Roland Fryer Answers Reader Questions About His Police Force Study
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Version 0 of 1. A new study on police force found no bias against black civilians in police shootings in 10 cities and counties, including Houston. It did find bias against blacks in every other type of force, like the use of hands or batons. The study provoked debate after it was posted on Monday, mostly about the volume of police encounters and the scope of the data it used. Below, the author of the study, Roland G. Fryer Jr., a professor of economics at Harvard, answered questions from readers. What about the chance of a police encounter? Mr. Fryer’s study looked only at what happens once the police have stopped civilians, not at the chances of being stopped in the first place. Many readers questioned whether that was the right denominator. Other research has shown that blacks are more likely to be stopped by the police. Lee Buttala from Ashley Falls, Mass., asked, “Is it possible that the statistics on shooting are misleading because the police are less likely to stop white people generally.” Wendy Maland from Chicago put it this way: “The question isn’t — once police identify you as a potential criminal, how are you treated? — the question is — who is being treated as a criminal?” Why the focus on Houston? Mr. Fryer’s evidence on shootings came from 10 cities and counties. In these places, he examined questions like whether officers were quicker to fire at black suspects and whether black civilians in officer-involved shootings were less likely to be armed. The data from these places supported his counterintuitive finding, that there wasn’t racial bias in the use of lethal force. But his most comprehensive data — including times when the police did not shoot — came from Houston. Mr. Phil in Houston wrote, “Houston and NYC are certainly the most racially diverse cities in the country, yet was Houston the best comparator?” (Houston and New York City are indeed among the most racially diverse cities in the country.) How is your work different from an earlier analysis? Many readers asked about previous studies, in particular a paper published in PLOS ONE by Cody T. Ross. That paper, “A Multi-Level Bayesian Analysis of Racial Bias in Police Shootings at the County-Level in the United States, 2011–2014,” found that the chance of being black, unarmed and shot by the police was about 3.5 times the chance of being white, unarmed and shot by the police. It was based on a crowdsourced data set, the U.S. Police-Shooting Database, that includes some nonfatal shootings. (About two-thirds of the shootings in Mr. Fryer’s data set were nonfatal.) The USPSD covers the entire country, but it is not comprehensive. It has information from a variety of departments on 16 civilians shot by the police in Houston and other parts of Harris County, Tex., from 2011 to 2014. Mr. Fryer’s data shows 177 shootings by the Houston Police Department in those years. The questions the papers asked were different, particularly in Houston. As Mr. Ross wrote, “The USPSD does not have information on encounter rates between police and subjects according to ethnicity. As such, the data cannot speak to the relative risk of being shot by a police officer conditional on being encountered by police.” John H. in Chicago wrote, “Please compare these results versus the ones published by Ross.” For nonlethal force, why were the estimates from police data and civilian data so different? Mr. Fryer looked at two sources of data on nonlethal force. The first was from stop-and-frisk records in New York City. The second, from the perspective of civilians, came from a national survey, the Police-Public Contact Survey, or PPCS. Hydraulic Engineer in Seattle wrote, “The last graph on citizen-reported encounters — ‘Use of Force in All Types of Police Encounters, According to Civilians’ — requires much more explanation. It shows much more bias toward blacks than the earlier graphs using police reports of encounters with ‘compliant’ citizens.” Do we have to trust police reports to believe your study? “‘Police narratives’?!” wrote Paula Robinson from Peoria, Ill. Larry Evans asked, “If a Narrative crashes in the forest, does it make any sound?” Mr. Fryer hopes his analysis — and reader examination of it — leads to better data on the police use of force. “It’s not the finish,” he said. “It’s the start.” |