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• An intervention, not an accident: Research into use of force by police requires understanding its context and counterfactuals
  Brandon del Pozo
  Published on: 13 August 2018

• Published on: 13 August 2018

  An intervention, not an accident: Research into use of force by police requires understanding its context and counterfactuals

  • Brandon del Pozo, Chief of Police Burlington Police Department

  In “Years of life lost due to encounters with law enforcement in the USA, 2015–2016,” Bui et al. estimate the public health impact of police use of force by a simple computation of the years of life lost by the people killed by police.[1] Unnecessary use of force by police is a problem demanding serious attention, and leadership in policing has responded with interventions and training in recent years to improve de-escalation techniques and reduce the incidence of unnecessary or unlawful use of force. Bui et al.’s analysis, however, fails to consider three key factors in these analyses: first, the distinction between necessary and unnecessary/unlawful uses of force; second, the potential impacts on years of life lost had the police not have intervened in these specific scenarios; and third, the broader impacts of police intervention on public health.
  Police may use lethal force when they have sufficient reason to believe that a person poses a risk of serious physical injury or death to another person. A reporter for The Washington Post concludes that “the vast majority of individuals shot and killed by police officers… were armed with guns and killed after attacking police officers or civilians or making other direct threats.”[2] Unnecessary or unjustified use of force by police are thought to account for about five percent of the total number of incidents of use of force,[2] with great skeptics acknowledging they are certainly fewer than 50%.[3] Including sensitivit...

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  In “Years of life lost due to encounters with law enforcement in the USA, 2015–2016,” Bui et al. estimate the public health impact of police use of force by a simple computation of the years of life lost by the people killed by police.[1] Unnecessary use of force by police is a problem demanding serious attention, and leadership in policing has responded with interventions and training in recent years to improve de-escalation techniques and reduce the incidence of unnecessary or unlawful use of force. Bui et al.’s analysis, however, fails to consider three key factors in these analyses: first, the distinction between necessary and unnecessary/unlawful uses of force; second, the potential impacts on years of life lost had the police not have intervened in these specific scenarios; and third, the broader impacts of police intervention on public health.
  Police may use lethal force when they have sufficient reason to believe that a person poses a risk of serious physical injury or death to another person. A reporter for The Washington Post concludes that “the vast majority of individuals shot and killed by police officers… were armed with guns and killed after attacking police officers or civilians or making other direct threats.”[2] Unnecessary or unjustified use of force by police are thought to account for about five percent of the total number of incidents of use of force,[2] with great skeptics acknowledging they are certainly fewer than 50%.[3] Including sensitivity analyses to account for necessary versus unnecessary/unlawful use of force, including the range of reasonable estimates of the proportion of incidents in which use of force was unjustified, would allow for more meaningful insights from Bui et al.’s estimates.
  Additionally, as noted above, police use of lethal force often occurs in the context of imminent threats to the safety of others. So one of the counterfactuals of police use of force is the years of life that would have been lost were it not for police intervention. These are not merely co-occurring outcomes; one specifically seeks to bring about the other. In the language of public health, police use of force is intended to reduce imminent risks of morbidity and mortality. Estimates for years of potential life lost by other potential victims, had the police not intervened, are entirely missing from Bui et al.’s model.
  Finally, there are broader impacts of policing at the individual and population levels that are not captured in these analyses. The substantial reduction in homicide in America over the past two and a half decades has been characterized as a “public health triumph,” and police work—including the use of force in the face of imminent morbidity and mortality risks—has played a non-negligible part in it. It has added hundreds of thousands of years of life to the population, since, for example, “the impact of the decline in homicide on the life expectancy of black men is roughly equivalent to the impact of eliminating obesity altogether.”[4]
  To compare the deaths caused by policing to those caused meningitis or bicycle crashes is facile because unlike diseases or accidents, policing is an intervention. When police interventions are done well, they also stand to reduce their own incidence: for example, as the violent crime rate in New York City decreased precipitously, so did the need for its police to make forceful interventions.[5] As a result, shootings by police in New York City have fallen to record lows along with violent crime.[6]
  In that same way public health officials seek to reduce the iatrogenic effects of interventions (think of the prescribing of opioid analgesics), police seek ways to reduce the use of unnecessary and unlawful force, and to make force less necessary to begin with. Practitioners have made strides in this regard. The police killing of unarmed people has shown significant declines in the US in the last three years,[7] and innovative use of force curricula are being introduced across the nation.[8]
  The victims whose lives were saved by police interventions may have counterfactual stories to tell, but they are not just anecdotal. The interventionist nature of policing should shape the structure of research questions. Future models estimating the impact of use of police force on public health outcomes should explicitly account for justified versus unjustified use of force, the counterfactual of lack of police intervention, and the broader context of policing efforts on the outcomes of interest to more precisely estimate the magnitude of the impact of unlawful police intervention on public health. In a model with these additional inputs, the 57,754 years of life lost due to use of force by police in 2016 would likely decline to a level well below the threshold of a public health emergency from a population-level perspective.
  REFERENCES

  [1] Bui AL, Coates MM, Matthay EC. Years of life lost due to encounters with law enforcement in the USA, 2015-2016. J Epidemiol Community Health 2018;72:715-8

  [2] Brittain, A., “On Duty Under Fire,” The Washington Post, 10/24/2015, retrieved on 5/12/18 at http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/investigative/2015/10/24/on-duty-under-....

  [3] Balko, R, “Why It is Impossible to Calculate the Number of Police Shootings That are Legitimate,” The Washington Post, July 14, 2016, retrieved on 5/12/18 at https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2016/07/14/why-its-impo...

  [4] Sharkey, P., Uneasy Peace: The Great Crime Decline, the Renewal of City Life, and the Next War on Violence. New York: Norton, 2018, at 69.
  [5] Southall, A., “Crime in New York City Plunges to a Level Not Seen Since the 1950s,” The New York Times, 12/27/17, retrieved on 5/12/18 at https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/27/nyregion/new-york-city-crime-2017.html.
  [6] Moore, J., “NYPD Officers Shot the Lowest Number Of People Ever In 2017,” Newsweek, 12/24/17, retrieved on 5/12/18 athttp://www.newsweek.com/nypd-officers-shot-lowest-number-people-ever-201....
  [7] Sullivan, J., & Tate, J., “Fatal Police Shootings of Unarmed People Have Significantly Declined, Experts Say,” The Washington Post, 5/7/18, retrieved on 5/12/18 at https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/fatal-police-shootings-of-....
  [8] See these two examples: Lowery, W., “Police chiefs consider dramatic reforms to officer tactics, training to prevent so many shootings,” The Washington Post, 1/29/16, retrieved on 5/12/18 at https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2016/01/29/police-chi..., and Baker, A., “U.S. Police Leaders, Visiting Scotland, Get Lessons on Avoiding Deadly Force,” The New York Times, 12/11/15, retrieved on 5/12/18 at https://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/12/nyregion/us-police-leaders-visiting-s...

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  Conflict of Interest:
  None declared.

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