As the Equal Justice Initiative states, “The lynching of African Americans was terrorism, a widely supported campaign to enforce racial subordination and segregation.” We will examine if areas that had lynchings at the turn of the 20th century are more prone to police violence.
Before beginning this problem set, please read “Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror: (Equal Justice Initiative (just the introduction: pages 3-5) for historical context on lynching in the United States.
We will use a dataset (national_lynching) that tracks the history of lynching in the United states from 1880 to 1940. This dataset combines the work of:
Seguin and Rigby (2019) “National Crimes: A New National Dataset of Lynchings in the United States, 1883-1941” Socius: Sociological Research for a Dynamic World Dataset
Project HAL: Historical American Lynching Data Collection Project Dataset
Using the national lynching dataset, generate a county level dataset that tallies the total number of historical lynchings in a county.
Using the large county-level dataset that we created in Lab 7 (ACS_citizens_health_countypres_police), merge the county-level historical lynchings dataset onto it.
Is the any evidence that counties that had any lynchings are more likely to also have greater police violence?
Hints:
How could lynchings during the 1883-1941 period contribute to police violence in the present day? What are potential confounders/omitted variables in this analysis?
FiveThirtyEight: Why Statistics Don’t Camputer the Full Extent of Systematic Bias in Policing
How does this reading inform your understanding of bias in policing? How does it inform your understanding of the relationship between bias and statistics in general?