Police officers in the United States currently kill about eleven hundred civilians annually. In contrast, police in Germany kill fewer than ten a year, and those in England and Wales kill about two. This talk will examine recent data on police homicides in the US, with particular attention to the geographic distribution of incidents and racial disparities in victimization. I consider and evaluate two competing hypotheses that seek to account for the data, and discuss the possibility that Simpson's paradox may be relevant for understanding the patterns that we see. Some historical context is provided with reference to the 1968 Kerner Commission Report and the Carnegie-Myrdal study of the 1930s. The talk will draw on material from Shadows of Doubt: Stereotypes, Crime and the Pursuit of Justice, written jointly with Brendan O'Flaherty (Harvard University Press, forthcoming in April 2019) as well as ongoing work with Jose Luis Monteil Olea and Brendan O'Flaherty.
Link: Youtube Live
Rajiv Sethi is a Professor of Economics at Barnard College, Columbia University and an External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. He has previously held visiting positions at Microsoft Research in New York City, and at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He is on the editorial boards of the American Economic Review and Economics and Philosophy. His current research deals with information and beliefs, including examining how stereotypes affect interactions among strangers, especially in relation to crime and the criminal justice system. He is also part of a large interdisciplinary team working on the forecasting of geopolitical events using methods that combine machine models with human judgment. Rajiv is a founding member of CORE (Curriculum Open-Access Resources for Economics), a group of scholars engaged in the production of high-quality freely-available resources for the teaching of economics.