Race and deadly force: assessing minority-threat arguments

Parker, Karen F.No social justice issue has been more present in the news media recently than the deaths of racial minorities at the hands of the police in the United States of America. This clear division between communities and the police has resulted in protests and marches sweeping the nation under the statement that “Black Lives Matter.” With racial disparities in the criminal justice system being a long-standing issue, the need for empirical investigations into the factors that contribute to police use of force is essential in today’s criminological literature. In this study, Blalock’s (1967) theory of minority-group relations is utilized to determine the impact that racial threat has on the use of deadly force by police. This study offers a state-level analysis that accounts fully for Blalock’s theory by including race-specific economic measures and indicators of political-threat, which are often overlooked in this literature. Census data are merged with other existing data on the use of deadly force [Supplementary Homicide Reports (SHR) and Mapping Police Violence (MPV)] to explore the impact of racial threat on racial patterns in police violence. This study indicates that there are some discrepancies in results based on which data source is used to measure police lethality, SHR versus MPV. In the end, though, there is some support for Blalock’s threat theory at the state-level; however, the most consistent result is family disruption, which may indicate that other theoretical frameworks, such as social disorganization, should be explored.University of Delaware, Department of Sociology and Criminal JusticeM.A