A new study shows that when it comes to police using lethal force on suspects, there is no racial bias whatsoever. In fact, the numbers show that white suspects are more likely to be shot than blacks.
The author of the study, a black man, was taken aback at what he found. Roland G. Fryer Jr., a Harvard economics professor, said, "It is the most surprising result of my career."
Fryer admits that he prefers looking at data more than protesting, and since the shooting of Michael Brown, the professor has been looking at the numbers to validate the cries from Black Lives Matter that police are racist and trigger-happy when it comes to confrontations with black suspects. But his research has turned up the exact opposite.
Looking at 1,332 shootings between 2000-2015 in 10 major police departments, including Orlando, Jacksonville, and four other counties in Florida, Los Angeles, Houston, Austin, and Dallas, Fryer uncovered that the narrative stoking racial tensions in the U.S. is misaligned. From The New York Times:
In officer-involved shootings in these 10 cities, officers were more likely to fire their weapons without having first been attacked when the suspects were white. Black and white civilians involved in police shootings were equally likely to have been carrying a weapon. Both of these results undercut the idea that the police wield lethal force with racial bias.
Specifically in Houston, Fryer found that officers were 20% less likely to shoot black suspects during tense situations, according to the report. When other factors were considered, the data still showed that cops were more restrained using lethal force with a black suspect, or at the very least, black and white suspects equally.
On the other hand, the study purports to show evidence of racial bias among officers who use non-lethal force. In this case, officers are 17% more likely to use physical force with black suspects than white. A chart was included showing those numbers:
Another chart echoes Fryer's findings. It shows that out of the 509 citizens killed by police so far in 2016, most have been white and overwhelmingly male: 238 white males killed to 123 black males killed. It should be noted that only 13% of the U.S. population is black, but National Review adds some much needed perspective to make sense of that disparity:
One possible comparison group is murderers: According to the FBI, about half are black. Another is cop-killers, i.e., those who demonstrably presented a lethal threat to police: Again according to the FBI, about 43 percent are black. Still another is violent criminals in general: Most of these commit relatively minor offenses (such as simple assault, where there is no weapon or serious injury), but according to victimization surveys, about 24 percent are black. In other words, violent-crime rates roughly explain the gap — indeed, they over-explain it in the case of murderers and cop-killers, who are far more likely to be black than police-shooting victims are.
