TESTING NARRATIVES: UTPB professor goes after bias

John Fisher, UTPB assistant professor of criminology and coordinator of the Criminal Justice Administration Program talks about the research he conducted with students on whether police use race as a determinant to using fatal force. (Ruth Campbell|Odessa American)

John Fisher enjoys challenging established narratives and the assistant professor of criminology at UTPB has done just that with an article titled “Disproportionality Does not Equal Racism.”

It was published in the Journal of Law and Criminal Justice, an open-source journal, out of Wisconsin.

“My research interest is extremism, polarization and hate. So I like testing narratives. In 2020, we had a narrative that police officers killed suspects based on race, so I tested that. Using the fatal force database found in the Washington Post, we ran a statistical analysis of every law enforcement use of fatal force against suspects to test whether or not the narrative was true that cops target people based on race, or ethnicity. This was a project that I did with my research class, so we had 30 students involved,” said Fisher, who also is coordinator of the Criminal Justice Administration Program.

Christina Ritter, a graduate student at UTPB, helped him compile all the information and shares a byline with Fisher on the article.

“But it was my entire research class that tested the theory, or the idea, that police used race as a determination. We found that they did not. Ninety-five (95%) of the decedents, people killed by police, were either armed and/or posed an immediate threat to the life of a police officer or a third party,” Fisher said.

In 2019, leading up to the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minn., there were 1,003 people that were killed by police. Of that, 27% were African Americans; 47% were white; and the remaining was “a mixture of everybody else.”

“If you stopped your research right there, you would say that yes disproportionality shows because the African American population only makes up 13% of the population, then they’re disproportionately over-represented. Our research, the research that we conducted, showed that there was no link, or no significant relationship, between race and the decision to use fatal force. But just solely on disproportionality, you could make the claim that they’re racist,” Fisher said.

Ninety-five percent of the people killed in 2019 were armed with a weapon. Six out of 10 were armed with a gun. The remaining four were armed with 10 other deadly weapons, whether it was an edged weapon like a knife, sword, machete, or a baseball bat.

“There was one individual who had created his own flame thrower with wasp spray and a lighter. He was trying to burn police officers with that. … That particular individual was white. Law enforcement statistically, or just by the bare numbers, kills many more white people than they do others. Just in the mere fact that they’re killing 1,000 people a year, which is a horrible number in itself, but the race is not the determining factor. The determining factor is whether or not the suspect or the decedent is armed and they’re posing a threat. Those are the significant purposes of the significant influencers for police to use fatal force,” he said.

Five percent of the people killed by police are unarmed.

“They’re going for their cell phone, or reaching for their wallet. They’re doing something other than reaching for a weapon. The police officer in his perception believes that they’re going after weapons, so he shoots and kills them. Just about every one of those cases, the police officer has been prosecuted,” Fisher said.

He added that it is harder to convict police officers and there is a lot made of qualified immunity. The test is would other police officers facing the same situation take the same action, Fisher said.

UTPB has a class taught by Richard Kiekbusch, associate professor and coordinator of the Criminology Program, on civil liability on making those decisions and the protections you have.

“I know a lot of people like throwing qualified immunity out there. But if your average police officers are not going to make the same decisions, you have no protection. And qualified immunity doesn’t protect you, so when you’re making a decision on the street, that decision that you have to make has to be reasonable,” Fisher said.

He added that it has to be the decision other officers would make in the same situation.

Fisher got into the research because, as he said, he likes to test narratives and the narrative out there was that police officers are systematically racist and they target racial minorities for excessive use of force. He used the Washington Post database to find out if the narrative was true.

“And I found that the narrative was not true,” Fisher said.

He added that the conclusion was very controversial.

The research students that worked with the project helped with the literature review and helped compile the data.

“There was a lot of empty spaces, a lot of missing data in the database. So the students in my research class went and found those answers. We compiled the database, we made sure that the database was put together … We went into this, the students, the class, and everybody went into this, thinking that we were going to end up confirming the narrative that cops are racist. And at the end of the semester, we found out that they were not. It was quite surprising and shocking. I sent it for publication. And after going through a couple of different journals, I found one that would publish it (after) several revisions,” Fisher said.

He first sent it to the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences journal, which rejected it.

“They said this is just wrong,” Fisher said. “The Journal of Law and Criminal Justice, it’s an open source journal out of Wisconsin and so they accepted it. I had to rewrite a lot and change some of the vocabulary to where some of the vocabulary wasn’t as inflammatory. But other than that, they didn’t have me change any of my conclusions or any of the results. … One reviewer said this is important and it needs to be shared,” Fisher said.

He added that there are a whole slew of accepted narratives that are being overturned and nobody likes it.

“But in my world of extremism, polarization and hate, stating that cops are racist is going to increase polarization and extremism so I tested it to find out,” Fisher said.

Ritter said she was flattered to have the opportunity to work on Fisher’s project.

“Based on the media attention surrounding law enforcement’s use of fatal force, I was interested in digging into the actual data, as opposed to merely listening to opinions. I did not go into the project with a specific idea about what the data would look like,” Ritter said in a text message.

“One of the challenges was that there were many missing data points in the Washington Post’s data. It took more detective work than I anticipated, but I was aided by some of the students in Dr. Fisher’s class and we were able to get most of the relevant data for our article,” she said. “I was surprised by how few of these instances were captured on police body cams (only about 12%).”

She added that she was hopeful their findings would be published because it contains such relevant information in light of the controversy surrounding law enforcement’s use of fatal force.

“Being ‘published’ is a big deal, so I am grateful to have been a part of this project,” Ritter said.

Fisher has another article that’s about to be published on Texas sheriffs’ perceptions of right-wing militias and their threat to domestic security. His sample on this study was rural sheriffs in counties of less than 200,000.

“There’s one sheriff that said if I have a problem in my county and my deputies and myself can’t handle that problem, I’m calling the militia,” Fisher said.

Another project he and his students are working on is gun violence in schools.

“We’re trying to link because of 8/31 here we’re looking at doing some research on how many people got licenses to carry after Seth Ator, after our mass murder event. … The governor put out an action safety plan with eight different executive orders and on those eight executive orders, three of them were dictated at the schools. So there’s four of us. There’s myself, a former colleague from here, who’s now at the University of Arkansas, and two people from the College of Education are working on a program to identify whether or not this action plan that Governor Abbott put forth has been implemented and how well it’s been implemented across the state which will be another fun paper,” Fisher said.

He also presented a paper on lessons from Uvalde.

He found out from that research that complacency is the biggest problem.

“We need to be diligent. Every single person who has gone through a mass casualty event, there have been warning signs and people have known that that’s what they were going to do. And nobody responded. Because they just don’t believe it,” Fisher said.