States with high rates of residential segregation are significantly more likely to have fatal police shootings of unarmed black victims, according to a new Boston University study. The Boston University School of Public Health (BUSPH) research team said their study is the first of its kind to find a link between structural racism, particularly residential segregation, and racial disparities in fatal police shootings at the state level. “This suggests that the higher rates of fatal police shootings of unarmed Black victims are not merely a result of more interactions between police officers and Black suspects,” wrote study co-author Anita Knopov, a pre-doctoral fellow at SPH in a Monday blog post. “Instead, our results indicate that in some states, there is a systematically different response based on the race of the suspect,” Knopov said. The study, which was published in the Journal of the National Medical Association, used data on fatal police shootings of unarmed victims collected between Jan. 1, 2013 and June 30, 2017 from the Mapping Police Violence Project database.

Source: Huffington Post February 08, 2018 20:08 UTC