A new study on officer-involved shootings says it's the times when police decide not to shoot someone that may help us better understand why they do pull the trigger.

Criminologists at the University of Texas at Dallas, the State University of New York and the University of North Texas at Dallas' Caruth Police Institute analyzed data from 207 fatal shootings between 2003 and 2016 and 1,702 incidents between 2013 and 2016 when Dallas officers reported drawing their gun but not firing.

Dallas police shot seven people last year, two of them fatally, and have killed one so far this year. In the latest shooting, on Feb. 27, police shot and killed the former security guard at an Uptown apartment complex after he killed the manager and fled.

The security guard was a black man, and African-Americans tend to be "overrepresented" in the shootings the study examined. Almost half of the cases between 2003 and 2016 involved black people, while just one in four Dallas residents is black.

But, the study says, the narrative changes when you factor in the number of times officers pull their guns but don't shoot.

When those cases are considered, black suspects were less likely to be shot than white suspects, the researchers concluded. Other factors seem to matter more than a suspect's race and gender.

"We find that situational factors of whether the suspect was armed and whether an officer was injured were the best predictors of the decision to shoot," the researchers wrote in an article published online this week.

We talked to UTD professor Andrew Wheeler, who co-authored the article, to learn more about the team's findings. (The quotes below have been edited for clarity and length.)

What makes this study different than others like it?

A couple different folks — such as The Guardian — have used national-level databases that are crowd-source databases. Those particular databases only recorded when someone was killed by police or if police shot at the individual.

But police use their discretion to not shoot in a lot of different circumstances where they may have been legally justified to. Our main contribution is to look at that particular outcome — shoot vs. not shoot vs. just looking at a database of shooting.

What were the biggest factors in the decision to shoot?

The biggest factors are probably common sense for a lot of different folks. We're considering when the officer drew their firearm and pointed it at an individual. After that particular point, we found that if the suspect was already armed — if they had a weapon or a gun in particular — they were at a much higher risk of being shot. And if an officer was already injured — that was another large risk factor as well.

In terms of gender, it didn't make much of a difference. You would think that officers were more likely to shoot at males, but we didn't find that was the case in our particular data set.

One of the main findings was about race. Officers were less likely to shoot at an African-American than they were against white suspects.

Why is this significant?

The national crowd source databases claim to find racial bias, in particular, when looking at the distinction between unarmed vs. armed, but those are just looking at instances in which the officer shot — not when they didn't shoot.

Imagine an officer gets a call from dispatch, and it says the individual is armed or they have a history of dangerousness. That would prime an officer to be more likely to pull their gun and be more likely to shoot at the suspect because of the prior information from dispatch.

What could account for your findings?

It's a possibility that officers are more likely to draw their weapons against minorities. We definitely can't rule that out with the information that we have.

Another potential explanation though is simple geographic policing. If officers are doing stuff in those particular hot spots or TAAG areas, those areas tend to have more minority individuals. That might result in more instances in which officers feel justified to pull their weapons.

Does the type of neighborhood matter?

There are clusters where officers are more likely to pull their gun or to shoot, but we found that the actual decision to shoot didn't have any spatial pattern. So it wasn't like in Oak Cliff, officers were more likely to shoot. The probability of them shooting was very similar across the entire city.

What were some limitations of the data you analyzed?

There are different decision points that an officer makes. They have to make a decision to draw the gun to begin with. Our analysis can't say anything in terms of that. We can only talk about the decision point to actually pull the trigger. It could be that they are biased in their decision to draw the gun, but we don't find evidence that they are biased when they make the decision to shoot.

In the database we have information on whether the suspect was armed or not armed but we don't know if the officer knew that before the incident. It could be that the officer shot an individual and later found that they were armed but didn't know that at the time of the shooting. That's a limitation of this administrative data in a spreadsheet. There are very dynamic incidents, so it's hard to capture everything from the standardized fields to know what happened before and after.

What data do you wish you had to better understand use of force?

The information that an officer had before the encounter, like a dispatcher saying the person had a prior history. That is the biggest, most important missing piece that we can't get from this public information.

But I do want to say that the Dallas PD should be commended for having this data set both in terms of the use of force and then the officer-involved shootings — it is pretty open. We wouldn't have been able to do what we did here without that openness and that transparency that we've had so far.

Reporter's note : The Dallas Police Department's officer-involved shooting database hasn't been updated for nearly a year, but we did get a quick response from the department when we asked for updated numbers.

So what’s next? What’s the one policing question that you’re eager to answer?

One finding in our research was that officers who had more prior personnel complaints had a higher likelihood of shooting. That hints at using what are called early intervention systems to monitor officers and try to identify problematic officers or problematic behaviors at the source.

Thinking long term, those systems have a lot of promise to be able to improve police behavior in terms of use of force for a lot of different things. That would be my long-term goal or interest going forward — using those systems to improve police behavior.

Correction: This article originally referred to the University of North Texas at Dallas' Caruth Police Institute as part of the University of North Texas.