How Many Police Shootings Are Tragic Mistakes? How Many Can We Tolerate?

Abstract

This paper has two aims. First, it uses a novel approach to estimate how many police shootings are “tragic mistakes”—i.e. killings of individuals that posed no threat. The approach is novel because it estimates based on the proportion of police killed by civilians versus civilians killed by police. This allows us to see beyond the individual cases (and conflicting accounts about them) to reveal the national scale of the problem. However, the scale does not tell us whether our policing practices are unjust; a shooting can be both a tragic mistake and fully justified. Coons’s second aim, accordingly, is to suggest that these deaths are more than a public health problem, they constitute a serious institutional injustice.