  Fatal police shootings in the United States continue to be a polarizing
social and political issue. Clear disagreement between racial proportions of
victims and nationwide racial demographics together with graphic video footage
has created fertile ground for controversy. However, simple population level
summary statistics fail to take into account fundamental local characteristics
such as county-level racial demography, local arrest demography, and law
enforcement density. Utilizing data on fatal police shootings between January
2015 and July 2016, we implement a number of straightforward resampling
procedures designed to carefully examine how unlikely the victim totals from
each race are with respect to these local population characteristics if no
racial bias were present in the decision to shoot by police. We present several
approaches considering the shooting locations both as fixed and also as a
random sample. In both cases, we find overwhelming evidence of a racial
disparity in shooting victims with respect to local population demographics but
substantially less disparity after accounting for local arrest demographics. We
conclude our analyses by examining the effect of police-worn body cameras and
find no evidence that the presence of such cameras impacts the racial
distribution of victims.
