"What if the popular narrative about police racism that’s being pushed by Black Lives Matter and others in the wake of last week’s fatal shootings is based on unfounded assumptions?
That’s the question we are forced to confront today after the publication of a new study conducted by Harvard University’s Rolando G. Fryer Jr. that shows there is no evidence that blacks are more likely than whites to be shot by cops.
Fryer, an African-American economics professor, characterized the results as “the most surprising result of my career.”
While FBI director James Comey is quoted in a New York Times Upshot piece about the study saying that reliable statistics about interactions between African-Americans and police have been lacking, Fryer’s effort — which was published under the rubric of the National Bureau of Economic Research — seems to fill in the gap.As the Times notes, Fryer began this undertaking because of his anger about the controversial shootings in Ferguson, Missouri and Baltimore that put the wind in Black Lives Matter’s sails.
But what he discovered doesn’t back up the notion that trigger-happy white cops have declared open season on blacks.
Fryer studied more than 1,332 police shootings involving ten major American police departments in Texas, Florida, and California between 2000 and 2015.
While he found that blacks were more likely to be touched or handcuffed by police during the course of investigations or confrontations, they were not more likely to be shot.
To the contrary:
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...."
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