When Femininity Is Irrelevant: Gender Similarities and Racial Differences in Fatal and Nonfatal Police Violence in California, 2016–2021
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Research finds racial disparities in the frequency and severity of police violence. Police violence research has not interrogated gender to the same effect. We build on theories of “gender irrelevance” to argue that violent incidents between police and civilians cannot be extricated from masculinity’s relevance. However, in contexts when police respond to women as violent, police render women’s femininity as irrelevant. Using 2016–2021 California URSUS data and supplementary archival examples, we examine gender and race across fatal and nonfatal police violence incidents. We find that women are no more or less likely to experience fatal relative to nonfatal police violence than men of the same racial group when accounting for police perceptions of civilians being armed. We also find racial differences in perceptions of weapons, with lower barriers for fatal violence against Black and Latinx civilians. When women are in high-conflict, violent situations, other statuses become hyper-present beyond women’s femininity.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".