Analyzing police shootings, public safety, and policy
A series of three recently published studies have provided the first nationally comprehensive analysis of shootings by law enforcement officers that injured or killed people in the U.S.
Led by Julie Ward, assistant professor of medicine, health, and society, in a joint effort with the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions, the team analyzed data on fatal and nonfatal shootings from 2015 to 2020.
The researchers found that 55 percent of shootings by law enforcement during the six-year period were fatal, and 56 percent of U.S. counties experienced one or more injurious shootings. They estimate that 23 percent of incidents that escalated to an injurious shooting involved victims who were experiencing behavioral health needs, such as symptoms of a mental illness or substance use, and that these were more likely to result in death.
The studies also found that Black, Indigenous, and Hispanic residents were injured at higher rates than white residents in urban, suburban, and rural areas.
“Police in the U.S. have been given a unique and important responsibility to be able to use deadly force if they decide it’s needed. We should know how often that power is used,” Ward said. “People are often surprised to find out that policing agencies are actually not required to report their uses of deadly force to the federal government. So, until now, we have had very limited knowledge of how often shootings by police occur or how many people have been injured or killed in them.”
In the first paper, “National burden of injury and deaths from shootings by police in the United States,” published in the American Journal of Public Health in April 2024, the team described the total national burden of injury from shootings by law enforcement and compared the characteristics of fatal versus nonfatal injurious shootings nationally.
The second paper, “Characteristics of injurious shootings by police along the urban-rural continuum,” published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine in October 2024, describes and compares shooting incidence and characteristics in urban, suburban, and rural areas of the U.S.
The third paper, “Social and policy characteristics associated with injurious shootings by police in US counties: A multilevel analysis, 2015-2020,” which will be published in Social Science & Medicine in December 2024, describes state and county variations in the rate of fatal or nonfatal shootings by law enforcement nationally. Researchers examined more than 30 social and policy factors potentially associated with differences in local rates of injurious shootings by police.
“Higher rates of injury from shootings by police within a county were associated with multiple modifiable social and policy conditions,” Ward said. “Factors that were significantly associated with higher rates of injury included: higher income inequality, higher residential segregation, higher gun availability and weaker firearm licensing systems, higher rates of undermanaged substance use disorder within the state, and higher per capita state spending on police versus health.”
“Policing comes with costs—including over 1,700 firearm injuries annually,” Ward said. “We hope this research moves us all to recognize that ‘public safety’ is bigger than ‘police.’ It’s the responsibility of all of us (and to all of our collective benefit) to advocate for less discriminatory, more equitable, safe living conditions and access to the help we need when we need it.”
In recent years, Ward said many communities have invested in alternative crisis response systems, such as co-responder models or dedicated clinician response teams, which are better suited to address behavioral health crises.
The team hopes this research is helpful to communities that want to develop these systems, and that it brings awareness to the harms that can come from overreliance on police responses to various social conditions.
Looking ahead, Ward said the team is working on more focused analyses of injured people who were unhoused when a policing response escalated to a shooting, shootings that injured juveniles, behavioral health related shootings, and the role of agency policies in preventing dangerous and ineffective shots fired on vehicles.
They also plan to continue developing the dataset into 2021 and 2022, and to analyze the mental and physical effects of secondary exposures to shootings on neighborhoods and communities.
“Investments in health, measures to reduce income inequality, and policies to assure equitable access to quality housing and living conditions, including safer gun ownership, could have multiple health and public safety benefits for minoritized populations and society more broadly,” Ward said. “In the future, we hope a dataset that spans more than eight years will make it possible to evaluate the effect of policies and public safety reforms on reducing injuries over time.”
Funding to support the initial data collection and analysis was provided by the New Venture Fund and Joyce Foundation. Additional funding was provided by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.