UNO Criminology Professor Analyzes Non-Fatal & Fatal Police-Involved Shootings, to Better Understand Officer Behavior

A professor at the University of Nebraska Omaha is studying fatal and non-fatal police-related shooting data, and has interesting findings related to race.

Justin Nix is a professor of criminology and criminal justice at UNO and said most states analyze officer-involved shootings by only looking at fatal shootings. He explained why that’s problematic.

“You might actually be drawing conclusions based on the differences in the likelihood of mortality, than in differences in police behavior,” Nix said. “So, to get a more accurate understanding of the behavior, police shootings, we need data on all police shootings, because at the end of the day, I would hope we’d all want to minimize police shootings to the extent possible.”

Many variables impact whether someone survives a police shooting. Nix pointed to where a bullet hits the person and the proximity to a hospital as determining factors.

Nix said data in fatal, officer-involved shootings show a racial disparity and explained what his research has discovered.

“You’d find that black people are fatally shot disproportionate, relative to the rate that white people are fatally shot,” he said, “and then we add in the nonfatal shooting data, and we see that those same disparities are even more pronounced.”

Nix said younger people are more likely to survive, which further skews the understanding of police behavior, when only considering fatal shootings.

Nix compiled data from California, Colorado, Florida, and Texas. He hopes Nebraska can take the same approach, as more and more states publicize data on all law enforcement shooting incidents.