How Structural Racism is Linked to Higher Rates of Police Violence

The question that typically pops up when black people are killed by police is whether racism had anything to do with it. Many studies do show that racism plays a part in causing police to pull the trigger more quickly on black suspects. That’s usually because of the implicit racial biases of the individual police officer involved. Law enforcement officials often try to rule out racism by arguing that you can’t tell what’s in a officer’s heart when these killings happen.

But what a team of researchers at the Boston University School of Public Health recently endeavored to find out was whether the kind of racism that’s woven into laws and policies also informs racial disparities in police violence. Their findings were released in the paper, “The Relationship Between Structural Racism and Black-White Disparities in Fatal Police Shootings at the State Level,” which was recently published in the Journal of the National Medical Association.