IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/sae/anname/v687y2020i1p58-66.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

The Role of Individual Officer Characteristics in Police Shootings

Author

Listed:
  • Greg Ridgeway

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.

Suggested Citation

  • Greg Ridgeway, 2020. "The Role of Individual Officer Characteristics in Police Shootings," The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, , vol. 687(1), pages 58-66, January.
    • Handle: RePEc:sae:anname:v:687:y:2020:i:1:p:58-66
    DOI: 10.1177/0002716219896553
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0002716219896553
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1177/0002716219896553?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:sae:anname:v:687:y:2020:i:1:p:58-66. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: SAGE Publications (email available below). General contact details of provider: .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.