The 2014 fatal shooting of Michael Brown by Officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri, prompted what criminologist Lawrence Sherman called the Second Great Awakening of “both public and scholarly sentiment against avoidable police shootings.” (The First Great Awakening occurred in the 1970s and 1980s, when 50 large cities prohibited officers from shooting nonviolent, fleeing suspects.) Since then, an interdisciplinary array of scholars have drawn on newly available, more comprehensive databases tracking deadly police‒citizen interactions (e.g., Fatal Encounters, Mapping Police Violence, and The Washington Post’s Fatal Force database) to test hypotheses about the causes and public health consequences of these interactions, as well as disparities therein. This body of research has revealed an annual average of approximately 1000 fatalities attributable to police gunfire in the United States. However, the scope of these studies has been limited by the paucity of data on nonfatal police shootings. Though nonfatal police shootings, by definition, do not involve fatalities, they nevertheless constitute uses of deadly force (i.e., force likely to cause death) by police officers.
Unveiling the Unseen: Documenting and Analyzing Nonfatal Shootings by Police
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Unveiling the Unseen: Documenting and Analyzing Nonfatal Shootings by Police
Category: Crime|Journal: American Journal of Public Health|Author: J Nix|Year: 2024