Avertogenic deaths: how upstream justice decisions shape police lethal force

Abstract

Each year, roughly 1,100 people are fatally shot by U.S. police, and nearly as many are shot and survive. Research on these shootings typically begins and ends at the encounter—suspect behavior, officer perception, situational features. We propose an earlier starting point. Avertogenic police killings are downstream lethal encounters enabled by upstream court decisions about sentencing, diversion, and release. The framework treats police shootings as system outputs shaped by who remains at liberty and therefore at risk of police contact. Using a conceptual model and Monte Carlo simulation calibrated to national data on felony sentencing, recidivism, and police-involved mortality, we show how marginal reductions in incapacitation can increase the population-level hazard of lethal force by returning higher-risk individuals to the community. This is not an argument for harsher sentencing; mass incarceration carries well-documented harms of its own. Rather, the avertogenic framework clarifies a trade-off that neither the policing nor the corrections literature has systematically addressed—bridging two research traditions that rarely speak to each other.