Crimbrary

Punishing Police Won't Curb Officer-Involved Shootings: Study
"If cops charged with fatal shootings rarely get convicted, is there a better way of dealing with such incidents before they happen? According to a study published this month in the Annual Review of Criminology, there is.

Despite efforts to hold police accountable for their actions in a flurry of court cases since the controversial 2014 Ferguson, Mo. shooting of Michael Brown, there is little evidence to show that such legal efforts to “blame” individual officers are effective, writes Lawrence W. Sherman of Cambridge University’s Institute of Criminology.

Instead, he argues, 'there is far greater evidence that fatal police shootings can be reduced by re-engineering policy systems than by trying (with little chance of success) to change the legal immunity of police officers or the behavior of juries.'”

View the Study