Franklin Zimring on When Police Kill

Episode Summary

Executive Summary: Russ Roberts and Franklin Zimring discuss Zimring’s argument that U.S. police killings are undercounted, concentrated in fatal shootings, and often avoidable without increasing risk to officers. They explore why lethal-force policy has been hard to reform, how data and incentives matter, and why local, administrative, and financial accountability may reduce unnecessary deaths.

Main Topics: Counting police killings accurately (Priority: 5/5): Zimring explains why police killings were historically under-aggregated across 18,000 departments and why newspaper-based tallies by the Washington Post and Guardian are closer to reality than official counts. When deadly force is actually necessary (Priority: 5/5): The discussion distinguishes between situations where firearms pose real risk to officers and cases involving knives, clubs, or flight that may justify force but not killing. Domestic violence and dispute calls (Priority: 4/5): A large share of police shootings arise from domestic or personal disputes, highlighting how often police are responding to volatile non-crime situations rather than classic felony confrontations. Incentives, sanctions, and accountability (Priority: 5/5): Zimring argues that many killings reflect system-level failures, so reform requires clearer rules, financial damages, and administrative consequences rather than only criminal punishment of individual officers. Police safety versus civilian safety (Priority: 4/5): The conversation weighs whether reducing shootings would endanger officers or raise crime; Zimring says evidence for such tradeoffs is weak because the main justification categories are not strongly linked to officer deaths or crime prevention. Policy change and the post-2014/2020 watershed (Priority: 4/5): The speakers discuss Ferguson, Eric Garner, Freddie Gray, Kaepernick, and George Floyd as turning points that shifted public attention and made broader policing reform politically possible.

Key Arguments: Official police-killing statistics are too low because they are not aggregated across departments; media-based counts better capture the true scale of lethal force. About 1,000 of roughly 1,120 yearly deaths in police interactions are fatal shootings, so shootings are the core policy problem. Roughly half of police shootings appear unnecessary if judged by whether officer lives were truly at risk. Only firearms pose a recurring, meaningful threat to police lives; knives, bats, and other weapons generally do not create comparable fatal risk. Many shootings stem from disputes, especially domestic-violence-related calls, which are common but not equivalent to armed criminal assaults. Clearer 'don't shoot' and 'stop shooting' rules could prevent many deaths without increasing officer risk. Individual criminal blame is often insufficient because many shootings are jointly produced by officers, chiefs, departments, and administrative rules. Financial damages, qualified-immunity reform, and departmental incentives may be more effective than purely criminal punishment. There is little persuasive evidence that reducing shootings would meaningfully raise attacks on police or general crime. Police departments that have reduced killings substantially, such as New York City and Philadelphia, did so without obvious increases in officer fatalities. Broader debates about defunding or remaking police should be separated from the narrower, more solvable problem of unnecessary police killings.

Data Points: Annual police killings in the U.S.: about 1,000 to 1,100 per year - Zimring says official counts are too low and newspaper aggregation is closer to the real total. Official count of police killings: too low by about half - Russ notes that official numbers undercount compared with the Washington Post and The Guardian. Number of police departments: 18,000 - Used to explain why killings were treated as isolated events rather than aggregated national data. Annual executions in the U.S.: 20 to 40 per year - Contrasted with police killings to show how public attention differs despite larger numbers of police deaths. Fatal shootings share: about 1,000 of 1,120 deaths; roughly 90% - Zimring emphasizes that shootings dominate police-caused fatalities. Shootings split: almost exactly 50-50 between necessary and unnecessary - Zimring’s core empirical claim about the 1,000 shooting deaths. Cases where police say a gun was present: 57% - Using Washington Post/Guardian data, these are cases where officers reported a gun threat. Police fatalities from assault involving guns: 97.5% - FBI statistics over six years show guns are the dominant threat to officers. Police deaths in the line of duty: about 50 per year - Used to gauge officer risk and compare U.S. policing to other countries. New York City citizen deaths from police guns: 70 per year in the 1970s; about 7 or 8 now - Illustrates the large long-run reduction in police-caused deaths. One wound death rate: 20.8% - Zimring says a single gunshot wound has a lower death rate than multiple shots. Philadelphia trend: dramatic drop over two years before 2017 - Russ asks whether the decline continued and Zimring says it likely did. Domestic/dispute category share: about 25% - Zimring says a quarter of shootings arise from disputes or personal conflicts. Population and police size: 300 million people; 650,000 police - Used to stress that overall death risk from non-gun threats is tiny.

Pivotal Quotes: "there are 18,000 different police departments and that the police department is the operational unit to focus on meant that each police killing happened as a separate news event and we never added them up" — Franklin Zimring: Explaining why police killings were historically undercounted and politically invisible. "The good news is that only firearms are real risks to police officer lives. The bad news is there are a lot of firearms in the United States" — Franklin Zimring: Summarizing the central tradeoff in police use-of-force policy. "If unjustified killings are an administrative wound to police in the United States, they're going to fix the problem." — Franklin Zimring: Arguing that financial and administrative incentives can drive reform.

Implications: The episode suggests reforms should focus on better data, clearer use-of-force rules, and monetary accountability at the department level. It also warns against collapsing the narrow issue of police killings into broader debates about policing, crime, and defunding.