Blind Justice: Police Shootings in Memphis

The literature on police use of deadly force' has produced two major findings.First, researchers report extreme variation in rates of police shooting among American jurisdictions. 2 Second, regardless of its geographic scope, the research invariably reports that the percentage of police shootings involving black victims far exceeds the percentage of blacks in the population. 3 This paper examines factors affecting both of these findings. I. INTERJURISDICTIONAL VARIATIONSAttempts to identify sources of interjurisdictional shooting rate variation have produced mixed results.Milton suggests that differences among shooting rates are associated with differences in levels of community violence and risk to officers. 4Kania and Mackey, in an attempt to test two related hypotheses, report strong associations between fatal police shooting rates and public homicide and arrest rates over the 50