Support For The Death Penalty Lowest In 40 Years In The US

A new Pew Research Center survey indicates that while a majority of Americans continue to favor the death penalty for people convicted of murder, the number who support the use of the death penalty is the lowest it has been in 40 years.  Support for the death penalty was highest in the 1980s and 1990s, peaking at 78 percent in 1996 before declining steadily to 56 percent in 2015.  The decline can be seen in all political groups, but has been steepest among Democrats, only 40 percent of whom now support the death penalty.  Women and minorities are significantly less likely to support the death penalty than men and Whites.

Overall, Americans tend to think that the death penalty is morally justified in cases of murder, but they express doubts about how the death penalty is applied and whether it deters serious crime.  They are also concerned about racial disparities in the application of the death penalty.

Perhaps as a reflection of this public opinion shift, death sentences are becoming rarer and death row populations are declining.

"Most of the 32 death-penalty states have fewer people on their death rows now than they did in the peak year of 2000. The big exception is California, where dozens of convicted criminals have been sentenced to death in recent years (25 in 2013) but no one has been executed since 2006, when court rulings forbade the state from using its three-drug lethal-injection protocol. [...] The other notable exception to the trend of smaller death rows: the federal government. In 2000, only 20 prisoners were facing federal death sentences. That figure has more than tripled since, to 62 as of the beginning of this year, according to the NAACP report."

Read more:
http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/04/22/americas-death-row-population-is-shrinking/#more-269108
http://www.people-press.org/2015/04/16/less-support-for-death-penalty-especially-among-democrats/
http://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=pbdetail&iid=5156

TeachingwithData.org resources:
The Death Penalty (http://www.teachingwithdata.org/resource/3114)

America's Missing Black Men

A recently published analysis by the New York Times' The Upshot indicates that while most Whites live in places with roughly equal numbers of White men and women, most Blacks live in places with a significant shortage of Black men: "More than one out of every six black men who today should be between 25 and 54 years old have disappeared from daily life."  As a result, prime-age black women outnumber prime-age black men by 1.5 million.

The gap is highest in states where a substantial share of the population is African-American: in the South, as well as in cities across the Midwest and Northeast.  Ferguson, MO, with 60 men for every 100 black women in the 25-54 age group, is the city with the single largest proportion of missing black men.

This is not a new phenomenon.  According to The Upshot, "each government census over the past 50 years has recorded at least 120 prime-age black women outside of jail for every 100 black men."  Young Black men have long been disproportionately more likely to be incarcerated or to suffer an early death (due to homicides, heart disease, and accidents).  It is estimated that higher imprisonment rates account for almost 600,000 of the 1.5 million missing prime-age black men. "Both homicides and H.I.V.-related deaths, which disproportionately afflict black men, have dropped [since the 1990s]."  But the legacy of the country's imprisonment binge in the 1980s and 1990s continues to be felt acutely among this demographic.

The staggering numbers of missing black men highlight troublesome racial disparities with far-reaching implications, not only for black men themselves, but for their female partners, their families, and their communities.

Read more:
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/04/20/upshot/missing-black-men.html?fb_action_ids=10204391943578850&fb_action_types=og.shares&abt=0002&abg=0
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/22/upshot/areas-with-large-black-populations-have-the-smallest-shares-of-black-men.html?rref=upshot&module=Ribbon&version=context&region=Header&action=click&contentCollection=The%20Upshot&pgtype=Multimedia&abt=0002&abg=0

TeachingwithData.org resources:
White/Black Racial Segregation in U.S. Cities (http://www.teachingwithdata.org/resource/3163)
Race and Poverty in the United States (http://www.teachingwithdata.org/resource/3169
Exploring Race and Ethnicity Using Census 2000 Data (http://www.teachingwithdata.org/resource/3176
Race and Ethnic Inequality (http://www.teachingwithdata.org/resource/3101)
Gender, Education, Family, Poverty, and Race (http://www.teachingwithdata.org/resource/3128)
Race in America: Tracking 50 Years of Demographic Trends (http://www.teachingwithdata.org/resource/3863)
Attitudes about Racial Discrimination and Racial Inequality in the US: A Data-Driven Learning Guide (http://www.teachingwithdata.org/resource/3431)

The "Dark Figure" of Police Killings in the US

The recent killings of several unarmed black men by police have prompted outrage throughout the country.  Amid calls for sanctions and police training reforms, governments, policymakers, and researchers alike are scrambling to figure out just how widespread the problem is.  This is a tricky endeavor because "no one collects data that answers exactly that question. There is no national database that police departments are required to submit a record to when they complete an investigation after a police officer shoots a civilian."

The interactive map below is based on data from Fatal Encounters, a nonprofit trying to build a national database of police killings from reports from the public, media, and FBI. It shows some of the deaths by law enforcement since 2000.  The creator of Fatal Encounters estimates that the database captures only 35 percent of police killings.

The only official (i.e. governmental) source of data on police killings is the FBI's Supplemental Homicide Reports (SHR).  The SHR, published annually, contain information about "justifiable homicides," which can be used as a very imperfect proxy for police killings (note: there's no effort at all to record the number of unjustifiable homicides by police).

The SHR statistics are problematic for a number of reasons, as explained in this article by FiveThirtyEight:

1. As is the case for the FBI's Uniform Crime Reports (UCR), the SHR rely on voluntary reports by police agencies.  But fewer local police agencies report SHR data than report standard Uniform Crime Reports data and some states, like Florida, don't participate at all.
2. "Felon killed by police" refers narrowly to justifiable police homicides, and "unjustifiable homicide by police" is not a classification. This means it's difficult to combine unjustifiable police homicides � which could be listed as crimes elsewhere in the database � with "justifiable" police homicides.
3. It's likely there are homicides recorded in the SHR that should be attributed to police as "justifiable" but aren't. And there's an unknown number of unjustifiable police homicides that aren't marked with any evidence of police involvement.
4. If the legality of a police homicide is in question, it may not be reported to the SHR until the investigation is resolved. If the investigation concludes in a new reporting year, the old SHR data may not be updated, regardless of whether the killing was found to be justifiable or not. Criminology professor Geoff Alpert of the University of South Carolina, an expert on police violence, said he has "never seen a department go back and audit their numbers and fix them." (In a statement provided in response to emailed questions, the FBI confirmed that it generally does not reopen master data files to add or correct reports.)
5. Killings in federal jurisdictions, such as federal prisons or military bases, are not included in the database.

As a result of these flaws, a study from the Bureau of Justice Statistics estimates that official statistics under-count the number of people killed by police by more than half.  According to criminologist David Klinger (University of Missouri, St. Louis): "The available data (FBI, Vital Stats, BJS) are worse than miserable.  They suck and no one should do any sort of analysis with them beyond using them to say that we have some floor [regarding] shootings and perhaps note that there are all sorts of circumstances involved when shootings occur."

The SHR do contain some information about the demographic characteristics of both victims and perpetrators of homicides, as well as the circumstances surrounding the homicide.  For example, there are six different subcategories of "felon killed by an officer": attacking the officer, attempting flight, killed in the commission of a crime, resisting arrest, ... However the reports often rely on the word of the officer involved in the killing and contain no information about whether victims were armed when killed by police.

It difficult, if not impossible, to know the actual level of racial disparities in police use of force, but an analysis of SHR "justifiable homicides" in 2012 suggests that victims of "justifiable homicide" are "overwhelmingly male, heavily young, disproportionately black," and that the majority were not attacking anyone when they were killed.

Note: The dark (or hidden) figure of crime is a term employed by criminologists and sociologists to describe the amount of unreported or undiscovered crime.

Read more:
http://www.vox.com/2014/12/17/7408455/police-shootings-map
http://www.fatalencounters.org/
http://www.vox.com/2014/8/21/6051043/how-many-people-killed-police-statistics-homicide-official-black
http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/investigative/2015/04/11/thousands-dead-few-prosecuted/
http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-many-americans-the-police-kill-each-year/
http://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=pbdetail&iid=5259

TeachingwithData.org resources:
Gun Violence in America (http://www.teachingwithdata.org/resource/3864)
Fear of Crime (http://www.teachingwithdata.org/resource/3155)
Crime Victimization in the US: A Data-Driven Learning Guide (http://www.teachingwithdata.org/resource/3437)
Generational Trends in Attitudes about Gun Ownership: A Data-Driven Learning Guide (http://www.teachingwithdata.org/resource/3448)
Crime and Victims Statistics (http://www.teachingwithdata.org/resource/3261)