Ask the average news consumer to think of “police shooting” and the names most likely to come to mind would include Michael Brown, George Floyd, Eric Garner and Breonna Taylor. Each of them were killed by police in major cities or metropolitan areas. But a recent study suggests that we tend to overlook the many police shootings that happen in suburbs and rural regions.
The research, published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine in June, focuses on both fatal and nonfatal police shootings in urban, suburb and rural areas from 2015-2020. Researchers from Vanderbilt and Johhs Hopkins University, led by Julie A. Ward, PhD, pulled data from the Gun Violence Archive—a resource that collects data from thousands of police departments, media, government and other sources.
The team found that in rural areas, rates of police shootings—proportional to population—were similar to urban areas, and sometimes even higher. Circumstances leading to police involvement prior to the shootings—often domestic violence incidents, traffic stops or shooting reports—were also similar. People’s unmet behavioral health needs are a related issue everywhere. And in a devastating but unsurprising finding: Black, Indigenous and Hispanic people are overall more likely than white people to be shot, injured or killed by police in every type of area.
“Expectations of use of force as a typically urban phenomenon may be influenced by urban media outlets’ broader reach and alignment with a longstanding research focus on urban crime.”
Despite such findings, the researchers noted the relative lack of available information about non-urban police shootings.
“Expectations of use of force as a typically urban phenomenon may be influenced by urban media outlets’ broader reach and alignment with a longstanding research focus on urban crime,” the authors wrote. “However, a cross-sectional 2015−2017 analysis found that per capita rates of fatal shootings by police were comparable between urban and rural areas by most measures of rurality … Yet, the circumstances of these shootings across the urban−rural continuum remain unknown.”
The researchers found that 34 percent of all police shootings over the five-year period happened in urban areas, 22 percent in the suburbs, and 45 percent (a total of 4,729 incidents) in primarily rural areas. Police shootings in rural areas were also slightly more likely to be fatal; 58 percent of rural victims did not survive, versus 53 percent in urban areas. About 9 percent of shooting victims across all areas were unarmed.
Paul Hirschfield is the director of the criminal justice program at Rutgers University. He wasn’t involved in this study, but has led his own research on policing trends in the United States, showing how US cops are far more lethal than those in other Western countries, like France and Australia.
“In urban departments there are a few things that constrain shootings—like gun control,” he told Filter of the new study’s findings. “The typical citizen is not a gun owner, whereas in a rural area not only do you have more gun owners but also more lax restrictions and maybe anti-government sentiments.”
“Another factor would be [law enforcement] accountability structures,” he continued. “In urban departments there’s often several layers of review.” On the other hand, “If you’re in one of these rural departments and you shoot someone, it’s more likely you know your sheriff personally, your police chief. There might be people in the prosecutor’s office that know you, not to mention the media and general public might be less critical and diligent in pursuing accountability.”
“If you don’t experience [so many] incidents, paradoxically, the more likely you are to overreact.”
One factor that seems to change based on where you are is the officers involved in the incident. The farther away you are from big cities, the greater the likelihood that a county sheriff’s office—rather than a local police department—carried out a shooting. There’s also a greater chance of multiple police agencies and offices being involved in a single incident. The research found that in 83 percent of urban police shootings, shots were fired by the local department; that was the case in less than half (43 percent) of rural shootings.
Hirschfield explained that while human experiences of issues like domestic violence and mental health might be similar across different areas, police officers’ professional experiences with such issues may vary greatly.
“[A rural cop] might not be used to dealing with folks in a psychotic episode or suddenly pulling out a gun,” he said. “They may overreact to threats. The more threats you experience, the greater is your ability to discern levels of threats. Whereas if you don’t experience those incidents, paradoxically, the more likely you are to overreact.”
Some cities and states—among them Eugene, Oregon; Denver, Colorado; and the states of New Jersey and New York—have implemented non-police responder programs. Such teams can take emergency calls related to homelessness, mental health or substance use that don’t require immediate police attention. Some programs, notably CAHOOTS in Eugene, have proven successful in reducing violent or fatal police interactions. But when they aren’t given the adequate staff and funding, they are obviously less effective. Could more of them be expanded and brought to the countryside?
“If efforts only target local police agencies and not state police or county sheriffs, we’ll be missing a big piece of the issue in rural areas.”
“Some of the promising efforts we are seeing include a re-design of dispatch systems to better integrate trained crisis responders into police and fire department dispatch,” lead study author Julie Ward wrote in an email to Filter. “Some places are using co-responder models where clinicians and police respond together; others are developing independent crisis response teams.”
“Additionally, we’ve seen efforts to introduce more police oversight, including through local policies and agency procedures to set clearer parameters around police use of force or to require that medical responders be included when medical needs are involved,” she continued. “Part of what this research has shown is that if these policing-focused efforts only target local police agencies and not state police or county sheriffs, we’ll be missing a big piece of the issue in rural areas.”
Hirschfield added that reducing police violence will require more than just police-focused reforms—it also means addressing the social factors that may result in cops being called to the scene at all.
“What can you do to reduce these incidents?” he asked. “Unfortunately the biggest factor is outside the direct control of police, and that’s the prevalence of guns. It’s of singular importance in explaining this data. You would have to control civilian access to firearms.”
“But there are also a lot of people in mental health crises or drug-induced psychoses,” he added. “[These data] can underscore, especially in rural areas, the lack of access to treatment for mental health and substance use disorders, how lack of basic housing and health supports can exacerbate these conditions.”
Photograph by Bwave via Wikimedia Commons/Creative Commons 3.0
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