A study published by Princeton University unveiled how the intersection of race and politics plays out when it comes to America’s police.

Such questions about how race affects police have been sparked since the violent police beating of Tyre Nichols by Black police officers in Memphis. The beating of Nichols, who was unarmed and stopped for a traffic violation, led to his death on Jan. 10.

There have been many studies about police abuse and the Black community, and most have found that police violence against Black Americans is higher than other segments of the U.S. population.

The trend of fatal police shootings in the U.S. seems only to be increasing, with a total of 1,060 civilians having been shot, 220 of whom were Black, as of December 20, 2022. In 2021, there were 1,055 fatal police shootings, and in 2020 there were 1,020 fatal shootings. The rate of fatal police shootings among Black Americans was much higher than that for any other ethnicity, standing at 5.9 fatal shootings per million of the population per year between 2015 and December 2022, according to Statista. 

Did the race of the Memphis officers affect the use of force they inflected upon Nichols? Did the political affiliation of the officers affect their interaction with Nicholas? in general, are most killer cops of Black men registered to the Democratic Party? Or are they Republican? The Princeton study seems to hold some insight.

The study, “Who are the Police? Descriptive Representation in the Coercive Arm of Government,” was conducted by Bocar Ba, Jacob Kaplan, Dean Knox, Mayya Komisarchik, Rachel Mariman Jonathan Mummolo, Roman Rivera, and Michelle Torres and published on March 21, 2022.

To conduct the multi-dimensional analysis, the study’s researchers merged personnel records, voter files, and census data to examine roughly 220,000 officers from 97 of the 100 largest local U.S. agencies—over one third of local law enforcement agents nationwide. The study also used Chicago, which has one of the country’s largest police forces, as a case study.

What the study found was that overall, “officers skew more white, Republican, politically active, male, and high-income than their jurisdictions.”

Take Chicago’s Austin District, located on the west side of the city, as an example. The area’s residents are 87 percent Black and 9 percent Hispanic. Yet about 56 percent of officers assigned to this area are white. Overall, 15 percent of Chicago Police Department officers are Republican.

“If each officer was replaced with a representative draw from the local district population, this group would be 3 percent Republican,” the study stated.

The researchers also looked at political affiliation, race, arrests, and use of force.

They found “find “Democratic officers detain 3.8 fewer civilians, make 0.77 fewer arrests and engage in 0.09 fewer uses of force per 100 shifts, compared to Republican officers faced with the same circumstances.” Black Republicans had a high use of force, even against Black civilians. But the use of force was still less than the use of force by white Republican cops against Black civilians.

In general, however, Black officers tend to make fewer stops and arrests than white officers of the same political party.

Deploying “a Black officer yields reductions of 6.0 and 0.8 stops and arrests of Black civilians per 100 shifts, and deploying a Democratic officer yields reductions of 3.2 and 0.6 stops and arrests of Black civilians per 100 shift,” the study found. (The study looked at the two main political parties, and not police officers who identified with another political party.)

On December 17, 2020, Gallup polling found that 31% of Americans identified as Democrats, 25 percent identified as Republican, and 41 percent as Independent. Overall, in 2016 87 percent of Black voters identify with the Democratic Party or lean Democratic, compared with just 7 percent who identify as Republican or lean Republican, according to Pew Research Center.

Police officers are also much more politically active than a representative group of civilians: 86 percent of officers are registered to vote (compared to 77 percent of voting-age civilians), and 69 percent of officers voted in the 2020 general election (compared to 54 percent of civilians), according to the Princeton study.

The study also noted that “officers are markedly more likely to be Republican than civilians in their jurisdictions: as a share of the voting-age population at least 32 percent of officers are Republican, versus 14 percent if officers represented civilians.”

Looking at race, the study found, “Black officers are 52 percent Democratic. Among Black voting age civilians drawn from the same jurisdictions, 66 percent appear as Democratic…Black officers are also 2 percent Republican, versus 1 percent among representative Black civilians.”

When it comes to the use of force, the “effects are most pronounced interactions with Black civilians. Deploying a Black (relative to white) officer or a Democratic (relative to a Republican) officer produces an expected reduction in 0.07–0.08 force per 100 shifts.,” the researchers wrote.

The Memphis Police Department officers involved in the death of Tyre Nichols. Top: Tadarrius Bean, Demetrius Haley, Emmitt Martin. Bottom: Desmond Mills Jr., Justin Smith. (Image: Memphis Police Dept.)