The Revenge of the Thin Blue Line 41: Harvard Economist Roland Fryer Study Destroys Racial Bias in Police Shootings or does it?

So, at work a friend asked me if I had heard the Harvard study showing there is no racial discrimination in shootings.  I said I hadn't and he began to play a video with his phone facing away from me.

So, right away I could tell the speaker was an African-American man.  I will leave it up to you to determine why rightwingers absolutely love hearing conservative black writers and thinkers like Thomas Sowell, Clarence Thomas, Colon Noir, Candace Owens or whomever regurgitate reactionary agitprop and direct snide inflammatory insults at Democrats, progressives, LGBTQ persons and other minorities.

Bari Weiss lies about Crime

Anyway as I listened to about 30-60 seconds of the speaker who it turns out is Harvard Economist Professor Roland Fryer, who stated he had published a study showing there was no bias in police shootings.  Reading up on it, the study was conducted in 2016 and published in July 2017, so it's post Ferguson but, pre-George Floyd and BLM burning down every city in America 4 times over during the 2020 "Riots".

Now, this video was a snippet from a 75 minute interview with Bari Weiss, so already I know it's going to have a hard right slant while it masquerades as a Neutral follow the facts not feelings or even adopts a pseudo-left patina.  It's also under the umbrella of the "University of Austin", which if you don't know is a Billionaire funded reactionary laboratory designed to undercut education by claiming it's all about stopping Cancel Culture and Wokeness. 

My first question was where did the data come from before we got off topic.  We got off topic because my friend wanted to defend the Jan6th Coup Attempt ("It wasn't an insurrection") and decry the southern border migrant influx.  His defense of the Jan6th criminal conspiracy boiled down to 'They [i.e. the Police] let them in' therefore it can't have been a Coup Attempt.  Shades of a Nixonian belief, If police officer let's you do it, that means it is not illegal.

But, getting back to Professor Fryer, in the snippet he claimed other academics went to him and pressured him to not publish it.  And if that was remotely true he'd name names.  No names?  Didn't happen.  Fryer, also leans in and in semi-stunned tones claims after getting his results of not finding any racial bias in police shooting from his 8 RAs, he hired 8 "fresh ones" and redid the study and got the same result!  Shocking!!!  Of course, you could hire a million RA's and if you feed them the same data every time you're probably going to get the same result.  The old stand by of Garbage In, Garbage Out, still applies I see.

Or if anyone did go to Fryer and ask him not to publish it was because they knew as soon as his study was released shameless bad faith actors would seize upon it and tout it for decades proving there was no racial bias in policing.  Because... No One... NO ONE... reads a study like this in it's entirety.  And yes before you go, Well I found 3 people who read this from cover to cover, functionally no one reads everything.  Instead what they do is read the Title, perhaps find a tidbit or two in the study that conforms to their narrative, and cite it over and over and over by repetition.

 

And that's the biggest disservice of this paper because, grotesque Reactionaries like my friend or Megyn Kelly are going to reference it to prove there isn't any bias in Police work.  Even though, and this is classic, Professor Fryer states, "that yes we saw some bias in the low level uses of force, everyday pushing up against cars and things like that..."

Just as an aside, sure there's Police brutality in everyday interactions with black an hispanic people and police like throwing people up against cars blah blah blah... but let me minimize it so I can provide Faux News and rightwing grifters like Bari Weiss the ammo they need to claim 'Ackshullay there really isn't Police brutality'...

And of course, the whole fucking point isn't that White Cops are all Klansman running around gunning down black people on a daily N-word hunt, but that Police brutality and systematic racism stem from the day-to-day interactions and injustices meted out in disproportionate number of traffic stops, unequal application of laws, over-policing of certain neighborhoods based on demographics, targeted harsh sentencing of black and brown peoples while certain whites get special treatment, plus a whole host of other micro-aggressions which minorities face from the Justice System on a daily basis.

Judge Adrian acknowledged he was supposed to
impose a mandatory 4-year sentence against Clinton,
 but he would not send him to prison.
“That is not just... I will not do that.”

But, Crypto-Fascists like Fryer say and take certain actions specifically to upset others.  Don't make the mistake of thinking Fryer or any other fascist believes the bullshit they say, they say it precisely to upset you, to trigger you (as the MAGA Chuds proudly declared in 2020), to get you flustered, to waste your time refuting their nonsense, and ultimately to make you despair and give up.  Fascists win when regular people no longer fight back and cede the ground to the Fascists. 

That's what Fryer is all about.

So I won't tell you I read this whole study, but right away even Fryer and his team have to acknowledge

Interestingly, as the intensity of force increases (e.g. handcuffing civilians without arrest, drawing or pointing a weapon, or using pepper spray or a baton), the probability that any civilian is subjected to such treatment is small, but the racial difference remains surprisingly constant.  These are rare events. Yet, the results indicate that they are significantly more rare for whites than blacks. With all controls, blacks are 21 percent more likely than whites to be involved in an interaction with police in which at least a weapon is drawn and the difference is statistically significant. [3]

So, getting back to where the data is from you will be unsurpirised to learn it comes from Police Departments themselves, and Fryer admits it's difficult to get any data around Police shootings other than it happened and almost impossible to get data from the day-to-day indignities black and brown persons suffer at the hands of bigoted Police Officers. 

And why choose the data he chooses?  Certainly, Professor Fryer would state he didn't want his paper to be about any one high profile police shooting of a black person, like Laquan McDonald in Chicago, or Walter Scott in South Carolina, but his decision to narrowly say their is not racism in Police shootings also afforded him the opportunity to ignore Eric Garner being choked to death in Long Island.  So, the data mainly comes from Police department records themselves Houston Police Department (2005-2015), New York Stop & Frisk (2003-2013), and from cities Boston, Camden, Austin, Dallas, Los Angeles, six Florida counties.

Notice this data completely excludes entire regions of the country and every State in the Deep South, the regions of the country where most Americans would say Institutional Racism is a way of life and abuse of force and authority goes back centuries.

But, anyway my time is more and more precious to me so there's not much more to be gained from an 8 year old study or anything to be gained from watching his interview with the odious rightwing troll Bari Weiss.  But, understand two things about this study as with John Lott's totally bogus NRA-funded study that Americans use guns in self-defense 3,000,000 times a year or Andrew Wakefield's fraudulent study that vaccines cause Autism this study will forever be cited as absolute proof that there is no anti-black bias in Police Work, Police Officers merely go to where the crime is, and crime is an inherent part of black and brown society. 

Remember language is a weapon and the language that Fryer employs is designed to give cover to the growing demands of right-wingers that the handcuffs be taken off their Police, because we know Police never lie in reports, Police never arrest innocent men, and every euphemistically named Officer-involved shooting (OIS) is a good shoot.  After all who you gonna believe New York's Finest or your lying eyes?

Prosecutors released new footage of a viral attack on two police officers that appears to conflict with police accounts of their initial interaction with a group of migrants that quickly escalated into a melee that triggered nationwide outrage.

Professor Fryer then concludes with a Bill Cosby, a beloved black authority figure especially to Whites, style condemnation of black people,

The importance of our results for racial inequality in America is unclear. It is plausible that racial differences in lower level uses of force are simply a distraction and movements such as Black Lives Matter should seek solutions within their own communities (emphasis added) rather than changing the behaviors of police and other external forces. 

Conclusion: 

So, while reading this I did find multiple refutations of Professor Fryer's work.  (I won't go into his personal failings or foibles but leave that to you to decide if it undercuts his research and work.)

2020 update: The specific flaws of Roland Fryer's paper have now been characterized in two studies (by other scholars, not myself). Knox, Lowe, and Mummolo (2019) reanalyze Fryer's data to find it understates racial biases. Ross, Winterhalder, and McElreath (2018) do something similar through a statistical simulation.

Fryer’s analysis is highly flawed, however. It suffers from major theoretical and methodological errors, and he has communicated the results to news media in a way that is misleading. While there have long been problems with the quality of police shootings data, there is still plenty of evidence to support a pattern of systematic, racially discriminatory use of force against black people in the United States.

There should be no argument that black and Latino people in Houston are much more likely to be shot by police compared to whites. I looked at the same Houston police shooting dataset as Fryer for the years 2005-2015, which I supplemented with census data, and found that black people were over 5 times as likely to be shot relative to whites. Latinos were roughly twice as likely to be shot versus whites.