Why there are so many fatal police shootings in Monroe County

On Monday, 3/20/23 the Police shot and killed a 35 year old man. Both the Rochester Police Department and Monroe County’s Sheriff’s Office were involved in the shooting which is reported to have involved multiple police officers. As the D&C has reported in 3/22 there was one police killing by an RPD officer. In addition “There were five killings involving RPD officers in 2021.”

This leaves the question why are there so many fatal police shootings in Monroe County. There was recently a study released looking at bias at the community level and fatal police shootings. The study was labeled “Disproportionate Use of Lethal Force in Policing Is Associated With Regional Racial Biases of Residents” The study looked at data gathered from the Harvard Implicit association test (IAT). Which is the most widely used method of measuring an individual’s implicit biases and then when gathered by zip code, an areas implicit biases. As noted by the authors of the study “Project Implicit (implicit.harvard.edu) has been collecting various IATs and measures of explicit bias over the Internet since 2002. By geolocating respondents, we used this data set (Xu, Nosek, & Greenwald, 2014) to compute point estimates of implicit and explicit biases by region.”

The study found a strong correlation between the implicit biases in a region and the number of fatal police shootings of individuals of color. Specifically, the study found that “We find that the implicit racial biases of White residents predict disproportionate regional use of lethal force with Blacks by police. This association is robust, reliably emerging across two conceptually distinct measures of racial bias, multiple imputations, three different transformations of the outcome measure, traditional and bootstrapped distributions, and above and beyond 14 sociodemographic covariates. Though the implicit prejudice of Whites is sufficient to significantly predict disproportionate lethal force (Analysis 1), the strongest predictor of lethal force was the regional implicit stereotypical association between Blacks and weapons (Analysis 2).” This means the more a community associates people of color with weapons the more people of color are killed by police.

The reason to write about this is that Monroe County is one of those racially biased communities with a strong correlation between that bias and the fatal killings of people of color in our community. In other words, our community’s racism is strongly correlated with the death of people of color by police. This is a striking and a very disturbing finding. That can not be said enough or loudly enough. Our communities racist attitudes are directly correlated with fatal shootings in Monroe County. The question then becomes what are we going to do about it? How long are we going to let it persist?