Law enforcementYoung Hispanic men may face greatest risk from police shootings

The police shooting earlier this month of Stephon Clark in his grandmother’s Sacramento backyard has renewed protests over officer-involved deaths of unarmed black men, but research led by Washington University in St. Louis suggests young Hispanic men may face an even greater risk of being killed by police, especially in mixed-income neighborhoods with large Latino populations.

“When it comes to police shootings, the color of your neighborhood may matter as much as the color of your skin,” said lead researcher Odis Johnson, associate professor of education and of sociology, both in Arts & Sciences at Washington University. “Our database analysis shows that the racial and economic demographics of the neighborhood you’re in can be a powerful factor in your odds of being killed during an interaction with law enforcement.”

WUSTL says that the study is the second in a series of reports from the ongoing Fatal Interactions with Police (FIPS) research project, which includes contributions from public health and biostatistics experts at hospitals and universities, including Saint Louis University, New York University and Harvard University. The first report in the series, which found that nearly 60 percent of black women killed by police were unarmed at the time of the interaction, also is available at the FIPS website.

The FIPS database includes details on about 1,700 fatal interactions with police that occurred in jurisdictions across the United States during a 20-month time period from May 2013 to January 2015. It estimates the demographic odds of a fatality occurring during an interaction with police based on the location of the interaction and the characteristics of the likely responding law enforcement agency.