Date of Award

2024

Document Type

Open Access Capstone

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts (BA)

Department

Political Science

First Advisor

Andrew Aoki

Abstract

For decades, police departments in every part of the United States have been scrutinized for incidents of excessive and unjustified force. Some departments kill more of the citizenry than others, both with and without justification. Attention is drawn to Minnesota in the decade since the advent of the Black Lives Matter movement, through and after the murder of George Floyd and subsequent racial reckoning. Existing scholarship categorizes factors as individual and contextual, both of which are included in partial least squares regression performed on crowdsourced data and responses to Law Enforcement Management and Administrative Statistics surveys from 29 departments in Minnesota. This study examines how agency organization, personnel diversity, and area socioeconomic distress affect the occurrence of police-involved death. Implications of significant findings on diversity, staffing, and funding are discussed for departments and local governments.

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