The Role of Individual Officer Characteristics in Police Shootings

Abstract

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