Multi-group data versus dual-side theory: On race contrasts and police-caused homicides

Empirical evidence points to a persistent Black-White racial gap in police-caused homicides. Some scholarship treats the gap as denoting criminal justice exposure either in terms of involvement in crime or living in a high-crime context. By contrast, health scholarship typically points to the importance of racism including the attitudes, institutional practices, and overall structures that operate to privilege one group over another. Still, given the demographics of US society, the Black-White racial contrast overlooks the 25% of Americans who are neither Black nor White: Native Americans, Latinos, and Asians. The question of how the groups should be organized vis-a-vis the current Black-White model and theories arises. An answer is not straightforward. There is a rank-ordering to the groups’ mortality rates as well as an exponential increase in the number of possible comparisons. In this paper we systematically review the literature on race and police-caused homicide with a particular focus on studies that attempt to move beyond the Black-White model. We find that studies on race and police-caused homicide either make no comparison between the groups, or, alternatively, use a White-non-White, a Black-non-Black, and/or a Black-Native American-Latino vs. White-Asian comparison. We use data on group-specific mortality rates to examine the strengths and limits of each of these practices. The limits are the selection of counterfactual gaps, the selection of smaller gaps, and/or the omission of larger gaps. To address these limits, we propose that a Black-Native American vs. Latino-White-Asian model best captures the higher and lower mortality rates in police-caused homicide data.