 5 people on January 30, 2024

Police killed 1 people on January 31, 2024

Police killed 2 people on February 01, 2024

Police killed 9 people on February 02, 2024

Police killed 5 people on February 03, 2024

Police killed 3 people on February 04, 2024

Police killed 3 people on February 05, 2024

Police killed 6 people on February 06, 2024

Police killed 4 people on February 07, 2024

Police killed 2 people on February 08, 2024

Police killed 1 people on February 09, 2024

Police killed 1 people on February 10, 2024

Police killed 5 people on February 11, 2024

Police killed 7 people on February 12, 2024

Police killed 2 people on February 13, 2024

Police killed 2 people on February 14, 2024

Police killed 2 people on February 15, 2024

Police killed 0 people on February 16, 2024

Police killed 7 people on February 17, 2024

Police killed 2 people on February 18, 2024

Police killed 1 people on February 19, 2024

Police killed 4 people on February 20, 2024

Police killed 3 people on February 21, 2024

Police killed 6 people on February 22, 2024

Police killed 4 people on February 23, 2024

Police killed 6 people on February 24, 2024

Police killed 0 people on February 25, 2024

Police killed 4 people on February 26, 2024

Police killed 1 people on February 27, 2024

Police killed 0 people on February 28, 2024

Police killed 2 people on February 29, 2024

Police killed 5 people on March 01, 2024

Police killed 5 people on March 02, 2024

Police killed 7 people on March 03, 2024

Police killed 2 people on March 04, 2024

Police killed 1 people on March 05, 2024

Police killed 3 people on March 06, 2024

Police killed 4 people on March 07, 2024

Police killed 7 people on March 08, 2024

Police killed 3 people on March 09, 2024

Police killed 5 people on March 10, 2024

Police killed 3 people on March 11, 2024

Police killed 2 people on March 12, 2024

Police killed 5 people on March 13, 2024

Police killed 2 people on March 14, 2024

Police killed 1 people on March 15, 2024

Police killed 7 people on March 16, 2024

Police killed 2 people on March 17, 2024

Police killed 6 people on March 18, 2024

Police killed 7 people on March 19, 2024

Police killed 2 people on March 20, 2024

Police killed 7 people on March 21, 2024

Police killed 2 people on March 22, 2024

Police killed 5 people on March 23, 2024

Police killed 2 people on March 24, 2024

Police killed 4 people on March 25, 2024

Police killed 3 people on March 26, 2024

Police killed 4 people on March 27, 2024

Police killed 1 people on March 28, 2024

Police killed 4 people on March 29, 2024

Police killed 3 people on March 30, 2024

Police killed 8 people on March 31, 2024

Police killed 4 people on April 01, 2024

Police killed 3 people on April 02, 2024

Police killed 2 people on April 03, 2024

Police killed 4 people on April 04, 2024

Police killed 1 people on April 05, 2024

Police killed 5 people on April 06, 2024

Police killed 1 people on April 07, 2024

Police killed 4 people on April 08, 2024

Police killed 5 people on April 09, 2024

Police killed 5 people on April 10, 2024

Police killed 5 people on April 11, 2024

Police killed 6 people on April 12, 2024

Police killed 5 people on April 13, 2024

Police killed 2 people on April 14, 2024

Police killed 2 people on April 15, 2024

Police killed 3 people on April 16, 2024

Police killed 7 people on April 17, 2024

Police killed 4 people on April 18, 2024

Police killed 2 people on April 19, 2024

Police killed 9 people on April 20, 2024

Police killed 4 people on April 21, 2024

Police killed 0 people on April 22, 2024

Police killed 1 people on April 23, 2024

Police killed 1 people on April 24, 2024

Police killed 6 people on April 25, 2024

Police killed 3 people on April 26, 2024

Police killed 6 people on April 27, 2024

Police killed 6 people on April 28, 2024

Police killed 6 people on April 29, 2024

Police killed 7 people on April 30, 2024

Police killed 4 people on May 01, 2024

Police killed 8 people on May 02, 2024

Police killed 4 people on May 03, 2024

Police killed 3 people on May 04, 2024

Police killed 6 people on May 05, 2024

Police killed 4 people on May 06, 2024

Police killed 4 people on May 07, 2024

Police killed 5 people on May 08, 2024

Police killed 2 people on May 09, 2024

Police killed 8 people on May 10, 2024

Police killed 2 people on May 11, 2024

Police killed 3 people on May 12, 2024

Police killed 3 people on May 13, 2024

Police killed 9 people on May 14, 2024

Police killed 9 people on May 15, 2024

Police killed 5 people on May 16, 2024

Police killed 3 people on May 17, 2024

Police killed 5 people on May 18, 2024

Police killed 4 people on May 19, 2024

Police killed 2 people on May 20, 2024

Police killed 2 people on May 21, 2024

Police killed 2 people on May 22, 2024

Police killed 6 people on May 23, 2024

Police killed 5 people on May 24, 2024

Police killed 2 people on May 25, 2024

Police killed 5 people on May 26, 2024

Police killed 5 people on May 27, 2024

Police killed 5 people on May 28, 2024

Police killed 2 people on May 29, 2024

Police killed 7 people on May 30, 2024

Police killed 1 people on May 31, 2024

Police killed 3 people on June 01, 2024

Police killed 3 people on June 02, 2024

Police killed 2 people on June 03, 2024

Police killed 6 people on June 04, 2024

Police killed 4 people on June 05, 2024

Police killed 3 people on June 06, 2024

Police killed 3 people on June 07, 2024

Police killed 6 people on June 08, 2024

Police killed 4 people on June 09, 2024

Police killed 4 people on June 10, 2024

Police killed 6 people on June 11, 2024

Police killed 4 people on June 12, 2024

Police killed 5 people on June 13, 2024

Police killed 3 people on June 14, 2024

Police killed 8 people on June 15, 2024

Police killed 3 people on June 16, 2024

Police killed 3 people on June 17, 2024

Police killed 5 people on June 18, 2024

Police killed 3 people on June 19, 2024

Police killed 8 people on June 20, 2024

Police killed 3 people on June 21, 2024

Police killed 2 people on June 22, 2024

Police killed 1 people on June 23, 2024

Police killed 4 people on June 24, 2024

Police killed 5 people on June 25, 2024

Police killed 6 people on June 26, 2024

Police killed 6 people on June 27, 2024

Police killed 5 people on June 28, 2024

Police killed 4 people on June 29, 2024

Police killed 4 people on June 30, 2024

Police killed 2 people on July 01, 2024

Police killed 6 people on July 02, 2024

Police killed 2 people on July 03, 2024

Police killed 5 people on July 04, 2024

Police killed 3 people on July 05, 2024

Police killed 4 people on July 06, 2024

Police killed 0 people on July 07, 2024

Police killed 4 people on July 08, 2024

Police killed 2 people on July 09, 2024

Police killed 8 people on July 10, 2024

Police killed 5 people on July 11, 2024

Police killed 5 people on July 12, 2024

Police killed 4 people on July 13, 2024

Police killed 2 people on July 14, 2024

Police killed 5 people on July 15, 2024

Police killed 5 people on July 16, 2024

Police killed 4 people on July 17, 2024

Police killed 3 people on July 18, 2024

Police killed 5 people on July 19, 2024

Police killed 4 people on July 20, 2024

Police killed 4 people on July 21, 2024

Police killed 4 people on July 22, 2024

Police killed 1 people on July 23, 2024

Police killed 4 people on July 24, 2024

Police killed 4 people on July 25, 2024

Police killed 1 people on July 26, 2024

Police killed 2 people on July 27, 2024

Police killed 6 people on July 28, 2024

Police killed 2 people on July 29, 2024

Police killed 4 people on July 30, 2024

Police killed 4 people on July 31, 2024

Black people are 2.9x more likely to be killed by police than white people in Location the U.S. .

Police killings per 1 million people in the u.s., 2013–2024.

Race and ethnicity population data from the 2020 Decennial Census

Police have killed 55 more Victim people in Location the U.S. through July in Year 2024 compared to the same period in the previous year.

Police have killed victim people in 49 states and the district of columbia in year 2024 so far..

Fewer police killings

More police killings

Sage Journals

The threshold for being perceived as dangerous, and thereby falling victim to lethal police force, appears to be higher for White civilians relative to their Black or Hispanic peers.

The threshold for being perceived as dangerous, and thereby falling victim to lethal police force, appears to be higher for White civilians relative to their Black or Hispanic peers. - Sage Journals

Protest against police brutality reduces officer-involved fatalities for African Americans and Latinos (but not for Whites)

Protest against police brutality reduces officer-involved fatalities for African Americans and Latinos (but not for Whites) - SSRN

Ten years after Ferguson, data on police killings shows a lack of progress

In the 10 years since Michael Brown Jr. was killed in Ferguson, Missouri, sparking nationwide protests against police brutality , documented police killings in the United States have continued at virtually the same rate, an NBC News analysis of the Mapping Police Violence database found.  

NBC News’ analysis found:

• Police killed 1,000 to 1,300 people each year from 2013 to 2023.
• Documented police killings have risen each year from 2019 to 2023, and if 2024’s current pace holds, it will continue the trend.
• Black people, Native Americans, Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders have been killed at higher rates each year than the general population and higher rates than whites.

“Police violence hasn’t stopped,” said Sirry Alang, professor of Black communities and social determinants of health at the University of Pittsburgh. “It hasn’t decreased, despite all of the attention that we’ve had, socially or politically.”

Brown’s shooting by a police officer on Aug. 9, 2014, led to more than 11 days of protests in Ferguson and came just over three weeks after another Black man, Eric Garner, was killed during an encounter with police in New York. Both Brown and Garner were unarmed.

A 2021 study of police killings by a researcher at the University of North Carolina found that Black victims were less likely to have exhibited mental illness, less likely to have been armed, and more likely to have been attempting to flee compared to their white counterparts.

A grand jury declined to indict the officer who shot Brown, 18, despite the public outcry. And in the decade since, data shows there has not been an increase in charges brought against officers.

Philip Stinson, a professor of criminal justice at Bowling Green State University, has tracked cases of police officers charged with murder or manslaughter resulting from on-duty shootings since 2005. Though his numbers show prosecutors taking up more cases in recent years, Stinson told NBC News the totals are inflated due to numerous instances in which multiple officers were charged over the same incident.

“What I can say is that nothing has changed in the past decade in terms of any statistically significant change in officers being charged with murder or manslaughter resulting from on-duty shooting, and can also say that on-duty police are still killing 900 to 1,100+ people each and every year in this country,” Stinson wrote in an email. “In those regards, policing has not changed and reform efforts have been ineffective in changing those two facts.”

The Mapping Police Violence database is maintained by the police reform nonprofit Campaign Zero, which has been gathering data since 2015. Data is aggregated from publicly accessible media sources and reviewed by Campaign Zero’s researchers. The database shows that documented police killings have steadily increased in recent years.

More than 790 people have been reported killed by law enforcement so far this year, the highest count recorded at this point in a year to date. A similar database from The Washington Post has shown comparable trends.

Experts who study police violence say they have to rely on databases based on media reports because the federal government doesn’t keep comprehensive, reliable data on police violence. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention tracks deaths due to legal intervention, but the figures lag by several years, and a 2021 study published in The Lancet found that it undercounted police killings by more than half.

And while the FBI created a national use-of-force database in 2019, the data is self-reported by individual law enforcement agencies, participation is voluntary, and the agency has yet to release detailed figures on killings.

“We are a country where we can collect data on all kinds of things if we really want to,” said Alang, from the University of Pittsburgh, who called the lack of federal figures a “huge problem.”

The issue of police killings made headlines again in recent weeks after the fatal shooting of Sonya Massey , a 36-year-old Black woman who was shot inside her home after calling police over fears of a prowler. The Illinois sheriff’s deputy who shot Massey has been charged with first-degree murder, aggravated battery with a firearm and official misconduct.

Matthew Danbury is a Data Graphics intern for NBC News.

A better path forward for criminal justice: Police reform

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Rashawn ray and rashawn ray senior fellow - governance studies clark neily clark neily senior vice president - cato institute.

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Below is the first chapter from “A Better Path Forward for Criminal Justice,” a report by the Brookings-AEI Working Group on Criminal Justice Reform. You can access other chapters from the report here .

Recent incidents centering on the deaths of unarmed Black Americans including George Floyd, Daunte Wright, Elijah McClain, Breonna Taylor, William Green, and countless others have continued to apply pressure for wide sweeping police reform. To some, these incidents are the result of a few “bad apples.” 1

To others, they are examples of a system imbued with institutional and cultural failures that expose civilians and police officers to harm. Our article aims to combine perspectives from across the political spectrum on sensible police reform. We focus on short-, medium-, and long-term solutions for reducing officer-involved shootings, racial disparities in use of force, mental health issues among officers, and problematic officers who rotten the tree of law enforcement.

Level Setting

Violent crime has significantly decreased since the early 1990s. However, the number of mass shootings have increased and the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Homeland Security report being worried about domestic terrorism, even within law enforcement. Nonetheless, despite recent increases that some scholars associate with COVID-19 spillovers related to high unemployment and underemployment, violent crime is still much lower than it was three decades ago.

Some scholars attribute crime reductions to increased police presence, while others highlight increases in overall levels of education and employment. In the policy space, the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 and the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 are often noted. We believe there is some validity to all of these perspectives. For example, SWAT deployment has increased roughly 1,400 percent since 1980. Coinciding with the 1986 Drug Bill, SWAT is often deployed for drug raids and no-knock warrants. 2 The death of Breonna Taylor, a 26-year-old Black woman killed in her home in Louisville, Kentucky, is most recently highlighted as an example that demonstrates some of the problems with these tactics. 3

The 1994 Crime Bill ushered the COPS program and an increase in prisons around the country. 4 This legislation also coincided with stop-and-frisk policies and a rise in stand-your-ground laws that disproportionately disadvantaged Black Americans and led to overpolicing. It is an indisputable fact that Black people are more likely to have force used on them. In fact, Black people relative to white people are significantly less likely to be armed or be attacking at the time they are killed by police. This is a historical pattern, including during the 1960s when civil rights leaders were being beaten and killed. However, officer-involved killings, overall, have increased significantly over the past two decades. 5 And, we also know that if drugs were the only culprit, there would be drastically different outcomes for whites. Research shows that while Blacks and whites have similar rates of using drugs, and often times distributing drugs, there are huge disparities in who is arrested, incarcerated, and convicted for drug crimes. However, it is also an indisputable fact that predominately Black communities have higher levels of violent crime. Though some try to attribute higher crime in predominately Black neighborhoods to biology or culture, most scholars agree that inequitable resources related to housing, education, and employment contribute to these statistics. 6   7 8 Research documents that after controlling for segregation and disadvantage, predominately Black and white neighborhoods differ little in violent crime rates. 9

These are complex patterns, and Democrats and Republicans often differ on how America reached these outcomes and what we do about them. As a result, bipartisan police reform has largely stalled. Now, we know that in March 2021 the House of Representatives once again passed The George Floyd Justice in Policing Act. States and localities are also presenting and passing a slew of police reforms, such as in Maryland where the state legislature passed the Maryland Police Accountability Act of 2021. We are not here to debate the merits of these legislations, though we support much of the components, nor are we here to simply highlight low-hanging fruit such as banning no-knock warrants, creating national databases, or requiring body-worn cameras. People across the political aisle largely agree on these reforms. Instead, we aim to provide policy recommendations on larger-scale reforms, which scholars and practitioners across the political aisle agree needs to occur, in order to transform law enforcement in America and take us well into the twenty-first century. Our main themes include accountability, training, and culture.

Accordingly, our recommendations include:

Short-Term Reforms

Reform Qualified Immunity

• Create National Standards for Training and De-escalation

Medium-Term Reforms

Restructure Civilian Payouts for Police Misconduct

Address officer wellness.

Long-Term Reforms

Restructure Regulations for Fraternal Order of Police Contracts

Change police culture to protect civilians and police, short-term reforms.

Qualified immunity is a legal doctrine that courts invented to make it more difficult to sue police and other government officials who have been plausibly alleged to have violated somebody’s rights. 10 11 We believe this doctrine needs to be removed. 12 13 States also have a role to play here. The Law Enforcement Bill of Rights further doubles down on a lack of accountable for bad apples.

We are not out on a limb here. A recent YouGov and Cato poll found that over 60 percent of Americans support eliminating qualified immunity. 14 Over 80 percent of Americans oppose erasing historical records of officer misconduct. In this regard, most citizens have no interest making it more difficult to sue police officers, but police seem to have a very strong interest in maintaining the policy. However, not only do everyday citizens want it gone, but think tanks including The Brookings Institution and The Cato Institute have asserted the same. It is a highly problematic policy.

Though police chiefs might not say it publicly or directly, we have evidence that a significant number of them are quite frustrated by their inability to get rid of the bad apples, run their departments in ways that align with best practices they learn at Federal Law Enforcement Training Centers and National Association of Chiefs of Police, and discipline and terminate officers who deserve to be held accountable and jeopardize not only the public perception of their own department but drag down the social standing of the entire law enforcement profession. As noted above, The Law Enforcement Bill of Rights at the state level needs to be addressed. It further doubles down on qualified immunity and removes accountability for law enforcement.

National Standards for Training and De-escalation

In 2016, Daniel Shaver was fatally shot and killed by officer Philip Brailsford. Brailsford was charged but found not guilty. At the time of the killing, Shaver was unarmed as he lay dead in a hotel hallway. Police experts critiqued Brailsford’s tactics to de-escalate the situation. As he entered the scene, he had both hands on his M4 rifle and eliminated all other tools or de-escalation tactics. Brailsford was fired, tried for murder, and then rehired. He ultimately retired due to PTSD. Highlighting the roles of militarization, mental health, qualified immunity, and other policy-related topics, this incident shows why there is a need for national standards for training and de-escalation. Many officers would have approached this situation differently, suggesting there are a myriad of tactics and strategies being taught.

Nationally, officers receive about 50 hours of firearm training during the police academy. They receive less than 10 hours of de-escalation training. So, when they show up at a scene and pull their weapon, whether it be on teenagers walking down the street after playing a basketball game or someone in a hotel or even a car (like in the killing of Daunte Wright in a Minneapolis suburb), poor decisions and bad outcomes should not be surprising.

Police officers regardless of whether they live in Kentucky or Arizona need to have similar training. Among the roughly 18,000 law enforcement agencies across the country, there is wide variation in the amount of training that officers have to complete as well as what type of training they complete. With the amount of travel that Americans engage in domestically, law enforcement has not kept up to speed with ensuring that officers receive the same training. Consequently, police officers may be put in positions to make bad decisions because of a lack of the implementation of federal standards. Funding can be provided to have federally certified trainers who work with localities within states, counties, and cities.

MEDIUM-TERM REFORMS

From 2015–2019, the 20 largest U.S. municipalities spent over $2 billion in civilian payouts for police misconduct. Rather than the police department budget, these funds mostly come from general funds. 15 So, not only is the officer absolved from civil or financial culpability, but the police department often faces little financial liability. Instead, the financial burden falls onto the municipality; thus, taxpayers. This money could be going toward education, work, and infrastructure.

Not only are the financial settlement often expensive, like the $20 million awarded to William Green’s family in Prince George’s County, Maryland, but the associated legal fees and deteriorated community trust are costly. In a place like Chicago, over the past 20 years, it has spent about $700 million on civilian payouts for police misconduct. New York City spent about $300 million in the span of a few years.

We assert that civilian payouts for police misconduct must be restructured. Indemnification will be eliminated, making the officer responsible, and requiring them to purchase professional liability insurance the exact same way that other occupations such as doctors and lawyers do. This would give insurance companies a strong incentive to identify the problem officers early, to raise their rates just the way that insurance companies raise the rates on a bad driver or a doctor who engages in malpractice. In this regard, the cost of the insurance policy would increase the more misconduct an officer engaged in. Eventually, the worst officers would become uninsurable, and therefore unemployable. This would help to increase accountability. Instead of police chiefs having difficulties removing bad officers through pushback from the Fraternal Order of Police Union, bad officers would simply be unemployable by virtue of the fact that they cannot secure professional liability insurance.

Bottom line, police almost never suffer any financial consequences for their own misconduct.

Shifting civilian payouts away from tax money and to police department insurance policies would instantly change the accountability structure.

Shifting civilian payouts away from tax money and to police department insurance policies would instantly change the accountability structure. Police are almost always indemnified for that misconduct when there is a payout. And, what that means is simply that their department or the city, which is to say us, the taxpayers, end up paying those damages claims. That is absolutely the wrong way to do it.

Most proposals for restructuring civilian payouts for police misconduct have included some form of liability insurance for police departments and/or individual officers. This means shifting the burden from taxpayer dollars to police department insurance policies. If a departmental policy, the municipality should pay for that policy, but the money should come from the police department budget. Police department budget increases should take settlement costs into account and now simply allow for increased budgets to cover premium increases. This is a similar approach to healthcare providers working in a hospital. If individual officers have liability insurance, they fall right in line with other occupations that have professional liability insurance.

Congress could approve a pilot program for municipalities to explore the potential impacts of police department insurance policies versus individual officer liability insurance, and even some areas that use both policies simultaneously. Regardless, it is clear that the structure of civilian payouts for police misconduct needs to change. We believe not only will the change provide more funding for education, work, and infrastructure, but it will increase accountability and give police chiefs and municipalities the ability to rid departments of bad apples that dampen an equitable and transparent cultural environment.

Mental Health Counseling

In this broader discussion of policing, missing is not only the voices of law enforcement themselves, but also what is happening in their own minds and in their own bodies. Recent research has highlighted that about 80 percent of officers suffer from chronic stress. They suffer from depression, anxiety. They have relationship problems, and they get angered easily. One out of six report being suicidal. Another one out of six report substance abuse problems. Most sobering, 90 percent of them never seek help. 16  We propose that officers should have mandatory mental health counseling on a quarterly basis. Normalizing mental health counseling will reduce the stigma associated with it.

It is also important for law enforcement to take a serious look into the role of far-right extremism on officer attitudes and behaviors. There is ample evidence from The Department of Homeland Security showing the pervasive ways that far-right extremists target law enforcement. 17 Academic research examining social dominance ideation among police officers may be a key way to root out extremism during background checks and psychological evaluations. Social dominance can be assessed through survey items and decision-making simulations, such as the virtual reality simulations conducted at the Lab for Applied Social Science Research at the University of Maryland.

Community Policing

Community police is defined in a multitude of ways. One simple way we think about community policing is whether officers experience the community in everyday life, often when they are not on duty. Do they live in the community, send their children to local schools, exercise at the neighborhood gym, and shop at the main grocery store? Often times, police officers engage in this type of community policing in predominately white and affluent neighborhoods but less in predominately Black or Latino neighborhoods, even when they have higher household income levels. Police officers also live farther away from the areas where they work. While this may be a choice for some, others simply cannot afford to live there, particularly in major cities and more expensive areas of the country. Many police officers are also working massive amounts of over time to make ends meet, provide for their families, and send children to college.

Altogether, community policing requires a set of incentives. We propose increasing the required level of education, which can justify wage increases. This can help to reduce the likelihood of police officers working a lot of hours and making poor decisions because of lack of sleep or stress. We also propose requiring that officers live within or near the municipalities where they work. Living locally can increase police-community relations and improve trust. Officers should receive rent subsidies or down payment assistance to enhance this process.

LONG-TERM REFORMS

Unions are important. However, the Fraternity Order of Police Union has become so deeply embedded in law enforcement that it obstructs the ability for equitable and transparent policing, even when interacting with police chiefs. Police union contracts need to be evaluated to ensure they do not obstruct the ability for officers who engage in misconduct to be held accountable. Making changes to the Law Enforcement Bill of Rights at the state helps with this, but the Congress should provide more regulations to help local municipalities with this process.

Police have to be of the people and for the people. Often times, police officers talk about themselves as if they are detached from the community. Officers often view themselves as warriors at war with the people in the communities they serve. Police officers embody an “us versus them” perspective, rather than viewing themselves to be part of the community. 18

It must be a change to police culture regarding how police officers view themselves and view others. Part of changing culture deals with transforming how productivity and awards are allocated. Police officers overwhelmingly need to make forfeitures in the form of arrests, citations, and tickets to demonstrate leadership and productivity. Police officers rarely get credit for the everyday, mundane things they do to make their communities safe and protect and serve. We believe there must be a fundamental reconceptualization of both the mission of police and the culture in which that mission is carried out. Policing can be about respecting individuals and not using force. It is an ethical approach to policing that requires incentives positive outcomes rather than deficits that rewards citations and force.

T here must be a fundamental reconceptualization of both the mission of police and the culture in which that mission is carried out.

Recommendations for Future Research

First, research needs to examine how community policing and officer wellness programs can simultaneously improve outcomes for the community and law enforcement. The either/or model simply does not work any longer. Instead, research should determine what is best for local communities and improves the health and well-being of law enforcement. Second, future research on policing needs to examine the role that protests against police brutality, particularly related to Black Lives Matter protests, are having on reform at the local, state, and federal levels. It is important for policymakers to readily understand the demands of their constituents and ways to create peace and civility.

Finally, research needs to fully examine legislation to reallocate and shift funding away from and within police department budgets. 19  By taking a market-driven, evidence-based approach to police funding, the same methodology can be used that will lead to different results depending on the municipality. Police department budgets should be fiscally responsible and shift funding to focusing on solving violent crime, while simultaneously reducing use of force on low-income and racial/ethnic minority communities. It is a tall order, but federal funding could be allocated to examine all of these important research endeavors. It is a must if the United States is to stay as a world leader in this space. It is clear our country is falling short at this time.

We have aimed to take a deep dive into large policy changes needed for police reform that centers around accountability, finances, culture, and communities. Though there is much discussion about reallocating police funding, we believe there should be an evidence-based, market-driven approach. While some areas may need to reallocate funding, others may need to shift funding within the department, or even take both approaches. Again, with roughly 18,000 law enforcement agencies, there is wide variation in funds provided for policing and how those funds are spent. This is why it is imperative that standards be set at the federal level to help municipalities grapple with this important issue and the others we highlight in this report.

RECOMMENDED READING

Alexander, Michelle. 2010. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness . The New Press.

Brooks, Rosa. 2021. Tangled Up in Blue: Policing the American City : Penguin.

Horace, Matthew. 2019. The Black and the Blue: A Cop Reveals the Crimes, Racism, and Injustice in America’s Law Enforcement . Hatchette Books.

Ray, Rashawn. “ How Should We Enhance Police Accountability in the United States? ” The Brookings Institution, August 25, 2020.

• Ray, Rashawn. “Bad Apples come from Rotten Trees in Policing.” The Brookings Institution. May 30, 2020. Available at: https://www.brookings.edu/blog/how-we-rise/2020/05/30/bad-apples-come-from-rotten-trees-in-policing/
• Neily, Clark. “Get a Warrant.” Cato Institute. October 27, 2020. Available at: https://www.cato.org/blog/get-warrant
• Brown, Melissa and Rashawn Ray. “Breonna Taylor, Police Brutality, and the Importance of #SayHerName.” The Brookings Institution. September 25, 2020. Available at: https://www.brookings.edu/blog/how-we-rise/2020/09/25/breonna-taylor-police-brutality-and-the-importance-of-sayhername/
• Galston, William and Rashawn Ray. “Did the 1994 Crime Bill Cause Mass Incarceration?” The Brookings Institution. August 28, 2020. Available at: https://www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2020/08/28/did-the-1994-crime-bill-cause-mass-incarceration/
• Edwards, Frank, Hedwig Lee, and Michael Esposito. “Risk of Being Killed by Police Use of Force in the United States by Age, Race-Ethnicity, and Sex.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences , 2019. 116(34):16793 LP – 16798.
• Peterson, Ruth D. and Lauren J. Krivo.  Divergent Social Worlds: Neighborhood Crime and the Racial-Spatial Divide , 2010. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.
• Friedson, Michael and Patrick Sharkey. “Violence and Neighborhood Disadvantage after the Crime Decline,”  The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 2015. 660:1, 341–58.
• Jeffrey D. Morenoff and Robert J. Sampson. 1997. “Violent Crime and The Spatial Dynamics of Neighborhood Transition: Chicago, 1970–1990,”  Social Forces  76:1, 31–64.
• Peterson, Ruth D. and Lauren J. Krivo. 2010.  Divergent Social Worlds: Neighborhood Crime and the Racial-Spatial Divide , New York: Russell Sage Foundation.
• Sobel, Nathaniel. “What Is Qualified Immunity, and What Does It Have to Do With Police Reform?” Lawfare. June 6, 2020. Available at: https://www.lawfareblog.com/what-qualified-immunity-and-what-does-it-have-do-police-reform
• Schweikert, Jay. “Qualified Immunity: A Legal, Practical, and Moral Failure.” Cato Institute. September 14, 2020. Available at: https://www.cato.org/policy-analysis/qualified-immunity-legal-practical-moral-failure
• Neily, Clark. “To Make Police Accountable, End Qualified Immunity. Cato Institute. May 31, 2020. Available at: https://www.cato.org/commentary/make-police-accountable-end-qualified-immunity
• Ray, Rashawn. “How to Fix the Financial Gymnastics of Police Misconduct Settlements.” Lawfare. April 1, 2021. Available at: https://www.lawfareblog.com/how-fix-financial-gymnastics-police-misconduct-settlements
• Ekins, Emily. “Poll: 63% of Americans Favor Eliminating Qualified Immunity for Police.” Cato Institute. July 16, 2020. Available at: https://www.cato.org/survey-reports/poll-63-americans-favor-eliminating-qualified-immunity-police#introduction
• Ray, Rashawn. “Restructuring Civilian Payouts for Police Misconduct.” Sociological Forum, 2020. 35(3): 806–812.
• Ray, Rashawn. “What does the shooting of Leonard Shand tell us about the mental health of civilians and police?” The Brookings Institution. October 16, 2019. Available at: https://www.brookings.edu/blog/how-we-rise/2019/10/16/what-does-the-shooting-of-leonard-shand-tell-us-about-the-mental-health-of-civilians-and-police/
• Allen, John et al. “Preventing Targeted Violence Against Faith-Based Communities.” Homeland Security Advisory Council, U.S. Department of Homeland Security. December 17, 2019. Available at: https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/preventing_targeted_violence_against_faith-based_communities_subcommittee_0.pdf >.
• Ray, Rashawn, Clark Neily, and Arthur Rizer. “What Would Meaningful Police Reform Look Like?” Video, Project Sphere, Cato Institute, 2020. Available at: https://www.projectsphere.org/episode/what-would-meaningful-police-reform-look-like/
• Ray, Rashawn. “What does ‘Defund the Police’ Mean and does it have Merit?” The Brookings Institution, June 19, 2020. Available at: https://www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2020/06/19/what-does-defund-the-police-mean-and-does-it-have-merit/

Governance Studies

U.S. States and Territories

Race, Prosperity, and Inclusion Initiative

Allison P. Harris

August 8, 2024

Russell Wheeler

July 23, 2024

Richard Lempert

July 12, 2024

From Michael Brown to Sonya Massey, a decade of police antiblack violence causes grief, worry and coping for Black parents

Assistant Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis

Professor, Dean's Distinguished Professioral Scholar, Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis

Disclosure statement

Seanna Leath receives funding from the National Science Foundation, Russell Sage Foundation, and the Society for Research on Child Development.

Sheretta T. Butler-Barnes receives funding from the National Science Foundation.

Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis provides funding as a member of The Conversation US.

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A decade ago, Michael Brown Jr. , an unarmed Black 18-year-old, was shot and killed by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, a suburb of St. Louis.

The fatal incident began when the officer, Darren Wilson, saw Brown and a friend walking down the middle of a street. Wilson claimed that Brown refused to obey his order to get off the street and a fight ensued. The shooting, Wilson alleged , was in self-defense – a claim that officers have used nationwide to justify antiblack racial violence.

Brown’s death on Aug. 9, 2014, occurred just eight days after his high school graduation and triggered nearly a year of protests across the country. Three months later, a grand jury in Ferguson refused to indict the police officer, a decision that set off more protests and demands for racial justice in policing.

Nearly 10 years later and less than 90 miles away from Ferguson, Sonya Massey , an unarmed, 36-year-old Black woman and mother of two children, called local police on July 6, 2024, to investigate mysterious sounds outside of her home near Springfield, Illinois.

Instead of helping, one of the white officers , Sean Grayson, shot and killed Massey. As her son Malachi told reporters, the officer showed little regard for her humanity during the slaying that was captured on body-camera footage. At the officer’s request, Massey had taken a pot of hot water from the stove. Minutes later, she was killed when Grayson fired three bullets, including one that hit right below her eye.

Unlike Brown’s case in Ferguson, Grayson was fired from the Sangamon County Sheriff’s Office and charged with first-degree murder. Similar to Darren Wilson, he claimed he acted in self-defense.

These two instances of police violence highlight the cyclical nature of police violence against Black Americans – and the growing mistrust among Black Americans for local police.

From 2009-2019 , at least 179 people have been killed by police or while in jail within four counties of the St. Louis region near where Brown died.

These local statistics mirror nationwide patterns of police violence in the U.S. and reveal that Massey and Brown were not exceptions to the norm – but, rather, representative of the everyday racism that pervades American society.

As we have learned through our research of racist violence in Black communities, developing ways to cope is often a necessary reality of living in the United States.

What is racial grief?

With every new incident of racial violence committed by a police officer, Black people tend to experience a collective sense of racial grief.

That grief is defined by the U.S. National Institutes of Health as an “individuals’ cognitive, emotional, physical, and spiritual responses to loss due to racism and intersectional violence .”

In addition, many Black parents experience a type of anticipatory grief and stress due to the potential racial violence their children may encounter in their lifetime.

For instance, in a 2022 study , researchers found Black pregnant women experienced feelings of fear, stress and anxiety about police brutality toward their children – before their children were born. Even mothers who reported positive experiences with police officers anticipated negative treatment toward their children based on their race.

Racial grief can represent a coping response that allows Black parents to emotionally and cognitively process incidents of racial violence in community with others.

In our 2022 study , one mother told us:

“ I can’t watch the videos anymore. It is a living nightmare, and I do not need those images, because they cannot be unseen. It takes a heavy toll on me. I cope with it in therapy. I cry. I give myself space to feel my feelings. I talk with my partner about it. It gives me a sense of pain and purpose at the same time. ”

How do Black parents respond to racial violence

When parents think about how they can prepare their children for the racial discrimination they may encounter in their daily lives, many use what is known as racial socialization to improve they and their children’s adaptive coping responses in response to racial bias and discrimination.

Racial socialization refers to the process by which parents instill race-related messages and values in their children. It is considered by psychologists to be one of the most critical developmental processes for Black youth and includes both implicit and explicit practices.

For instance, some parents monitor the content of their children’s social media and limit their exposure to racial violence. Other parents balance messages on racial discrimination with affirmations that their children are loved, worthy and valued.

Common racial socialization messages include statements such as: “You should be proud to be Black.” A message on racial bias might involve: “You may be evaluated by higher standards than your white peers.”

Overall, these messages are intended to elicit racial and cultural pride, while also encouraging Black youth to be cautious and aware of the ongoing realities of racial violence.

In a forthcoming study we have on how Black parents in Missouri talk to their adolescents about race, one mother shared:

“ Like with the Sonya Massey thing, my daughter saw the video and she was like – ‘but she didn’t do anything wrong.’ That’s usually what happens. Like I told her, she called the police for help and they end up killing her. It happens sometimes because they act like they’re scared of Blacks for some reason. I feel like we are not progressing in America with this racism thing. ”

While Black parents and their children continue to resist racial discrimination through their everyday practices of care, love and joy , there remains a critical need to invest in the health and well-being of Black communities through structural policy changes in education, health care and local government.

• Michael Brown
• Police violence
• Police brutality
• Coping with grief
• Black communities
• Racial trauma

Service Delivery Consultant

Newsletter and Deputy Social Media Producer

College Director and Principal | Curtin College

Head of School: Engineering, Computer and Mathematical Sciences

Educational Designer

Perceptions Are Not Reality: What Americans Get Wrong About Police Violence

Executive Summary

This report presents original findings from the most comprehensive study of the accuracy of public perception with respect to the prevalence and racial distribution of police use of force.

The report is divided into four main parts:

• Part 1 outlines the study’s theoretical framework and expectations regarding the accuracy of public estimates of police use of force. In brief, it argues that because of a lack of direct personal experience and information for assessing the prevalence of police force and racial bias, Americans must rely on media coverage to estimate how serious police violence is. This renders public estimates susceptible to media distortion; and this perceptual distortion is further exacerbated by individuals’ political orientations and biases.
• Part 2 presents the first empirical analysis of new data from our original survey, which asks U.S. respondents to estimate various police use-of-force statistics. The findings reveal significant overestimates of the prevalence of nonlethal use-of-force incidents—both in general and as to those involving black Americans. Respondents also significantly overestimated both the black and unarmed shares of fatal police-shooting victims. These overestimates tend to be largest among liberal respondents.
• Part 3 introduces the study’s embedded experimental design, which tests whether correcting survey respondents’ misestimates leads respondents to adjust their perceptions of police brutality and related policy preferences. Encouragingly, the overall findings indicate that receiving correct information significantly reduced inaccurate perceptions of police brutality and racism and increased support for policing-centered, anticrime public policies. These effects were also greatest for liberals and respondents who gave moderate-to-large overestimates, on average.
• Part 4 discusses the implications of the study’s findings for news media coverage of police use of force. It proposes recommendations for journalists and argues for the aggressive and frequent use of social media context and fact-checking tools as a means of combating public misperceptions of policing.

Introduction

Recently, there has been a dramatic increase in media and public attention to police brutality and racial bias. By some measures, the volume of media references to these topics has been greater over the past decade than ever before.[ 1 ] Google search behavior shows that Americans are consuming this messaging ( Figure 1 ), and their attitudes toward police—particularly Democrats’ and liberals’ attitudes—have responded accordingly.[ 2 ] Confidence in police has never been lower,[ 3 ] while antipolice sentiment,[ 4 ] perceptions of police brutality[ 5 ] and racism,[ 6 ] and support for defunding the police have never been higher.[ 7 ]

So much have perceptions of racist policing grown that, as of 2021, more than half (52%) of Democrats felt that levels of racism were greater among police officers than other societal groups (up from 35% in 2014). Fears of the police among black Americans[ 8 ] have increased to the point that, in 2020, roughly 74% of black respondents to a Quinnipiac University poll said that they “personally worry” about being the victim of police brutality, compared with 64% and 57% who said so in 2018 and 2016, respectively.

Yet these trends in media coverage and public perceptions seem divorced from empirical reality. A stark illustration of this was provided by a nationally representative survey conducted in 2019 by the Skeptic Research Center,[ 9 ] which found that nearly 33% of people—including 44% of liberals—thought that 1,000 or more unarmed black men alone were killed by police in 2019. In fact, according to the Mapping Police Violence (MPV) database, 29 unarmed black (vs. 44 white) men were killed by police that year.[ 10 ] Further, whereas the average Skeptic Research Center respondent thought that 48% of all people killed by police that year were black—an estimate that reached a high of 55% among liberal respondents—the true proportion (25%) was far lower.[ 11 ]

Meanwhile, an earlier Qualtrics survey conducted by Manhattan Institute fellow Eric Kaufmann found that 80% of black respondents and 60% of highly educated white liberal respondents thought that young black men were more likely to be fatally shot by police than to die in a car accident.[ 12 ] Actually, in 2020, the year the survey was fielded, black men between the ages of 18 and 34 were more than 17 times more likely to die in motor-vehicle accidents (38.4 deaths per 100,000) than to be shot to death by police (2.2 per 100,000).[ 13 ]

More generally, and despite 45% of the public (including 67% of Democrats) thinking that police violence against the public is an “extremely” or a “very serious” problem, instances of police use of force remain exceedingly rare.[ 14 ] What data can be gathered[ 15 ] show that rates of fatal officer-involved shootings (FOIS) in major U.S. cities are generally lower in the past 10 years than in decades past.

Data from the MPV database ( Figure 2 ) further reveal that numbers and rates of FOIS among the country’s four largest racial/ethnic groups have either declined or remained stable across the 2013–22 period.

Rather than a response to actual increases in use of force, the swing of public opinion against the police appears to be a largely media-driven phenomenon—one apparently facilitated by the rapid adoption of smartphones and social media and the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement.

This report considers whether the unprecedented media attention given to police use of force has distorted public perceptions of its frequency and racial distribution, thereby making the phenomenon appear more pervasive and severe than is justified by the data.

It addresses three main questions:

• First, how accurate are people’s estimates of police use-of-force statistics? Though findings from the aforementioned Skeptic survey—one of the only existing surveys to address this question—suggest that they tend to be highly inaccurate, this report provides a more thorough investigation into the matter.
• Second, do such (mis)estimates directly inform people’s assessment of the severity of police brutality and racism, as well as their policing policy preferences? While intuitively that may be the case, it’s also plausible that overestimates of police brutality and racism are the result of political or social identities, reflecting or reinforcing preexisting views rather than independently guiding perceptions and preferences.
• Third, do people adjust their perceptions of police brutality and associated policy preferences when their misestimates are corrected?

These questions are important because, inadvertently or otherwise, news organizations, journalists, and political elites may be contributing to misperceptions about police use of force—misperceptions that could have, and likely have had, significant social costs.[ 16 ]

For instance, negative media portrayals of police and the public outrage that those portrayals foster can cause police officers to engage in less proactive policing, which, in turn, can lead to increases in crime.[ 17 ] Negative media portrayals can also weaken the morale of police officers and decrease the desirability of the profession, making it harder for police departments to retain and recruit quality personnel and forcing them to lower hiring standards[ 18 ] to fill staffing vacancies.[ 19 ] 

The erosion of the police’s public legitimacy can also sway or pressure local governments to consider or enact reckless de-policing policies[ 20 ] that compromise public safety—as was the case following the murder of George Floyd.[ 21 ] It could also motivate greater lawbreaking, as people are less likely to comply with the law if they perceive that the police routinely flout it.[ 22 ] In addition, misperceptions of police use of force can lead to unwarranted fears of being victimized by police, discouraging people from cooperating with the police or reporting crimes and suspicious activities.[ 23 ]

Insofar as these negative consequences are rooted in misperceptions of the prevalence and severity of police violence, this report brings good news. Since misperceptions can be corrected, this report suggests that at least some of these negative consequences could be mitigated, if not avoided, if news organizations and political leaders covered or discussed policing incidents more responsibly.

Part 1: Literature Review and Theoretical Expectations

The role of news media in public (mis)perceptions of “police violence”.

People often lack direct experience with the social phenomena that they are asked to assess in public opinion surveys. This is likely especially the case with respect to police use of force, which few Americans will ever directly observe or encounter. Therefore, when asked to appraise the importance, risk, or severity of a given phenomenon, the responses that people give are typically based on whatever information is at the top of their minds at that moment—or what is most convenient for their social identities and political orientations.[ 24 ]

People rely on news media as a source of informational cues, and media coverage is often the only window available through which the public can learn about phenomena outside their direct experience.[ 25 ] It is also the primary channel through which political leaders communicate to the public, which further helps people determine or become aware of an issue’s relative importance.[ 26 ] Thus, the more attention that news media and political leaders give to an issue, the more the public is likely to regard it as important. Additionally, the more the media reports on a given phenomenon, the easier it is for people to retrieve examples of that phenomenon from memory. This easy retrieval, in turn, is a cue to the phenomenon’s broader societal prevalence.

In the context of race, the availability of informational cues may explain why Americans tend to perceive greater discrimination against blacks and worse race relations in the U.S. at large than in their own communities—i.e., their appraisals of local events are less reliant on news media and elite messaging and are more informed by what they see around them.[ 27 ] When it comes to appraising the prevalence and severity of racism and race relations more broadly, however, most people have little choice but to rely on news media and political leaders. Therefore, it’s likely no coincidence that as media and political attention to racial discrimination increases, so, too, do public perceptions of its severity.[ 28 ]

Expectations for Public Estimates of Police Use of Force

As with racial discrimination, increases in public perceptions of the seriousness and prevalence of police brutality closely track increases in media coverage of that issue. To the extent that these perceptions relate to or influence people’s estimates of the prevalence of police force against the public, this study expects that the average respondent will significantly overestimate:

• The percentage of Americans subjected to nonlethal force at the hands of the police in a typical year
• The number of Americans shot and killed by police in a typical year
• The share of unarmed Americans shot and killed by police in a typical year.

However, the media and political messaging on police brutality that the public receives are hardly race-neutral. Data from the ProQuest news article database ( Figure 3 ) show that the average and median unarmed black (fatal) police-shooting victim returns nearly 11 and 21 times the number of news articles, respectively, as the average and median unarmed white (fatal) victim.

Black victims were also four times more likely than white victims to be featured in the New York Times . These disparities are not confined to printed news coverage. As shown in the right panel of Figure 3, black victims were more than five times more likely than white victims to be mentioned at least once during an MSNBC, CNN, or Fox News broadcast.

This indicates that media messaging on police brutality is overwhelmingly focused on black victims, despite blacks constituting just a quarter (if a disproportionate one) of those killed by the police in a typical year.[ 29 ] This likely explains why the average respondent in the Skeptic survey estimated that 48% of those killed by police in 2019 were black. When Americans are asked to provide such estimates, the cases that spring to mind likely consist largely, if not entirely, of black faces.

Accordingly, when respondents are additionally asked to give estimates for blacks and whites, this study predicts that:

• Respondents’ overestimation of the percentage of Americans who reported being subjected to nonlethal force in a typical year will be significantly larger when the Americans are identified as black than when identified as white
• They will significantly overestimate the black share of fatal police-shooting victims in a typical year and underestimate the white share
• Their overestimates of the unarmed share of fatal policing-shooting victims will be significantly larger when the victims are identified as black than when they are identified as white.

Political Orientation’s Influence on Estimation Accuracy

So far, all the theoretical predictions in this study have been blind to the respondents’ political orientations. This is because people’s estimates should basically be shaped by the same information environment. In other words, liberals and conservatives are all expected to overestimate the criteria in question, on average.

However, it’s also reasonable to expect that the magnitude of overestimates will be larger among liberals than conservatives. Not only are perceptions of pervasive police brutality and racism more congenial[ 30 ] to the moral-ideological orientations of liberals than conservatives, but they are also likely to be more interested in and attentive to (or at least less avoidant of) such information.[ 31 ] Also, the political (or Democratic Party) leaders and elites liberals follow are more likely to communicate it.[ 32 ]

What little data are available also suggest that liberals do indeed have less accurate perceptions with respect to police use of force than conservatives. As noted earlier, the Skeptic survey found that liberals overestimated both the number of unarmed black men killed by police and the black share of police homicides in 2019 to a greater degree than conservatives.

Additionally, while ideological identification was not measured, data from a 2021 Axios/Ipsos survey ( Figure 4 ) show that Democrats were four times more likely than Republicans to believe that police shootings of “Black or Brown youths” had gotten worse over the previous year.[ 33 ]

In fact, and regardless of the data source or definition of “youth” adopted, there were no such increases in the number of FOIS victims among these demographics (Figure 4, right panel) in 2019–21. To the contrary, fatal police shootings in this demographic either declined or remained roughly steady.

This context informs this study’s expectation that liberals will give larger overestimates of all nonlethal and lethal use-of-force criteria—especially those for black victims—than conservatives. Further, while conservatives are expected to give estimates that are closer to the actual number, on average, we expect rates of underestimation to be higher among them than among Democrats and liberals.

Do Perceptions Respond to New, Correct Information?

When people are provided with facts or correct information about a social condition or phenomena, do they update their perceptions accordingly? This is a critical question for the current study. If people cling to their perceptions of police brutality and racism despite being presented with evidence to the contrary, it would indicate that these perceptions are primarily driven by political or social motivations, as opposed to being a product of ignorance, media bias, and general information heuristics.

However, an emerging consensus from experimental research is that people do “typically update their beliefs in the direction of the evidence they receive.”[ 34 ] This has been evident in studies examining the accuracy of people’s perceptions of crime trends,[ 35 ] the degree of racial inequality and discrimination,[ 36 ] and the characteristics and economic contributions of immigrants to the United States.[ 37 ] Such findings suggest that that while social and political motivations do bear on individuals’ beliefs, there is also an inherent motivation to hold accurate beliefs about the world, leading to a willingness to revise their beliefs and perceptions when presented with sufficient evidence.[ 38 ] 

Because this study expects all respondents to initially overestimate the prevalence of police use of force and the proportion of black American victims, I predict that respondents who are subsequently shown official estimates of these statistics (i.e., the treatment) will perceive police brutality and racism to be rarer and less of a problem than those who are not shown official estimates.

However, some respondents will inevitably have larger overestimates than others, some will be roughly accurate, and some will even underestimate. It is wrong to expect the treatment to have the same effects on all misestimates. In other words, the more a respondent overestimated the official use-of-force statistics, the more that respondent will, after treatment, perceive less police brutality and racism relative to the untreated.

If individuals’ policing-related policy preferences are at least partly based on their perceptions of the prevalence and severity of police brutality and racism, it follows that respondents who receive corrective information (i.e., the “treatment” group) should update not only their perceptions but also their policy preferences.

Political science studies that compare the policy preferences of “informed” or accurate respondents with the uninformed or inaccurate generally offer strong conceptual support for this assumption.[ 39 ] An example of this kind of analysis is shown in Figure 5 , which compares the policing-related policy attitudes of those who thought that police shootings of “Black or Brown youths” had improved, neither improved nor worsened, or worsened over the previous year. Even when accounting for party identification, race, and other demographic/background variables, those who gave the (incorrect) response of “worsened” are 25–30 points more likely to oppose increasing police funding, 24–28 points more likely to support the “defund the police” movement, and 15–20 points more likely to support diverting police budgets to community policing and social services, compared with those who gave an “improved” or “neither improved nor worsened” response.

Of course, cross-sectional analyses of this sort hardly prove that policy preferences are causally downstream from perceptions. Both perceptions and preferences could stem from other variables whose influences are not captured in the model, such as ideology and political or social identity. Findings from experimental research are thus generally more probative. Esberg, Mummolo, and Westwood note that, with rare exceptions, they generally show that “correcting mistaken beliefs about seemingly relevant facts does little to alter related policy preferences.”[ 40 ]

Most relevant to this study is a recent experiment by Schiff et al. that tested whether providing information about the number of fatal police shootings in respondents’ cities influenced their support for varying police reforms. These authors concluded that this informational intervention had no significant effects on support for reforms—neither overall nor as a function of the magnitude and direction of misestimates—that were most strongly associated with partisanship.[ 41 ]

Other studies have similarly concluded that though receiving information can meaningfully affect perceptions, this effect does not carry over to policy preferences.[ 42 ] On the other hand, some earlier and more recent studies do show[ 43 ] that people adjust their policy preferences in the face of belief-discordant evidence.[ 44 ]

This Study’s Prediction: Policy Preferences Can Change

Given this conflicting evidence, predictions for the current study are not straightforward. But on the assumption that (mis)estimates of police use-of-force statistics do causally influence policing policy attitudes, respondents can be expected to update the latter when presented with estimation-corrective information.

Specifically, relative to the uncorrected respondents (i.e., the control group), estimation-corrected respondents who generally overestimated (underestimated) the official use-of-force statistics will express greater support for (opposition to) traditional policing-centered anticrime measures. The effects of corrective information on policy attitudes are also expected to grow as the magnitude of over- and underestimates increases. Finally, if corrective information shifts policy attitudes by shifting general perceptions of the problem and severity of police brutality and racism, shifts in perceptions are expected to at least partially mediate shifts in policy attitudes.

Part 2: The Current Study’s Results and Analysis

Recruiting a closely representative sample.

To test the predictions outlined in this report’s previous section, all of which were preregistered via the Open Science Framework (OSF) portal,[ 45 ] I recruited a sample of 1,508 U.S. adult (18+) respondents via the crowdsourcing platform Prolific. Recruitment began on February 13 and concluded on February 16, 2023. Although not a random sample of the U.S. population, respondents were recruited using cross-stratified demographic quotas[ 46 ] to produce a sample that approximates the broader U.S. population in terms of age, sex, and ethnicity.

This similarity is confirmed in Table 1 , which compares the demographic composition of recruited Prolific respondents with adult (18+) respondents from the 2022 Current Population Survey and the 2022 Cooperative Election Study. While Prolific adults are somewhat younger than adults in the broader population (median age=44 vs. 47), the sex and ethnicity distributions of the former closely match the latter.

For other variables, though, the correspondence is (unsurprisingly)[ 47 ] much weaker. Specifically, Prolific adult respondents report lower household incomes, are less likely to be married (37.4% vs. 51.5%), are more likely to have BA degrees (55.9% vs. 37.7%), and are far more likely to identify as Democrats (64% vs. 41%) and liberals (57.6% vs. 31.9%) than adults in the broader population. Consequently, Prolific sample means and variances for certain outcome variables are likely to meaningfully differ from those observed in the general population.

Nonetheless, research indicates that relationships and treatment effects observed in convenience and less representative samples do typically replicate in nationally representative samples.[ 48 ] Therefore, we can be confident that the substantive results of the current study will generalize to the broader U.S. adult population.

Estimating and Analyzing Police–Public Interaction

Estimates of nonlethal force.

To find respondents’ perceptions on police use of force, the first estimation questions begin by informing respondents about the 2018[ 49 ] Police–Public Contact[ 50 ] (PPC) survey, which the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) “conducted on large nationally representative sample of 139,692 U.S. respondents ages 16 and older to measure and better understand the public’s interactions with police over the previous 12 months.”[ 51 ]

Respondents were then separately[ 52 ] asked to estimate, using their “best guess and without looking up the answer,”[ 53 ] the percentage of all, white, and black PPC respondents who reported being stopped or approached by police over the previous 12 months. Then they were separately asked to estimate the shares of these respondents who subsequently reported being subjected to nonlethal force, which was defined for them (and by BJS) as kicking, hitting, pushing, grabbing, tasering, pepper-spraying, handcuffing, or gun-pointing.

Figure 6 charts the average estimates for the overall sample and for the three ideological groups. Bars in the final rows of each column report the benchmark estimates (i.e., the “correct” answers) from PPC.

Beginning with the left panel, we see that most respondents significantly overestimated the share of PPC respondents who reported being stopped/approached by police over the previous year. On average, respondents believed that such interactions were reported 2.5 times more frequently than they actually were, a pattern that was consistent across ideological groups.

When considering race-specific estimates of reported police-initiated contact, the Prolific survey adults’ estimates for white PPC respondents tended to be closer to the mark, while those for black PPC respondents were considerably less accurate. Specifically, respondents overestimated the white reporting rate by 4 points and overestimated the black rate by 30 points. While this pattern was evident across political ideologies, it was most pronounced among liberals, who overestimated the black rate by an additional 9 points, compared with conservatives.

A very similar pattern of overestimation is observed in estimates of the prevalence of nonlethal force (middle panel). While the actual report of such force among those stopped or approached by the police in the 2018 PPC survey was just 3%, the average respondent’s estimate was more than seven times higher. Estimates for black PPC respondents were, again, even less accurate in absolute terms. Whereas 6% of blacks who reported police-initiated contact reported being subjected to nonlethal force, the average respondent estimated that 30% did so, with liberal respondents again overestimating more than conservatives.

Taking both these and the earlier police-initiated contact estimates into account, the average respondent’s (implicit)[ 54 ] estimate of the share of all blacks who reported experiencing nonlethal force (right panel) was nearly 23 times—and those of liberals and conservatives 26 and 17 times—the actual rate reported in the PPC survey.

In conclusion, respondents[ 55 ] of all political backgrounds significantly overestimated the prevalence of police use of nonlethal force. This error, however, tended to be larger for estimates of force reported by black Americans and larger still for liberal than for conservative respondents.

Estimates of Fatal Officer-Involved Shootings (FOIS)

A second estimation series was designed to measure the accuracy of respondents’ perceptions of FOIS,[ 56 ] including their distribution across racial groups. The survey begins by informing respondents that, according “to data from the U.S. Census Bureau, the U.S. population averaged 326.5 million people between 2015 and 2022.”[ 57 ] This was done to ensure that respondents were not ignorant of the U.S. population size and that estimates have the same meaning[ 58 ] for all respondents.

After again reminding them to use their “best guess and without looking up the answer,” respondents were asked to estimate the number of people “shot and killed by police in the U.S. each year on average between 2015 and 2022.”[ 59 ] To benchmark these estimates, I use the average annual number of fatal shooting victims (1,012) reported in the Washington Post ’s (WP) Police Shootings database. Average and median estimates for the sample overall and for each of the three ideological groups are presented in Figure 7A .

Earlier, it was predicted that respondents, in general, would overestimate the number of fatal police-shooting victims, with liberals doing so to a greater degree than conservatives. However, the data do not support these predictions.

Although the average respondent estimate (65,934 deaths) vastly exceeded the Washington Post benchmark (1,012), this is largely due to respondents with extreme overestimates, which were extremely high outliers.[ 60 ] Therefore, the median, which is less influenced by such outliers, offers a more accurate account of respondents’ estimation tendencies. Quite unexpectedly, the median estimate (360 FOIS victims) falls well short of the benchmark number. Additionally, while the median estimate among liberals (500) was higher than that of conservatives (200), it was also significantly closer to the Washington Post benchmark, making it the more accurate of the two.

Figure 7B further elucidates this pattern by categorizing the continuous estimation scale into six ranges.

We observe that 64% of all respondents gave estimates of fewer than 1,000 average annual FOIS victims, including 25% who gave estimates of fewer than 100. Meanwhile, in the other direction, 11% of respondents gave estimates of 10,000 or more. These data also indicate that conservatives were significantly more likely to place into the “< 100” estimation category than liberals (35% vs. 19%), while liberals were twice as likely to place into the “10,000+” category as conservatives.

All told, these results are mostly at odds with expectations. Rather than significantly overestimating, the median respondent significantly underestimated the average annual number of FOIS deaths across the 2015–22 period. And while conservatives were, as predicted, more likely to underestimate than liberals, and liberals more likely to overestimate than conservatives (see Figure 7B), liberals’ estimates were actually more accurate (i.e., closer to the benchmark) overall than conservatives’ estimates.

These findings are difficult to square with those observed in the 2021 Skeptic survey, wherein 44% of liberals vs. 20% of conservatives estimated that 1,000 or more unarmed blacks alone were killed by police in 2019. This discordance[ 61 ] suggests that estimates of this sort are highly sensitive to differences[ 62 ] in question format and measurement scales. Future researchers of this topic should be mindful that estimates of the same phenomenon are unlikely to be reliably consistent across different measurement designs.

Estimates of the Racial Distribution and Unarmed Share of FOIS Victims

After estimating the average annual number of FOIS victims, respondents were informed[ 63 ] that, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau, non-Hispanic white Americans, black Americans, and Asian Americans constituted an average of 61%, 12.5%, and 5.5% of the U.S. population, respectively, during 2015–22. With their estimates of the annual average number of FOIS victims given as a reference, they were then asked to estimate the white, black, Asian, and “other”[ 64 ] (i.e., nonwhite, nonblack, non-Asian) share of all police-shooting victims in an average year during 2015–22. Finally, respondents were separately[ 65 ] asked to estimate the average “unarmed” share (i.e., those unarmed when killed) of each group’s FOIS victims during this period.

As predicted, Figure 7C shows that the average respondent substantially underestimated the white share and substantially overestimated the black (and, if to a lesser extent, the Asian) share of FOIS victims.

Specifically, according to the Washington Post Police Shootings database, white, black, and Asian Americans, respectively, constituted an average of 51%, 27%, and 2% of racially identified[ 66 ] shooting victims during 2015–22. But in the estimation of the average respondent, as found by this survey, white Americans constituted an average of 23% (an underestimate of –28 points), black Americans 54% (+27 points), and Asian Americans 8% (+6 points) of all victims. Further, while respondents across all ideological groups overestimated and underestimated the black and white shares, respectively, liberal respondents did so to a significantly greater degree than conservatives.

Just as they misestimated the distribution of FOIS victims’ race, respondents (particularly liberals) similarly misestimated the unarmed share of fatal police-shooting victims.

Per the Washington Post data, an average of 7% of all FOIS victims—including 6% of white, 10% of black, and 14% of Asian[ 67 ] victims—were unarmed when shot and killed by police during 2015–22. The average respondent, however, overshot these benchmarks by 18–34 points, with the largest average overestimates given for black victims (+34). Overestimates were also again greater—generally double in size—among liberal than conservative respondents. For instance, whereas the average conservative estimated that 27% of black victims were unarmed, the average liberal estimated that more than half (53%) were.

In sum, respondents[ 68 ] generally underestimate what the Skeptic data depict, or have a much more reasonable sense of the number of FOIS victims than what is depicted in the Skeptic data. Yet the current results also suggest that their estimates of the racial distribution of fatal police-shooting victims and of the extent that such victims are unarmed are significantly distorted. This is especially the case among liberal respondents. As will be described later, misestimates of these distributions may be just as important as—if not more important than—respondents’ perceptions of the problem and their policy preferences as to the sheer volume of cases.

A Secondary Analysis

While this report’s primary analyses focus on estimations related to police use of force and its racial disparities, it is important to note that the concern that respondents associate with their estimates—i.e., whether they consider perceived levels of force and racial disparities “serious problems”—may be shaped by their beliefs about the necessity of police use of force and what they think might be the cause of racially disparate policing outcomes.[ 69 ]

With this in mind, respondents were additionally asked to estimate: (a) the share of all violent crimes reported in 2021 attributed to offenders of different racial groups; and (b) the violent-offender share of the U.S. prison population. I briefly summarize the main results here and relegate a more complete and detailed discussion of these secondary analyses to Appendixes A.3 and A.4.

The first of these analyses found that respondents generally underestimated both the black and white American share of 2021 violent crimes reported to the FBI’s National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS). Liberals underestimated the black share to a greater extent than conservatives; conservatives underestimated the share attributable to white offenders to a greater extent than liberals.[ 70 ]

In the second analysis, respondents underestimated the violent-offender share of the U.S. state prison population, with this tendency being most pronounced among liberals. While BJS puts the share of violent offenders at a little under 60%, nearly half (48%) of all liberal respondents gave estimates of 40% or less. In contrast, while conservatives were more likely to give large (80%+) overestimates, the share of conservative respondents (14%) who did so was comparatively tiny.

All in all, these secondary analyses reveal patterns of survey respondents having inaccurate estimates. These patterns could inform the extent that people are alarmed by police use of force and racial disparities in policing outcomes. Moreover, they provide additional evidence that estimation inaccuracies are generally universal but differ in degree, on account of political ideology.

A comprehensive summary of these estimation inaccuracies and ideological differences is provided in Appendix A.5.

Part 3: Applying the Treatment to Respondents’ Estimates

So far, this study has shown that respondents’ perceptions of police use of force and its victims are often disconnected from reality and that the perceptions of conservatives tend to (with some exceptions) be mildly to moderately more accurate than those of liberals. These findings are interesting, but we might ask, “So what?” Do the misperceptions that I document have any practical significance? Do they inform people’s opinions of the severity and scale of police violence and their issue-related policy preferences? Or are they nothing more than wild guesses and expressive partisanship?

Experimental Design and Procedure

To answer those questions, we must study how attitudes change in the face of information that conflicts with those attitudes. To this end, after completing the estimation modules, respondents were randomly assigned to either a treatment or control group. Those assigned to the treatment group were told that they’d next be shown “a number of charts that visualize how far off (their) estimates were from official estimates,” which were “generally derived from data reported by the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics.” Then respondents were shown individualized visual juxtapositions of all their explicit and implicit (derived from their explicit) criterion estimates with the official benchmarks.

Examples of the first two individualized visualization pages—pertaining to estimates of the use of force—are displayed in Figure 8 . In this specific case, the respondent would first be made aware of the fact that, among other biases, his/her estimate of the percentage of all black PPC respondents who reported being stopped by the police and reported being subjected to nonlethal force was more than 40 times larger than what was reported in the 2018 PPC survey. The next visualization page would inform the respondent that he/she substantially overestimated the annual number and share of black FOIS victims as well as the number and share of black victims who were shot unarmed.

A third and final visualization page (see Appendix B.5) would compare the respondent’s estimates of racial-group violent-crime shares and the violent-offender share of the state prison population with their respective benchmark estimates.[ 71 ]

After viewing all three pages, treatment-group respondents were subsequently asked—in multiple-choice format—to recollect several of the official estimates that they were shown. “From the information (they) just reviewed,” respondents were asked to indicate: (a) the percentage of white and black Americans who reported being both stopped or approached by the police and being subjected to nonlethal force in 2018; (b) the number of unarmed white, black, and Asian Americans who were shot and killed by police each year on average between 2015 and 2022; and (c) the percentage of all violent crimes in 2021 that were committed by white, black, and Asian Americans. This was done to test and reinforce the absorption of the information, but also to identify respondents in need of “re-treatment,” as respondents who selected an incorrect answer option[ 72 ] were notified of their error and shown the correct answer.

Respondents assigned to the control group, in contrast, received no such visual juxtapositions. They were simply directed to an honesty check[ 73 ] and proceeded to answer questions about the prevalence and severity of police violence and their support for specific policing policy proposals. These attitudinal measures are further described below.

How I Measured the Survey Results

Respondents’ general perceptions of police brutality and racism.

Upon completing an honesty check, respondents were asked to respond to six questions and statements designed to capture their appraisals of the severity and prevalence of: (a) excessive police force in general, including unjustified killings of criminal suspects; and (b) police racism and violence against black Americans in particular. All six items are reproduced in the first column of Table 2 . Together, they form a very reliable (⍺=0.926), though not necessarily unidimensional,[ 74 ] index, which I employ in the forthcoming analysis.

Respondents’ General Policing Policy Preferences

After completing the measures of perceptions, respondents were asked a series of three policy-related questions ( Table 3) . The first two questions measure the extent that respondents think that federal spending on law enforcement and the number of police patrolling the streets of U.S. cities should be increased or decreased, respectively. A third and final measure, which was adapted from Cohen et al.,[ 75 ] is designed to force respondents to make policy trade-offs.

It asks respondents to play the role of a mayor of a large city that has experienced upticks in violent crime. Respondents are given a $200 million “public safety” budget and must decide how much of it to spend on four anticrime policy approaches. Two of these approaches—hiring more police officers to patrol communities and funding more crime-detection cameras—are “carceral” in nature, in that they focus on traditional law-enforcement methods for deterring and responding to crime. The other two—hiring more social workers to assist at-risk individuals and funding economic development programs—are “softer” measures that aim to address “root causes” and socioeconomic contributors to crime.

While all policy items will be modeled individually, I also combine and model them as an index. To construct this index, I first sum the two carceral allocation items[ 76 ] to create a combined “carceral allocations” scale. This scale and the two ordinal measures are then z-transformed (i.e., to a mean of 0 and a standard deviation of 1) and subsequently averaged together.

Respondents’ Estimation (In)accuracy

Both the size and direction (i.e., positive or negative) of the treatment’s effects on perceptions and policy preferences are expected to vary, depending on the magnitude and direction of the respondents’ estimation errors. To test this prediction, I created a summary estimation (in)accuracy index that indicates how far off respondents’ estimates were from the benchmarks on average. Table 4 presents three ways of constructing such indexes, which I further discuss and analyze in Appendix A.5.[ 77 ]

I report the results of these analyses in Appendixes A.6 and A.7. But ultimately, the index that best captures respondents’ estimation patterns and best predicts their general perceptions and policy preferences is the third index, which I refer to as the “directionally woke” estimated (in)accuracy index. This method reverse-codes: (a) all use-of-force criterion estimates for whites; (b) estimates of the share of 2021 violent crimes attributable to blacks (see Appendix A.3); and (c) estimates of the violent-offender share of the U.S. state prison population (see Appendix A.4).

I adopt the “directionally woke” estimation (in)accuracy index for some of the experimental analyses that follow.

To understand the scores on this “directionally woke” (in)accuracy index, consider the index’s hypothetical endpoints. For instance, a maximally “directionally woke” respondent is one who estimates that police use of nonlethal and lethal force is omnipresent and exclusively directed against nonwhites, that all (nonwhite) fatal police-shooting victims are unarmed, that whites constitute all of the country’s violent criminal offenders, and/or that the U.S. state prison population is exclusively filled with nonviolent offenders.

Conversely, at the hypothetical bottom of the scale, a maximally “directionally unwoke ” respondent is one who perceives that police use of force either never occurs or is exclusively directed against whites, that no fatal police-shooting victims are unarmed or that only white victims are unarmed, that nonwhites commit all violent crimes, and/or that the U.S. state prison population exclusively consists of violent offenders.

Of course, virtually no respondents meet these extreme descriptions. What the “directionally woke” index measures, then, is the extent that the respondents’ estimates exhibited the tendency to be “woke” or “unwoke.” Accordingly, a (hypothetical) score of 0 on the index denotes a respondent who perfectly accurately estimated each of the criterion benchmarks, while scores above and below zero represent the extent that respondents misestimated in the “woke” and “unwoke” directions, respectively.

Main Treatment Effects on Perceptions

To assess the overall impact of the treatment on perceptions of police brutality and racism, each of the six perception indicators and the combined index were regressed separately onto a treatment dummy variable. This variable labeled respondents who received the informational intervention as “1,” while all others, comprising the control group, are coded as “0.” To enhance the precision of the treatment’s estimated effects, “covariate-adjusted” models were also developed that control for all pretreatment variables,[ 78 ] including the directionally woke accuracy index.

The treatment group consistently scored significantly lower across all outcomes ( Figure 9A ), with all p-values < 0.001. The differences for individual items range from 0.159 to 0.244 standard deviations (SD) in the unadjusted models and 0.115 SD to 0.224 SD in the adjusted models.[ 79 ] When all six z-normed items are averaged together, the unadjusted and adjusted differences are 0.191 SD and 0.157 SD, respectively, indicating small effect sizes. Importantly, these differences are not merely attributable to shifts within response categories (e.g., “Strongly disagree” --> “Disagree”) but also to significant movement between them.[ 80 ]

For instance, the share of respondents who answered “Never” or “Rarely” when asked how often they think that police officers use more force than necessary when responding to a possible criminal situation was nearly 10.5 points (adjusted=9.4, p=0.001) higher among those who received the treatment than respondents in the control group. Treatment-group respondents were also 11.3 points (adjusted=9.3, p < 0.001) less likely to disagree that the “media exaggerates the amount of police brutality” and 9 points (adjusted=7.1, p=0.001) less likely to agree that black people “are regularly preyed upon by racist police.”

These findings suggest that the informational intervention induced genuine attitudinal changes, rather than merely reinforcing or tempering existing views.

Interestingly, the intervention’s effects[ 81 ] on the perceptions index were nearly seven times greater[ 82 ] for liberal than for conservative respondents, with the effects on the latter close to zero ( Figure 9B ). This discrepancy could be partially due to a “floor effect,” as conservative scores on the perceptions index are already so low[ 83 ] that they cannot decrease much further. Additionally, conservatives’ relatively smaller average criterion misestimates might be implicated in their null treatment response, as suggested by the results in the next section.

At this point, it is important to note that the effects of the treatment on respondents’ estimation accuracy were negative and statistically significant, regardless[ 84 ] of whether respondents overestimated or underestimated the annual average number of FOIS victims. This suggests that people’s perceptions of police brutality are not exclusively, or even mostly, tied to their (mis)estimates of the overall quantity [ 85 ] of FOIS victims. Rather, (mis)estimates of how the number of victims is distributed across racial groups—along with overestimates of the prevalence of nonlethal force against black Americans—appear to play a significant role in shaping these perceptions.

Accuracy-Conditioned Treatment Effects on Perceptions

While the main effects of the treatment are notable, their impact is expected to be even greater on those who gave relatively larger misestimates on average. This would explain why the effects of the treatment are significantly larger among liberals—who score highest[ 86 ] on the directionally woke accuracy index—than conservatives.

To test this hypothesis, two interaction models[ 87 ] were fitted ( Figure 9C ). The first model (left panel) interacts the treatment with the continuous directionally woke accuracy index.[ 88 ] This model reveals a statistically significant interaction (b=–0.299, p=0.001), suggesting that the intervention’s negative effects on perceptions grow linearly[ 89 ] as estimation inaccuracy rises. But the model that uses a categorical[ 90 ] accuracy interaction term (right panel) exhibits a superior[ 91 ] fit to the data.

Results from this latter model indicate that the intervention led to a nonsignificant 0.118 SD (p=0.084) increase[ 92 ] overall in perceptions of police brutality and racism among respondents within the bottom accuracy interval (i.e., ≥ –0.4, < 0.2), which, due to their smaller numbers,[ 93 ] combines “directionally unwoke” misestimators and those whose estimates were reasonably close to the benchmark figures on average.

In contrast, at all higher intervals, the intervention progressively and nonlinearly reduces such perceptions. For those in the middle (in)accuracy intervals (i.e., ≥ 0.2, < 0.7), the intervention led to a combined 0.113 SD (p=0.005) decrease in perceptions of police brutality and racism. These negative effects increase to a combined 0.262 SD (p < 0.001) among those in the highest two intervals (i.e., ≥ 0.7). For example, respondents in these intervals who received the intervention were 17.6 points (p < 0.001) less likely to believe that the police often use excessive force, 15.7 points less likely (p < 0.001) to consider the unjustified killing of suspects by police to be a serious issue, and 11 points less likely (p < 0.001) to agree that black people are regularly targeted by racist police.

Overall, these results largely validate the prediction that the intervention’s effects will vary as a function of respondents’ estimation accuracy. In general, the more respondents misestimated the various criteria in the “woke” direction, the more effective the intervention was in reducing negative or “woke” appraisals of the prevalence and severity of excessive police force and racist policing.

Main Treatment Effects on Policy Preferences

In the previous section, I considered how the treatments resulted in updated appraisals of police use of force. Now, I turn to the question of whether those updates translate into changes in policing-related policy preferences.

The standardized differences between the control and treatment groups on each policy measure are presented in Figure 10A . Compared with those observed for perceptions, these differences are smaller and less precise, ranging from 0.04 SD to 0.094 SD in size in the unadjusted models and from 0.014 SD to 0.096 SD in the adjusted models. While all are in the theoretically expected direction, none is significant at the p < 0.05 threshold, though several do approach it.[ 94 ]

When all items are considered in aggregate as an index, a more discernible, if still very modest, signal emerges. Compared with the control group, respondents who received the intervention scored an unadjusted 0.088 SD (p=0.037) and adjusted 0.061 SD (p=0.041) higher on the combined index, with these differences reaching significance at the 95% level. Further, and as expected, results from a mediation analysis (reported in Appendix A.8) suggest that almost all (95.6%) of these differences are attributable to the intervention’s negative effects on the perceptions index. In effect, the increases in support for policing-centered anticrime policies that are observed appear to be primarily driven by the intervention’s reduction of perceptions of police brutality and racism.

Although modest overall, the intervention’s effects are again larger[ 95 ] among liberals and moderates (and, unexpectedly, black[ 96 ] and Hispanic respondents) while smaller and statistically insignificant among conservatives. As Figure 10B (right panel) shows, liberals and moderates who received the intervention scored 0.101 SD (p=0.012) and 0.078 SD (p=0.242) higher, respectively—or 0.093 SD (p=0.003) higher when combined—on the policy index, compared with their control-group counterparts. Meanwhile, conservatives who received the intervention scored slightly more than –0.06 SD (p=0.354) lower than those who did not, though this difference is not significant.

Thus, as with perceptions, the treatment had a stronger effect on the attitudes of nonconservatives than conservatives. While some of this could, again, be attributable to a floor effect, it likely also stems from conservatives being more prone to place at the bottom of the “directionally woke” accuracy index, where the treatment effects are expected to be smaller or to move attitudes in the other[ 97 ] (i.e., liberal) direction. This expectation is formally tested again in the interaction models below.

Accuracy-Conditioned Treatment Effects on Policy Preferences

Earlier, this report stated that when the interventions had a negative impact on respondents’ perceptions of police brutality and racism, these tended to be stronger for those with relatively larger “directionally woke” misestimates. However, the results of a treatment x categorical accuracy interaction model (left panel of Figure 10C ) indicate that a more curvilinear relationship holds for the intervention’s effects on policing policy preferences.

In the bottom accuracy interval (≥ –0.4, < 0.2), respondents who received the intervention scored 0.197 SD lower (p=0.03) in support for policing-centered anticrime policies, which aligns with expectations and mirrors the pattern observed for perceptions. The effects begin to grow nonlinearly in the pro-policing direction at subsequent intervals. Across the intervals running from 0.2 to 0.9 standard deviations above perfect accuracy—encompassing approximately 72% of the data—respondents who received the intervention scored a combined 0.102 SD higher (p=0.006) on the policy index than those who did not. Moreover, this difference is not only driven by movement within response categories (e.g., “Strongly decrease” --> “Moderately decrease”) but also by changes between them. For instance, respondents in these intervals who received the intervention were 5 points (p=0.026) more likely than their control-group counterparts to support increasing the number of police patrolling the street in U.S. cities. They also allocated 4 points (p=0.004) more of their budgets toward policing-centered anticrime measures.

But rather than continuing to rise, the treatment’s effects plummet at the highest interval (≥ 0.9) such that respondents who received the intervention go from scoring 0.125 SD (0.7, < 0.9) to just 0.02 SD higher on the policy index (though this difference is not significant, p=0.5). Given this unexpected curvilinear pattern, I opted to test whether a curvilinear model with a quadratic continuous accuracy term better fit the data. The results from this model, which are plotted in the right panel of Figure 10C, show that it is a better fit.[ 98 ]

According to this curvilinear model, respondents at the bottom of the accuracy index who received the intervention score –0.422 SD lower on the policy index than control-group peers, though this difference falls just short of conventional levels of significance (p=0.05). The difference then trends and grows in the positive or pro-policing direction, peaking at 0.8 standard deviations above perfect accuracy, at which point respondents who received the intervention score 0.109 SD (p=0.025) higher than those who did not. Thereafter, though, the effects begin to weaken and point in the antipolicing direction.[ 99 ]

The reasons for this unexpected diminishment and directional shift of the treatment’s effects at the upper end of the accuracy distribution are worthy of further investigation. One possible explanation for this phenomenon is that this region of the accuracy index comprises the most ideologically liberal[ 100 ] subset of respondents, who may be more resistant to the treatment.

Approximately 81% of respondents in the highest (in)accuracy interval identify as “liberal” ( Figure 11 )—70% of whom identified as “very liberal” (37% of overall respondents) or “liberal” (33% of overall respondents), as opposed to “slightly liberal” (11% of overall respondents). In contrast, just 3% of respondents in this interval identified as conservative. This raises the question of how stronger ideological liberalism might moderate (if not altogether neutralize) the treatment’s effects on perceptions and policy preferences. I relegate my speculative answers and suggestions for future research to the endnotes.[ 101 ]

This unresolved question about the reasons for the treatment’s curvilinear effects aside, the results from these interaction models help explain why the main effects of the treatment on policy preferences bordered on insignificance. For respondents in all but the bottom and top accuracy intervals (i.e., 72% of the sample), the treatment led to a significant, if small (0.102 SD, p=0.006), increase[ 102 ] in support for policing-centered anticrime policies. But because the treatment had the opposite-to-no effect for those at the lowest and highest levels of the accuracy index, the overall effect (0.061 SD, p=0.041) was weakened.

Part 4: Implications for News Coverage

Given its rarity, the phenomenon of police brutality is, and likely will always be, an abstraction in the minds of all but a tiny segment of the American public. While people can roughly gauge broader economic conditions, for instance, via the prices they pay at the pump and their sense of job security, there are far fewer direct cues for Americans to lean on when it comes to gauging the seriousness of the problem of police brutality. This means that the public is almost entirely reliant on news media and political elites for assessing its prevalence and severity. This reliance makes public opinion susceptible to manipulation.

The current study documented how appraisals of police use of force have likely already been manipulated, as well as evidence for the manipulability of such appraisals in general.

In the first case, the widespread perception that black Americans, a racial group that constitutes just 12%–13% of the U.S. population, make up the majority of FOIS victims is not—or is highly unlikely to be—born out of thin air. The public does not come to that misperception unaided. Nor do they spontaneously adopt the misperceptions that: (1) roughly half of all black victims are shot unarmed; or (2) one in three blacks stopped by police—and close to 1 in 5 black Americans overall—is subjected to nonlethal physical force in a typical year. More likely, these perceptions are the consequences of a media environment that has flooded the public with more news about police brutality in the past decade than the previous five decades combined, and also largely sidelines nonblack victims of police violence.

But the volume and racial skew of media coverage may not be the entire story. The findings of this study suggest that what context is given or omitted is also important for influencing perceptions. Often, the contextual information that journalists provide is typically limited to data highlighting racial disparities in the experience of nonlethal and lethal police force. For instance, readers and viewers might be told that blacks are “three times more likely” than whites to be killed by a police officer in a given year, but they are only rarely given any data speaking to the prevalence of this phenomenon among these populations overall.[ 103 ] Nor are they provided with data that are highly relevant to understanding racial disparities in police use of force, likely because those data might reflect negatively upon black Americans.

A recent textbook example of this tendency is an infographic published by the New York Times following the January 2023 killing of Tyre Nichols ( Figure 12 , left panel). Not only does it not give any data on base rates, such as the percentage of Memphis blacks and whites with police contact who were subjected to police force; it excludes data that are most relevant to understanding the disparity that it highlights—namely, the even larger overrepresentation of black Memphis residents among the city’s violent criminal offenders.

Such reporting practices likely cultivate or reinforce the misperception that excessive police force against black Americans is pervasive and that black (rather than white) Americans are the most frequent victims of excessive police force. These misperceptions, in turn, can have significant psychological and social costs, particularly for socioeconomically disadvantaged groups that need police the most.

Among black Americans, for instance, these misperceptions can lead to widespread fears that they or their family members will be victimized by police—fears that are not only unwarranted, given the actual risk, but that could incur a psychological toll and discourage them from contacting police when necessary. Among the general public, they erode trust in—as well as the perceived legitimacy of—the police, which can inspire mass protests, economically costly social unrest, and greater support for de-policing policies that threaten public safety.

Importantly, the negative effects of misperceptions are likely compounded by the impact on the police themselves. Public backlash against the police can lead police officers to engage in less proactive policing, resulting in fewer stops and arrests, with some studies linking these outcomes to increases in crime. Moreover, it can weaken police morale, leading to retirements and staffing shortages, which can further exacerbate crime.

To be clear, this discussion should not be taken to mean that the pursuit of greater police accountability and reform is uncalled for or undesirable. Rather, these objectives can be pursued without distorting public perceptions of the scale and racial distribution of police use of force.

Activist groups have an interest in distorting the view that Americans might have of police brutality. Inflating public perceptions of the severity of the problem draws more attention to it. This attention can increase pressure on political leaders to act, and can encourage monetary donations from outraged members of the public. But this cynical approach can also incur substantial social costs and inspire the enactment of policing policies that are more informed by emotion than by actual data. Activist groups need to be made aware of these costs.

The findings of this study do not necessarily imply that news organizations and journalists should ignore or significantly reduce their coverage of use-of-force incidents. Instead, the implication here is that they should provide more context and information in their coverage. This will at once deracialize police use of force and put such incidents into a broader perspective. Also, given the social costs, it is incumbent on news organizations to refrain from reporting that inadvertently fuels or validates misperceptions about police violence.

Recommendations

More informative and less divisive use-of-force coverage is possible. Four recommendations to that end include:

First, journalists should contextualize their reporting of police use-of-force incidents by providing data on the rarity of such incidents. While this practice should be adopted in general, it is particularly important when referencing racial disparities in use of force. Group base rates should not be left to the audience’s imagination. Instead, journalists should clearly note them and allow their audiences to decide for themselves whether (for instance) a 0.6% occurrence rate among black Americans vs. a 0.2% occurrence rate among white Americans constitutes a “severe problem.” They could, in theory, even embed within articles base rate–related estimation questions and corresponding “misestimate” visualizations like the ones tested here. While base rates may not matter for the assessments of some (especially extremely liberal) readers/viewers, this study suggests that they are relevant to, and are likely to inform, the assessments of many others.

Second, if journalists do choose to highlight racial disparities in police use of force, they should not do so in isolation of the disparities that contribute to them, such as differing rates in criminal offending. In other words, they should not make the mistake of the NYT infographic in Figure 12. If disparities in criminal offending are not provided for context, readers/ viewers will have little choice but to attribute those in use of force to racial bias, which is likely to undermine their trust in police. While racial bias may play some role in use-of-force disparities, there is no good evidence of it being the dominant factor. Journalists should thus not lead their audiences to think that it is.

Third, journalists who highlight racial disparities should not limit the focus to those between black and white Americans. For instance, use-of-force rates against Asians—which are significantly lower than those against whites—should also be reported on. While it’s unclear[ 104 ] whether their inclusion in the current study’s informational treatment made a difference, reporting rates for Asians could help combat the notion that use-of-force disparities necessarily reflect racial bias.

Fourth, news organizations and journalists should increase their coverage of use-of-force incidents involving white victims. While underrepresented relative to their population share, white Americans still constitute the majority of both nonlethal and lethal use-of-force victims. Yet they receive but a fraction of the coverage given to black victims. Though stories involving the black Americans may generate more engagement from readers and viewers—if only because they fit a “racist police” narrative—the findings of this study suggest that the wildly disproportionate coverage that they receive substantially distorts public perceptions of the racial distribution of victims. Moreover, remember that the effects of the treatment were significant even for those respondents who underestimated the number of annual fatal police shootings. This suggests that public perceptions of this racial distribution may be just as influential[ 105 ] for the public’s appraisals of policing and policing policy preferences as the mere volume of victims. It is thus imperative that news organizations and journalists correct this severe racial imbalance in coverage. Doing so can counter the perception that police brutality is a phenomenon primarily suffered by black Americans; it could also help dispel perceptions and accusations of media bias among those on the right.

Police use-of-force incidents afflict Americans of all racial and ethnic backgrounds, and many of them should be treated as human tragedies. These recommendations could help bring about a healthier civic life and appropriate reform. However, I recognize that many of the incentives for news organizations to carry out these recommendations are lacking or are at odds with a bottom line that is measured more in terms of clicks and viewership than promoting accurate perceptions on social issues like police use of force.

Even if all news outlets and journalists were wholly on board with these recommendations, misperceptions of police use of force would still be promoted by political figures (including the current president),[ 106 ] activists, celebrities, and other opinion leaders.

The most realistic path to reform, then, consists of two steps:

First, news organizations and journalists should be pressured to cover policing issues in a more responsible and balanced fashion. They need to be informed of the misperceptions likely promoted by the manner in which the topic is typically reported on and their social harms. The findings of this study are a good start, but additional experimental research is needed to confirm them and bolster the case for reform.

Second, civic groups, nongovernment organizations, and even police agencies concerned with the spread of misinformation and misperceptions need to use social media fact-checking tools. Twitter’s (recently renamed “X”) new Community Notes feature, for instance, allows verified users to add context and information to tweets, thus putting a check on false or misleading information and rhetoric. This could have added much-needed context to the NYT tweet in Figure 12. The same should be done for tweets by public figures, such as NBA star Lebron James’s tweet that “We’re literally hunted EVERYDAY/EVERYTIME we step foot outside the comfort of our homes!”[ 107 ] As effective use of these tools will likely require a sustained and organized effort, civic groups and police agencies should consider establishing dedicated or collaborative teams of “community noters” that scour social media for and push back against false information about the frequency and nature of use-of-force incidents. One-off or intermittent interventions will not make a difference in the long term. Consistency and continued “re-treatment” are key.

There is no silver bullet for the misperception issues discussed here. We need to be realistic about the magnitude of change that can be achieved through perception-correcting interventions and the provision of additional context. These measures should not be regarded as substitutes for reforms that improve police accountability and transparency.

However, the current state of public perceptions of police use of force is clearly not tenable, nor is it conducive to the promotion of better public–police relations, race relations, and public safety. The findings of the current study suggest that informational and educational interventions—especially if sustained—can play a meaningful role in addressing the current public perception of police use of force and mitigating or moderating the social consequences.

About the Author

Zach Goldberg is a Paulson Policy Analyst who recently completed a PhD in political science from Georgia State University. His dissertation focused on the “Great Awokening,” closely examining the role that the media and collective moral emotions have played in recent shifts in racial liberalism among white Americans. At MI, his work deals with a range of issues, including identity politics, criminal justice, and understanding the sources of American political polarization. Some of Goldberg’s previous writing on identity politics in America can be found at Tablet and on his Substack .

In the summer of 2020, Goldberg joined MI president Reihan Salam, Columbia University professor Musa Al-Gharbi, and Birkbeck College professor and MI adjunct fellow Eric Kaufmann for a conversation on the “Great Awokening”—the strong leftward shift among white liberals on issues of racial inequality and discrimination, immigration, and diversity that has been taking place since 2014.

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Understanding What Police Brutality Is and Why It Occurs

Verywell / Nusha Ashjaee

Why Police Brutality Occurs

Examples of police brutality, tyre nichols, breonna taylor, george floyd, dontre hamilton, eric garner, john crawford iii, why racism can turn to violence, how to reduce police brutality, trigger warning.

Information presented in this article may be triggering to some people as it describes various examples of police-related violence.

If you are in crisis, contact the  National Suicide Prevention Lifeline  at  988  for support and assistance from a trained counselor. If you or a loved one are in immediate danger, call 911.

For more mental health resources, see our  National Helpline Database .

Police brutality refers to the excessive use of force by a police officer against a victim or victims that is deemed to go beyond the level required to sustain life, avoid injury, or control a situation.

Most encounters with the police do not involve violence. A U.S. Department of Justice Report measured contact between police and the public in 2018.

Around 61.5 million people had an encounter with the police the year before the survey, but only 2% of people experienced threats or use of force. However, it's worth remembering that roughly half of the encounters in this survey were traffic-related incidents, and the report did not include police behavior during protests as a category.

In order to solve the problem of police brutality, it is necessary to understand the underlying factors that lead to it happening in the first place. In fact, there are a number of different factors that may play a role, not all of which have to do with the underlying personality of the officer who engages in the act.

However, each of them can be considered from a psychological standpoint or psychological lens. This helps us to understand how to fix the problem from a psychological view.

Individual-Level Factors

What are the individual-level factors that contribute to police brutality? These can be understood as those that originate from the offending officer. Some examples of individual-level factors are given below.

Mental Health Issues

The mental health of the offending officer may play a role. A 2019 study found that officers who self-reported engaging in abusive police practices tended to have higher levels of PTSD symptoms.

It is possible that officers with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) from job-related stressors and trauma may have an increased startle response , a tendency toward suspicion, and problems with aggression. These traits can make it more likely that they will overreact and use deadly force when not necessary. However, it is also possible that engaging in excessive force results in a sense of profound guilt and moral injury that in turn lead to PTSD symptoms.

Some researchers theorize that traits of "psychopathy", also called antisocial personality disorder (APD) , may be more prevalent in police officers than the general population. Traits such as "fearless dominance" or "cold-heartedness" can be adaptive in dangerous or emotionally charged situations, but they can also make an individual more likely to engage in excessive use of force or to feel that they do not need to follow the rules.

That said, research on this theory is limited. It is unlikely that APD, which is very rare, could explain most police brutality cases.

Personal problems experienced by police officers may increase the likelihood of them engaging in excessive force, such as relationship problems or other stressful life events.

Organizational-Level Factors

What are the organizational-level factors that contribute to police brutality? These can include policies of the police department or the general working environment.

If the police department sets limits for the use of force that allows police officers to use their own discretion (in other words, limits that are too vague or lenient), then the likelihood that officers will use excessive force is going to increase.

In addition, if the general working environment of the police department is such that excessive use of force is not punished or reprimanded, then that sends the message to the police force that it's an acceptable part of their job description.

The Washington Post's police shootings database shows that police shoot and kill roughly 1,000 people a year in the United States. However, only 110 officers since 2005 have been charged with murder or manslaughter, and only 42 officers have been convicted.

In other words, the use of force becomes legitimized because everyone does it and nobody says anything about it.

This, despite the fact that if a civilian were to inflict the same level of force on another individual in the same situation, it would be considered to be a violation of the law. Due to qualified immunity, it can be difficult to prosecute officers for misconduct.

In order to understand the problem of police brutality, it is helpful to consider some of the more prominent examples in recent times. Below are some of the more well-known cases and issues surrounding them.

On January 7, 2023, 29-year-old Black man Tyre Nichols was pulled over in Memphis, TN, due to claims of reckless driving.

The five cops who stopped him, who were also Black, brutally beat him for about three minutes. As a result of his injuries, he died three days later.

The charges brought against the officers included second-degree murder and kidnapping.

After body-camera footage was released on January 27th, the public was outraged as many deemed it to be one of the most heinous acts of police violence ever witnessed.

Breonna Taylor was a 26-year-old Black woman who died after being shot in her apartment on March 13, 2020 in Louisville, Kentucky. Her death was the result of a search warrant that was being executed by white police officers from the Louisville Metro Police Department.

The raid began shortly after midnight. Her boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, thought the officers entering the apartment were intruders and fired a warning shot at them, which hit one officer in the leg. In return, the officers fired 32 shots, leaving Breonna Taylor dead and Walker physically unharmed.

While the City of Louisville agreed to pay $12 million to Taylor's family, the three police officers involved were not indicted on charges related to Taylor's death. The incident led to subsequent protests throughout the United States.

George Floyd was a 46-year-old Black man who died on May 25th, 2020 in Minneapolis, Minnesota after being arrested for using a counterfeit $20 bill. During the arrest, former police officer, now convicted murderer Derek Chauvin kept his knee on Floyd's neck while Floyd was handcuffed and lying on his face.

Bystanders who tried to intervene were prevented from doing so by other officers. Prior to his death, George Floyd pleaded for relief, saying that he could not breathe and that he was going to die. The entire incident became public when video footage shot by onlookers was released to the public. Autopsies revealed Floyd died as a result of the actions of the officers, and worldwide protests were sparked by the incident.

While these incidents occurred in 2020, police brutality has been a problem for decades. Below is a list of incidents from 2014, at the beginning of the Black Lives Matter movement that brought police brutality to the forefront of public discourse.

On April 30, 2014 Dontre Hamilton was killed after being shot 14 times by a police officer in a Milwaukee park. Local Starbucks employees had called the police for a wellness check after seeing Hamilton sleeping on a park bench. The officer who responded to the call, Christopher Manney, began what would later be described by the Police Chief Edward Flynn as an "inappropriate pat-down."

Hamilton woke up and began to struggle. Manney's defense team would later use Hamilton's prior diagnosis of schizophrenia to suggest that he was dangerous, but Flynn would later justify his firing of Manney by saying the officer ignored departmental policy and instigated the fight.

Eric Garner was killed on July 17, 2014 in New York after he was put in an illegal chokehold by a white police officer. Garner said "I can't breathe" 11 times while he was held down. The officer involved, Daniel Pantaleo, was not charged with a crime. His death sparked protests and "I can't breathe" as a slogan for protest.

John Crawford III was killed on August 5, 2014 after being shot by a police officer at a Walmart in Beavercreek, Ohio. He had been holding a pellet gun, which the store had advertised as being on sale, and there was no confrontation. The officers involved were not charged.

These are only some examples of how excessive use of force can lead to death.

Racism refers to bias held against a person or group of people because of their race or ethnicity. Why does racism turn into excessive use of force or violence among police officers? There are several factors to consider.

Prevalence of Deaths Due to Police Brutality

Research has demonstrated that the risk of being killed as a result of the use of excessive force by police in the United States varies by racial and ethnic group membership.

Specifically, Black men and women, American Indian/Alaska Native men and women, and Latin American men were shown to have a higher lifetime risk of dying due to police violence compared to their White counterparts.

In contrast, Latin American women and Asian/Pacific Islander men and women had a lower lifetime risk of dying due to police violence than White counterparts.

The overall lifetime odds were shown to be 1 in 2,000 for men and 1 in 33,000 for women. Overall, the highest risk was shown for Black men, who faced a 1 in 1,000 chance of being killed by a police officer over the course of their lifetime.

Racial Profiling

Why are Black men and other minorities at a higher risk for dying due to an excessive use of force by police than their White counterparts? Racial profiling may help to explain this phenomenon.

Racial profiling refers to assuming guilt based on race or ethnicity, a problem that mostly affects those individuals who have a higher lifetime risk of dying as a result of police brutality.

For example, police officers may use stereotypes when trying to determine the suspects in a crime, or they may perceive persons of certain races (such as Black men) as more aggressive or threatening when faced with a confrontation.

How can we work to reduce police brutality? There are a number of different steps that can be taken to reduce the risk of this phenomenon from an organizational and psychological standpoint.

In 2014, President Barack Obama signed an order to appoint a task force on 21st century policing. The task force developed a list of recommendations such as improving training and education, reducing bias among police officers and departments, introducing and improving crisis intervention training , and promoting cultural sensitivity as well as compassion.

Implicit Bias Training

Implicit bias training takes the approach that police officers operate with subconscious biases that they may not even be aware of. When these biases are activated, they may handle a situation differently than they would if, for example, a person was White instead of Black or driving a BMW instead of a old beat-up pickup truck.

The premise of this training is to help police officers understand that everyone grows up with subconscious biases, even if someone doesn't feel like they have any prejudice. The goal is to make police officers aware of their biases so that they can manage them in the moment. This is more effective than calling out police officers as racist, as most officers would not consider themselves to fall into that category. Rather, this approach takes the stance that all officers need training.

The idea behind implicit bias training is that those who are better able to manage their biases will be safer, more effective, and fairer in their role as police officers. However, there have been very few studies on the effectiveness of implicit bias training for police.

Only one 2020 study has looked at impacts on real-world behavior. While implicit bias training seemed to improve officer knowledge of implicit bias concepts and motivation to act without prejudice, the study found that training had little to no effect on racial and ethnic disparities in police enforcement. In other words, implicit bias training alone was not enough to change behavior.

Improved Hiring Practices

One way to reduce the risk of police brutality is to hire individuals who have a lower risk of becoming violent on the job.

Personality psychology can be helpful in making these decisions, as there are assessments that can be used to predict how individuals will respond to stressful situations as well as predict their behavior when on the job.

The use of personality assessments can also be a way to level the playing field for minorities, as it can be an unbiased way to determine who is the best fit for the job.

Improved Disciplinary & Supervision Measures

Suppose a police officer engages in excessive or deadly force, and there is no punishment. In that case, this sends the message to the rest of the department that the behavior is acceptable.

Instead, adequate supervision to identify police officers acting inappropriately before that behavior gets out of control, as well as disciplinary measures to send the message that the behavior is unacceptable, are necessary to identify and reprimand police officers who are the most likely to use excessive or deadly force.

Using such measures will also deter other officers from acting in the same manner and set the tone for the overall behavioral expectations of police officers in a department.

In other words, police departments should begin to lead by example, and that starts with enforcing the law for police officers in the same way that it would be for civilians.

Provide Mental Health Support for Police Officers

When police officers are better able to manage their emotions under stress, understand which emotions they are experiencing, and communicate well despite being in high-stress situations, they will be better able to de-escalate complex scenarios rather than react by using excessive force.

In other words, there is a tipping point at which excessive force begins to be used, and this tipping point can be dialed backward when police officers receive adequate support for their mental health needs.

Additionally, given the fact that PTSD can be a risk factor for the use of excessive or deadly force, providing swift and adequate support to officers who have experienced trauma on the job seems to be a necessary prerequisite to preventing the use of excessive force.

This begins by providing adequate funding to support the mental health of police officers, and it also means reducing stigma and encouraging police officers to come forward when they are struggling with their mental health.

As a society in general, mental health is still surrounded by stigma , so it is doubly important that police officers are made to feel that it is acceptable for them to talk about their mental health struggles. Rather than feeling isolated with their trauma, stress, or unmanageable emotions, police officers should be made to feel that they know exactly who to speak to for support and that those supports will be in place and easily accessible when they are most needed.

This also means the police departments should be trained to recognize the symptoms of PTSD so that they can intervene and offer support when an officer may not recognize their own symptoms of post-traumatic stress.

Improve Relationships Between Police & Community

To reduce the use of excessive and deadly force, it is important to improve the relationships between the police department and the community, particularly the Black community, as this sector is generally the one most affected by police brutality (and subsequent anxiety, depression, and post-traumatic stress).

This could take the form of programs and initiatives that place police officers in the community in a helping or educational role instead of a policing role. It could also mean having the police department work with the community or participate in marches and rallies to show their support and understanding. This was seen taking place when some police departments chose to attend Black Lives Matter protests and marches and kneel in support instead of taking a combative stance.

When police officers and the public begin to see each other as individuals rather than as groups to fear or cast stereotypes upon, real change will begin.

Conduct Research

In addition to the above measures, it is also necessary to continue to conduct research to understand the psychology behind police brutality. Which personality factors are most likely to correlate with excessive use of force? Which mental disorders show the highest correlation with deadly use of force? What forms of training help most to reduce implicit bias and improve the situation?

Ongoing research on these and other topics is the cornerstone of moving forward and improving the situation when it comes to the excessive use of force by police officers and the disproportionate impact that it has on racial minorities.

Defunding Police Departments

What about defunding police departments? This is a tactic that has been brought up as a solution to police brutality.

Defunding the police means taking money away from funding the police department and instead sending those funds to invest in the communities that are struggling the most and where most of the policing occurs.

It's very much similar to the concept of directing money toward prevention instead of dealing with problems after the fact. While not a simple solution, there is merit in funding programs and communities that are struggling instead of putting more people behind bars.

A Word From Verywell

Understanding the psychology behind police brutality is the first step toward fixing the problem. Unfortunately, the situation is inherently one that needs to be fixed from the top down, beginning with the government systems and how they allocate their funding. When better training and education are in place for police officers, as well as better mental health support, then better outcomes may result.

It's also worth noting that while this problem seems to be most prominent in the United States, other countries may have their own racial tensions (for example, in Canada and Australia, there is tension between the government and Indigenous people). The United States, however, struggles more than most with using deadly force in the form of gun violence.

Mental health support is available if you or someone you know has been affected by or witnessed police-related violence. Please reach out to a mental health professional . Acts of police brutality are traumatizing, and you deserve care, understanding, and support.

Amnesty International. Police violence .

U.S. Department of Justice. Contacts Between Police and the Public, 2018 .

DeVylder J, Lalane M, Fedina L. The association between abusive policing and PTSD symptoms among U.S. police officers . J Soc Soc Work Res . 2019;10(2):261-273. doi:10.1086/703356

Falkenbach D, Balash J, Tsoukalas M, Stern S, Lilienfeld SO. From theoretical to empirical: Considering reflections of psychopathy across the thin blue line . Personal Disord Theor Res Treat. 2018;9(5):420-428. doi:10.1037/per0000270

Thomson-DeVeaux A, Rakich N, Buchireddygari L. Why it's so rare for police officers to face legal consequences . FiveThirtyEight .

American Bar Association. Qualified immunity .

NPR. What we know about the killing of Tyre Nichols .

The New York Times. A timeline of Nichols's Lethal Police Encounter .

D'Amore R. Breonna Taylor: What we know about her death, the investigation and protests . Global News .

BBC News. George Floyd: What happened in the final moments of his life .

CBS News. Former Milwaukee officer not charged in fatal shooting of mentally ill man .

O'Kane C. Eric Garner's mom says seeing a black man plead "I can't breathe" is "like a reoccurring nightmare" . CBS News .

CBS News. Family sues over fatal shooting at Ohio Wal-Mart .

Edwards F, Lee H, Esposito M. Risk of being killed by police use of force in the United States by age, race-ethnicity, and sex .  PNAS. 2019;116(34):16793-16798. doi:10.1073/pnas.1821204116

Laurencin CT, Walker JM. Racial profiling is a public health and health disparities issue . J Racial Ethn Health Disparities . 2020;7:393-397. doi:10.1007/s40615-020-00738-2

President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing. Final Report of the President's Task Force on 21st Century Policing .

Center for Police Research and Policy. The Impacts of Implicit Bias Awareness Training in the NYPD .

Williams DR. Stress and the Mental Health of Populations of Color:Advancing Our Understanding of Race-related Stressors .  J Health Soc Behav . 2018;59(4):466-485. doi:10.1177/0022146518814251

Johnson DK. Confirmation Bias and Police Brutality . Psychology Today .

Miller L. Why Cops Kill: The Psychology of Police Deadly Force Encounters . Aggression and Violent Behavior. 2015;22:97-111. doi:10.1016/j.avb.2015.04.007

Muller RT. Officers with PTSD at Greater Risk for Police Brutality . Psychology Today.

Sherman RA. The Problem of Police Brutality . Psychology Today .

Turner E. How can psychology advance police-community relations? Using psychological science and advocacy to contribute to solutions . American Psychological Association.

By Arlin Cuncic, MA Arlin Cuncic, MA, is the author of The Anxiety Workbook and founder of the website About Social Anxiety. She has a Master's degree in clinical psychology.

How police violence causes grief, worry and coping for Black parents

A decade ago, Michael Brown Jr., an unarmed Black 18-year-old, was shot and killed by a White police officer in Ferguson, Mo., a suburb of St. Louis.

The fatal incident began when the officer, Darren Wilson, saw Brown and a friend walking down the middle of a street. Wilson claimed that Brown refused to obey his order to get off the street and a fight ensued. The shooting, Wilson alleged , was in self-defense -- a claim that officers have used nationwide to justify anti-Black racial violence. Advertisement

Brown's death on Aug. 9, 2014, occurred just eight days after his high school graduation and triggered nearly a year of protests across the country. Three months later, a grand jury in Ferguson refused to indict the police officer, a decision that set off more protests and demands for racial justice in policing. Advertisement

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Instead of helping, one of the White officers , Sean Grayson, shot and killed Massey. As her son Malachi told reporters, the officer showed little regard for her humanity during the slaying that was captured on body-camera footage. At the officer's request, Massey had taken a pot of hot water from the stove. Minutes later, she was killed when Grayson fired three bullets, including one that hit right below her eye.

Unlike Brown's case in Ferguson, Grayson was fired from the Sangamon County Sheriff's Office and charged with first-degree murder. Similar to Darren Wilson, he claimed he acted in self-defense.

These two instances of police violence highlight the cyclical nature of police violence against Black Americans and the growing mistrust among Black Americans for local police.

From 2009-2019 , at least 179 people have been killed by police or while in jail within four counties of the St. Louis region near where Brown died. Advertisement

These local statistics mirror nationwide patterns of police violence in the United States and reveal that Massey and Brown were not exceptions to the norm -- but, rather, representative of the everyday racism that pervades American society.

As we have learned through our research of racist violence in Black communities, developing ways to cope is often a necessary reality of living in the United States.

What is racial grief?

With every new incident of racial violence committed by a police officer, Black people tend to experience a collective sense of racial grief.

That grief is defined by the U.S. National Institutes of Health as an "individuals' cognitive, emotional, physical, and spiritual responses to loss due to racism and intersectional violence ."

In addition, many Black parents experience a type of anticipatory grief and stress due to the potential racial violence their children may encounter in their lifetime.

For instance, in a 2022 study , researchers found Black pregnant women experienced feelings of fear, stress and anxiety about police brutality toward their children -- before their children were born. Even mothers who reported positive experiences with police officers anticipated negative treatment toward their children based on their race. Advertisement

Racial grief can represent a coping response that allows Black parents to emotionally and cognitively process incidents of racial violence in community with others.

In our 2022 study , one mother told us:

"I can't watch the videos anymore. It is a living nightmare, and I do not need those images, because they cannot be unseen. It takes a heavy toll on me. I cope with it in therapy. I cry. I give myself space to feel my feelings. I talk with my partner about it. It gives me a sense of pain and purpose at the same time."

How do Black parents respond to racial violence

When parents think about how they can prepare their children for the racial discrimination they may encounter in their daily lives, many use what is known as racial socialization to improve they and their children's adaptive coping responses in response to racial bias and discrimination.

Racial socialization refers to the process by which parents instill race-related messages and values in their children. It is considered by psychologists to be one of the most critical developmental processes for Black youth and includes both implicit and explicit practices.

For instance, some parents monitor the content of their children's social media and limit their exposure to racial violence. Other parents balance messages on racial discrimination with affirmations that their children are loved, worthy and valued. Advertisement

Common racial socialization messages include statements such as: "You should be proud to be Black." A message on racial bias might involve: "You may be evaluated by higher standards than your White peers."

Overall, these messages are intended to elicit racial and cultural pride, while also encouraging Black youth to be cautious and aware of the ongoing realities of racial violence.

"Like with the Sonya Massey thing, my daughter saw the video and she was like -- 'but she didn't do anything wrong.' That's usually what happens. Like I told her, she called the police for help and they end up killing her. It happens sometimes because they act like they're scared of Blacks for some reason. I feel like we are not progressing in America with this racism thing."

While Black parents and their children continue to resist racial discrimination through their everyday practices of care, love and joy , there remains a critical need to invest in the health and well-being of Black communities through structural policy changes in education, health care and local government. Advertisement

Seanna Leath is an assistant professor of psychological and brain sciences at Washington University in St. Louis . Sheretta T. Butler-Barnes is a professor and Dean's Distinguished Professorial Scholar at Washington University in St. Louis . This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article . The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the author.

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From Michael Brown to Sonya Massey, police antiblack violence causes grief, worry and coping for Black parents

by Seanna Leath and Sheretta T. Butler-Barnes, The Conversation

A decade ago, Michael Brown Jr. , an unarmed Black 18-year-old, was shot and killed by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, a suburb of St. Louis.

The fatal incident began when the officer, Darren Wilson, saw Brown and a friend walking down the middle of a street. Wilson claimed that Brown refused to obey his order to get off the street and a fight ensued. The shooting, Wilson alleged , was in self-defense—a claim that officers have used nationwide to justify antiblack racial violence.

Brown's death on Aug. 9, 2014, occurred just eight days after his high school graduation and triggered nearly a year of protests across the country. Three months later, a grand jury in Ferguson refused to indict the police officer, a decision that set off more protests and demands for racial justice in policing.

Nearly 10 years later and less than 90 miles away from Ferguson, Sonya Massey , an unarmed, 36-year-old Black woman and mother of two children, called local police on July 6, 2024, to investigate mysterious sounds outside of her home near Springfield, Illinois.

Instead of helping, one of the white officers , Sean Grayson, shot and killed Massey. As her son Malachi told reporters, the officer showed little regard for her humanity during the slaying that was captured on body-camera footage. At the officer's request, Massey had taken a pot of hot water from the stove. Minutes later, she was killed when Grayson fired three bullets, including one that hit right below her eye.

Unlike Brown's case in Ferguson, Grayson was fired from the Sangamon County Sheriff's Office and charged with first-degree murder. Similar to Darren Wilson, he claimed he acted in self-defense.

These two instances of police violence highlight the cyclical nature of police violence against Black Americans—and the growing mistrust among Black Americans for local police.

From 2009–2019 , at least 179 people have been killed by police or while in jail within four counties of the St. Louis region near where Brown died.

These local statistics mirror nationwide patterns of police violence in the U.S. and reveal that Massey and Brown were not exceptions to the norm—but, rather, representative of the everyday racism that pervades American society.

As we have learned through our research of racist violence in Black communities, developing ways to cope is often a necessary reality of living in the United States.

What is racial grief?

With every new incident of racial violence committed by a police officer, Black people tend to experience a collective sense of racial grief.

That grief is defined by the U.S. National Institutes of Health as an "individuals' cognitive, emotional, physical, and spiritual responses to loss due to racism and intersectional violence ."

In addition, many Black parents experience a type of anticipatory grief and stress due to the potential racial violence their children may encounter in their lifetime.

For instance, in a 2022 study , researchers found Black pregnant women experienced feelings of fear, stress and anxiety about police brutality toward their children—before their children were born. Even mothers who reported positive experiences with police officers anticipated negative treatment toward their children based on their race.

Racial grief can represent a coping response that allows Black parents to emotionally and cognitively process incidents of racial violence in community with others.

In our 2022 study , one mother told us:

"I can't watch the videos anymore. It is a living nightmare, and I do not need those images, because they cannot be unseen. It takes a heavy toll on me. I cope with it in therapy. I cry. I give myself space to feel my feelings. I talk with my partner about it. It gives me a sense of pain and purpose at the same time."

How do Black parents respond to racial violence

When parents think about how they can prepare their children for the racial discrimination they may encounter in their daily lives, many use what is known as racial socialization to improve they and their children's adaptive coping responses in response to racial bias and discrimination.

Racial socialization refers to the process by which parents instill race-related messages and values in their children. It is considered by psychologists to be one of the most critical developmental processes for Black youth and includes both implicit and explicit practices.

For instance, some parents monitor the content of their children's social media and limit their exposure to racial violence. Other parents balance messages on racial discrimination with affirmations that their children are loved, worthy and valued.

Common racial socialization messages include statements such as: "You should be proud to be Black." A message on racial bias might involve: "You may be evaluated by higher standards than your white peers."

Overall, these messages are intended to elicit racial and cultural pride, while also encouraging Black youth to be cautious and aware of the ongoing realities of racial violence .

In a forthcoming study we have on how Black parents in Missouri talk to their adolescents about race, one mother shared:

"Like with the Sonya Massey thing, my daughter saw the video and she was like—'but she didn't do anything wrong." That's usually what happens. Like I told her, she called the police for help and they end up killing her. It happens sometimes because they act like they're scared of Blacks for some reason. I feel like we are not progressing in America with this racism thing."

While Black parents and their children continue to resist racial discrimination through their everyday practices of care, love and joy , there remains a critical need to invest in the health and well-being of Black communities through structural policy changes in education, health care and local government.

Provided by The Conversation

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What is donald trump’s agenda47 and how will it impact different communities.

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LAS VEGAS, NEVADA - JULY 08: Former U.S. President and Republican presidential candidate Donald ... [+] Trump delivers remarks at a Nevada Republican volunteer recruiting event at Fervent: (Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images)

As the U.S. presidential election draws closer, Agenda47 has been a topic of conversation among voters. Agenda47 is a list of proposals planned by former president Donald Trump’s campaign, should he get re-elected. Every American needs to understand Agenda47 and how it will impact different communities. This article examines Agenda47 in more detail and explores the wider implications of the proposal.

Accelerate climate change

On President Biden’s first day in office, he ensured that the United States rejoined the Paris Agreement. The Paris Climate Agreement is a treaty where countries take specific actions to fight against climate change. Trump, according to Agenda47 , wants to “exit the horrendously unfair Paris Climate Accords.” If elected, Trump, who is an unapologetic climate change denier , would diminish the United States’ transparency and accountability when it comes to addressing climate change. This will have far-reaching effects on everyone living on this shared Earth but more specifically, Black people as well as other marginalized groups , who are most severely and negatively impacted by climate change.

Curb U.S. Immigration

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End gender-affirming care

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Provide more police protections

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