Although research finds that police are more apt to employ force against black criminal suspects, empirical evidence for this relationship is derived entirely from analyses that only account for factors associated with the police-citizen encounter. If racial disparities exist in how citizens view the police prior to the citizen-police encounter, then any observed nexus between a criminal suspect’s race and police use of force will suffer omitted variable bias. We indirectly test this thesis by examining whether a black criminal suspect has an enhanced proclivity to injure either a black or white police officer during an assault. Results show that black suspects are no more likely than white suspects to injure black or white police officers.

尽管研究发现警察更倾向于对黑人犯罪嫌疑人使用武力，但是这种关系的经验证据完全来自仅考虑与警察与公民遭遇有关的因素的分析。如果在公民与警察发生冲突之前，公民在看待警察方面存在种族差异，那么在犯罪嫌疑人的种族与警察使用武力之间观察到的任何联系都将遭受遗漏的可变偏见。我们通过检查黑人犯罪嫌疑人在殴打期间是否会伤害黑人或白人警察的倾向性更高，来间接检验本论文。结果表明，黑人犯罪嫌疑人比白人犯罪嫌疑人伤害黑人或白人警察的可能性更大。