Reality check: study finds no racial bias in police shootings
Reality check: study finds no racial bias in police shootings
A new study claims that while black people might experience more use of force by the police, they’re no more likely to be shot – but the data is misleading.
A study reported by the New York Times on Monday claimed to find “surprising new evidence” that there is no racial bias in police shootings. But the study, and the New York Times’ reporting, uses a small sample of data that leads to simplistic conclusions.
The Counted: people killed by police in the United States – interactive
The Guardian has been counting the people killed by US law enforcement agencies since 2015.
The author of the study, Roland G Fryer Jr, analyzed 1,332 shootings between 2000 and 2015. However, the way he and a group of student researchers created their data was largely by coding police narratives rather than considering the testimonials of witnesses or suspects (assuming that the suspects were not killed by the police in the shooting). The study therefore assumes police reports are unbiased sources of information about facts like whether or not the officer shoots the suspect before being attacked.
There are other serious weaknesses in the research. To understand lethal use of force, Fryer looked at police reports from just one city: Houston. There, he found that blacks were either less likely to be shot by an officer or there was no difference between blacks and whites. Even if the data from Houston were accurate, it is doubtful the city is representative of the country.
The Houston police department also allowed the researchers to look at “interactions with police where lethal force may have been justified”. But that data assumes that all officers make fair and objective decisions about the lethal use of force – decisions that are not affected by the race of the suspect.
Looking at just one other city would suggest very different conclusions. In Chicago, a review of the reports of each police-involved shooting looked at fatal and non-fatal shootings. Despite the city being one third black, a disproportionate 118 black males (44 of them fatal) were involved in the 150 shootings recorded since 2010.
READ MORE: https://www.theguardian.com/news/reality-c...
A new study claims that while black people might experience more use of force by the police, they’re no more likely to be shot – but the data is misleading.
A study reported by the New York Times on Monday claimed to find “surprising new evidence” that there is no racial bias in police shootings. But the study, and the New York Times’ reporting, uses a small sample of data that leads to simplistic conclusions.
The Counted: people killed by police in the United States – interactive
The Guardian has been counting the people killed by US law enforcement agencies since 2015.
The author of the study, Roland G Fryer Jr, analyzed 1,332 shootings between 2000 and 2015. However, the way he and a group of student researchers created their data was largely by coding police narratives rather than considering the testimonials of witnesses or suspects (assuming that the suspects were not killed by the police in the shooting). The study therefore assumes police reports are unbiased sources of information about facts like whether or not the officer shoots the suspect before being attacked.
There are other serious weaknesses in the research. To understand lethal use of force, Fryer looked at police reports from just one city: Houston. There, he found that blacks were either less likely to be shot by an officer or there was no difference between blacks and whites. Even if the data from Houston were accurate, it is doubtful the city is representative of the country.
The Houston police department also allowed the researchers to look at “interactions with police where lethal force may have been justified”. But that data assumes that all officers make fair and objective decisions about the lethal use of force – decisions that are not affected by the race of the suspect.
Looking at just one other city would suggest very different conclusions. In Chicago, a review of the reports of each police-involved shooting looked at fatal and non-fatal shootings. Despite the city being one third black, a disproportionate 118 black males (44 of them fatal) were involved in the 150 shootings recorded since 2010.
READ MORE: https://www.theguardian.com/news/reality-c...
An Empirical Analysis of Racial Differences in Police Use of Force
This paper explores racial differences in police use of force. On non-lethal uses of force, blacks and Hispanics are more than fifty percent more likely to experience some form of force in interactions with police. Adding controls that account for important context and civilian behavior reduces, but cannot fully explain, these disparities. On the most extreme use of force – officer-involved shootings – we find no racial differences in either the raw data or when contextual factors are taken into account. We argue that the patterns in the data are consistent with a model in which police officers are utility maximizers, a fraction of which have a preference for discrimination, who incur relatively high expected costs of officer-involved shootings.
Here's that report: http://www.nber.org/papers/w22399