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Macrolevel studies of police killings generally focus on testing the conflict and community violence hypotheses. This research generally supports both the conflict proposition that minority threat is related to police violence and the community violence proposition that locations with higher levels of violence have a greater number of police-caused homicides. However, some of the most common proposals to reduce police-citizen violence, namely changing police personnel, are largely overlooked in existing research. The majority of studies that have examined police homicides do not acknowledge the possibility that the personnel composition of police agencies may affect levels of police violence. The current article extends previous lines of research on police-caused homicides by including measures of the personnel composition of police agencies as predictors of police-caused homicides. More specifically, this study examined the influence of minority and female representation within large municipal police agencies on police-caused homicides. The findings show that more diversified departments do not have significantly lower levels of police-caused homicides. The results do, however, support both the conflict and community violence propositions. Furthermore, the pattern of findings suggests the existence of a generalized threat in the nation's largest cities.
The intense controversy that often follows the killing of a citizen by police stems from underlying views of the police and social control. Proponents of the conflict theory of law suggest that police actions are a response to threats from minority subgroups. They argue that police violence is used to control racial and economic classes deemed threatening to the existing social order (Harring, Platt, Speiglman, & Takagi, 1977). A competing explanation views police-caused homicides as a response to community violence encountered by police officers. The level of police violence, and thus the number of police-caused homicides, is a direct result of the violence encountered by police.
Macrolevel studies of police killings generally test these competing explanations and generally support both the conflict proposition that minority threat is related to police violence (Holmes, 2000; Jacobs & Britt, 1979; Jacobs & O'Brien, 1998; Liska & Yu, 1992; Sorensen, Marquart, & Brock, 1993) and the community violence proposition that areas with higher levels of violence have a greater number of police-caused homicides (Fyfe, 1980; Jacobs & Britt, 1979; Jacobs & O'Brien, 1998). However, some of the most common...