Do Wichita police shoot and kill at a disproportionate rate?

After Andrew Finch was shot and killed by Wichita police, a lawsuit from his family said the number of shooting deaths “by the Wichita police department is disproportionately large for a city of its size.”

But a Wichita Eagle analysis shows that the city falls somewhere in the middle when it comes to shooting deaths by police compared to population or number of officers.

RELATED STORY: Shooting deaths by Wichita police since 2010

Experts say any such analysis needs to be viewed with caution since it doesn’t include every variable. It also only looks at shooting deaths, not every time police pull the trigger.

When compared with other cities in the 300,000-400,000 population range since 2013, Wichita placed sixth out of 16 for police in terms of the number of shooting deaths by population and eighth out of 16 for shooting deaths by number of officers.

The city placed 688th on a list of 1,054 cities with populations greater than 5,000 for deaths by population. It placed 680th when compared by deaths per police officer.

Officer Charley Davidson said in an email that the Wichita Police Department couldn’t speak to the veracity of the data, but that it did not appear to support the claims that Wichita has a disproportionate number of police shootings.

“Keep in mind WPD strives to have as few Officer Involved Shootings (OIS) as possible,” Davidson wrote. “Unfortunately, officers are tasked each and every day with responding to emergency calls involving weapons and shots being fired. In those situations occasions arise where lethal force is objectively reasonable.”

The Finch family’s lawyer did not respond to requests for comment. The lawsuit did not make clear the time frame the lawyer used to analyze shooting deaths.

The Wichita Eagle conducted the analysis by combining databases from The Washington Post and Mapping Police Violence of deaths caused by police from 2013-present day. Non-shooting deaths were excluded, as were federal, state, county and tribal agencies.

Information about full-time law enforcement officers and population came from the FBI’s 2011 Uniform Crime Reporting program.

Several shooting deaths were excluded from the comparison if information, such as the agency the officer worked for, was unavailable. For example, some shootings did not list the agency.

Lawyer James Thompson, who has sued the city in previous police shootings, said 2011 is when the Wichita Police Department changed its training, leading to an increase in shooting deaths.

There were four shooting deaths by police in 2012, but The Wichita Eagle did not include that year in its analysis since national data was not available for comparison in the Washington Post or Mapping Police Violence databases.

“Adding those four in will definitely change the results of your figures,” Thompson said.

According to Wichita Eagle archives, Wichita police have shot and killed 48 people since 1980. The most deadly year recorded by The Wichita Eagle was 1992, when five people were killed by police. That year was followed by 2012 and 2017 for the most shooting deaths by police. Officers killed four people during each of those years.

Of those 48 people killed, most were armed with knives or guns. One hit an officer with a hammer and four drove at or dragged officers with a vehicle, police said at a time.

Five were unarmed, including two men shot in the 1980s and the more recent deaths of Troy Lanning, John Paul Quintero and Finch.

Thirty-one of the people killed were white, 13 black, three Hispanic and one Asian. All but two were men.

Out of the 48, six were under the age of 20 while 28 were in their 20s. The oldest person killed was 73, while the youngest was 16.

David Klinger, professor of criminology and criminal justice at the University of Missouri – St. Louis, said while it is valid to compare agencies, there are many factors that affect a city’s ranking.

New York City, for example, has a higher “population” than statistics show, since so many people come in as tourists or commuters. St. Louis, which ranks high for police shooting deaths, also has one of the highest levels of violent crime in the country, he said.

Such analyses also don’t track overall acts of force by police.

“You can get misled when only looking at deaths when you are trying to infer something about the use of deadly force,” Klinger said. “The big issue is police officers making the decision to pull the trigger. The outcome could be all sorts of things.”

Data on fatal police shootings is hard to come by. Between 2011 and 2015, less than 3 percent of state and local police agencies had reported data to the FBI, according to The Washington Post.

The FBI is now developing a national use-of-force data collection, which launched last July with a six-month pilot study. Individual agencies will be responsible for reporting their data.

David Harris, professor of law at the University of Pittsburgh and an expert on law enforcement, said it’s “astounding” that use of force by police isn’t better tracked at a national level.

“Any use of deadly force by a police officer should be tracked in a consistent way across all police departments and nationally reported,” he said.

Regarding The Wichita Eagle analysis of Washington Post and Mapping Police Violence data, Harris also said it’s important to remember that those databases do not include the number of times an officer fired at a civilian and missed or caused an injury.

“It puts us in a position where as a country, we can’t really get a full grip on how widespread or how bad or how good certain situations are,” Harris said.

Nationwide, there have been more than 5,000 shooting deaths by police since 2013. Ten of those occurred in Wichita.

The most recent death in Wichita was that of Finch, who was killed after police responded to a fake “swatting” call of a hostage situation. Finch was unarmed.

This story was originally published February 9, 2018 at 3:59 PM with the headline "Do Wichita police shoot and kill at a disproportionate rate?."