Colloquium: Prof. Scott Jeffrey Cook

As recent media attention has highlighted, the application of deadly force by police officers in the United States is an ongoing problem. Yet, we do not even know the magnitude of this violence, let alone its causes. This is because official statistics on deadly force come from voluntary reports by state, county, and municipal police departments and, as such, are subject to bias. Using crowd-sourced data on police killings, we find that hundreds of police killings are obfuscated annually as a function of this reporting bias. In this article, we argue that this reporting bias can be overcome through legislative oversight and provide evidence that states endowed with high capacity legislatures, possessing the resources to scrutinize executive agencies (such as police departments), provide much more accurate statistics on police killings than states with low capacity legislatures. Two important implications arise: 1) legislative oversight is important for police transparency, 2) analyses using FBI statistics cloud our understanding on the causes of police violence (ex. median income, legislative capacity) due to systematic reporting differences across states.