OK, I'm happy to bite.
I took a look at the article that Coulter cites to support her assertion that more women results in more accidental shootings of civilians.
My opinion: overall, it is an excellent study, although I disagree with a lot of the statistical analysis (I am a statistician myself) and interpretation.
On the specific question of female officers and accidental shootings of civilians:
The author himself is not convinced of the relationship. He calls it "very preliminary". He does not even cite the relationship in either the abstract or the conclusions of the study. There are two reasons he is not convinced: first, the relationship is based only 24 datapoints. Second, the relationship is NOT statistically significant. The probability that it could have occurred purely by chance is about 9%, which is higher than the standard accepted threshold.
So: my judgment is that these data, while interesting and perhaps suggesting of the need for further study, are of practically no value in and of themselves.
And they are certainly not sufficient to justify a sanctimonious, sarcastic, self-congratulatory editorial in any respectable newspaper.
Here are the two paragraphs:
Quote:
Finally, it is possible to match evidence on police shootings of civilians with our data on the racial and sex composition of police departments. Geller and Scott [1992] compiled data police shooting of civilians for 12 cities: Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Indianapolis, Kansas City, (Mo.), Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, Santa Ana (Calif.), St. Louis, and San Diego. Although they provide as many as 20 years of data for Chicago and New York, our tests here are limited by the LEMAS to 1987 and 1990, thus leaving us with only 24 observations, so any results must be viewed as very preliminary. The central concern is well summarized by Los Angeles Police Commissioner Bert Boeckmann during a debate before the city's decision to remove the 5-foot height requirement: "Commissioner Bert Boeckmann expressed concern that small-statured officers might rely too much on their guns or partners to compensate for a lack of size and strength in dealing with uncooperative suspects. 'Would there be more of a tendency to reach for a gun as opposed to using some other form for quieting a person she may be having an altercation with?' he asked" (McGreevy [1997, N4]). This argument not only applies to height requirements but also raises the broader question of whether women are more likely to resort to substitute methods, such as guns, to control criminals. To test this, I regressed the per capita number of police shootings of civilians on the percentage of the police force that were black or white males as well as on the per capita number of felonious killings of police and assaults on police, the per capita number of sworn full-time police, officers, the city population, and city and year fixed effects. Felonious killings and assaults on police are used to measure the risks facing officers, with more killings and assaults implying that officers face higher costs to delaying a decision on the appropriate response to possible threats. A similar regression was run using the percentage of the police forces that were black and white females.(FN33)
The results reported in Table VII imply that more black or white male officers lower the number of civilians shot, whereas increasing the number of white females (but not black females) implies an increase. The effects are also quite large with a one standard deviation increase in the black male share of the police force reduces civilian shootings by 1.4 per 100,000 citizens and for white males the reduction is .58 per 100,000 citizens. By contrast, a one standard deviation increase in white females increases shootings by .87. Both regressions also imply that increasing the number of felonious police killings increases the number of accidental shootings of civilians. The other results are more mixed. In the specification that includes the male share of the police force, only the coefficients for assaults and population are statistically significant.
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And here's the analysis table:
Quote:
TABLE VII Explaining the Rate at Which Police Shoot Civilians
Exogenous Variables
Per Capita
Number of Per Capita
Felonious Number of
% of Police % of Police % of Police % of Police Killings of Assaults on
Endogenous Force Black Force Black Force White Force White Police Police
Variable Male Female Male Female Officers Officers
Per capita -.000135 ... -.0000543 ... .000142 2.31 e-7
number of (3.671) (2.164) (2.843) (3.093)
civilian 1.4% 8.3% 3.6% 2.7%
shootings
Per capita ... -.00005 ... .000085 .0000704 -2.64 e-8
number of (.988) (2.072) (2.109) (.285)
civilian 36.9% 9.3% 8.7% 78.7%
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I have no idea how to format tables, but that 9.3% in the last line is the probability value of the associated two-tailed t-test.