https://www.pnas.org/content/116/32/15877
Officer characteristics and racial disparities in fatal officer-involved shootings
A research paper publushed 22July2019. It explains why measuring 'white cop on black citizen' violence is hard to measure. It then does it's best and essentially comes to the following conclusion attached. I'll paste a snippet below:
What Is the Evidence for Racial Disparity?
When considering all FOIS in 2015, we did not find anti-Black or anti-Hispanic disparity. How do we explain these results? Our data are consistent with three possible explanations.
One police-centered explanation is that these disparities reflect depolicing (33, 34). Depolicing occurs when police officers’ concerns about becoming targets in civil litigation and the media spotlight impede officers from enforcing the law. Such concerns have been heightened due to recent high-profile shootings of Black men (35). The disparities in our data are consistent with selective depolicing, where officers are less likely to fatally shoot Black civilians for fear of public and legal reprisals. All else equal, this would increase the likelihood that a person fatally shot was White vs. Black. However, depolicing might be limited to areas with high-profile shootings (36). This explanation also does not explain the disparity observed when comparing White and Hispanic civilians. Future research could test for depolicing more rigorously by using a quasiexperimental time-lagged study investigating police use of force in cities before and after high-profile shootings where racial issues are prominent.
On the other hand, a civilian-centered explanation for these disparities is that White civilians may react differently toward police than racial minorities in crime-related situations. If White civilians present more threat toward police, this could explain why a person fatally shot was more likely to be White than Black or Hispanic. Among those fatally shot by police, Whites are more likely (relative to racial minorities) to be armed and pose a threat (26). We attempted to control for civilian threat level by measuring whether they were armed and attacking, but found these variables unrelated to the race of a person fatally shot. These issues illustrate a broader challenge in inferring civilian characteristics during fatal shootings. The newspaper databases we analyzed contained at least some errors (e.g., in whether civilians are coded as armed; ref. 37). There are likely more false positives and negatives in these databases, such as when separating individuals committing suicide who are not experiencing a mental health crisis from those who are experiencing a mental health crisis. Another challenge is that dichotomous variable codes may not capture the complexity of these interactions (e.g., a person is coded as attacking, but they had stopped struggling before they were fatally shot). One solution is to code civilian threat level in a more continuous way (e.g., ref. 10). But this will only be realistic if better records of FOIS are kept at the federal level. For this reason, we urge caution when interpreting the impact of civilian characteristics on racial disparities in fatal shootings.
Finally, the lack of anti-Black or anti-Hispanic disparity and the impact of race-specific crime are consistent with an exposure argument, whereby per capita racial disparity in fatal shootings is explained by non-Whites’ greater exposure to the police through crime. This explanation is consistent with studies that have used violent crime as a benchmark for testing disparity (20, 23⇓–25). However, this does not mean that researchers should continue to use benchmarking approaches, even if using violent crime over population size. Rather, researchers can take one or both predictors into account with our approach. Moreover, unlike the benchmark approach, our conclusions regarding racial disparity do not depend on which predictors are used (SI Appendix).