Toward a General Causal Framework for the Study of Racial Bias in Policing

A series of controversial police-involved killings and nationwide protests have recently reinvigorated the study of racial bias in policing. But a fractured interdisciplinary literature presents contradictory claims, and scholars have struggled to reconcile a dizzying array of seemingly incompatible analytic approaches that often rely on implausible and/or unstated assumptions. This confusion arose in part because data constraints have prompted researchers to examine only isolated aspects of the police–civilian encounters they seek to understand — focusing only on traffic stops in one study, or fatal shootings in another — while neglecting the complex, multi-stage nature of these interactions. The result is a conflicting and at times misleading body of evidence. To move toward a scientific consensus, scholars should converge on a common empirical framework that unites these disparate approaches under a shared conceptual umbrella, acknowledges the causal nature of the study of racial bias, accounts for the fundamental limitations of policing data, and yields substantively interpretable results that are useful to policymakers. We present such a framework and demonstrate its capacity to adjudicate conflicting claims, accumulate knowledge, and characterize the severity of one of the most pressing problems of institutional performance of our time.