Yeah, No, That Study Doesn’t Debunk Police Racism

Sloppy social science and the mental gymnastics of racism deniers.

Some people will say anything to deny the problem of racism in policing.

These are people who would have found ways to defend Bull Connor in Birmingham too, or Jim Clark and his goons in Selma six decades ago.

One thing about their denials has changed though — they’ve become more sophisticated.

Increasingly, such folks wrap their denial in a patina of respectable “evidence,” whereas, back in the day, they would have just said something about how those n-words were asking for trouble and left it at that.

But bullshit, even when footnoted, is still bullshit.

White racism deniers love ’em some Roland Fryer

My favorites are the white folks who send around the study from a few years ago by Roland Fryer, a Harvard academic, which concluded police were no more likely to use lethal force against Blacks than whites.

They love this one because Fryer is Black.

Apparently, if a Black guy says there’s no racism in policing — or if that’s what they think he’s saying — there must not be.

It’s funny — first, because conservative white people are so quick to latch on to any Black person who they think confirms their nonsense, and second, because they don’t understand what the Fryer study says, why much of it doesn’t support their view, and why the part that does is seriously flawed.

The Fryer study looked at four data sets, mainly focusing on three: stop-and-frisk data from New York City, data from 12 large cities or counties in Texas, Florida, and California, and a special data set from Houston.

The racism deniers focus on the finding that there was no racial disparity in use of lethal force, but before examining the data used to reach that conclusion, it’s worth looking at what the deniers ignore.

Non-lethal force shows clear disparity

Looking at non-lethal force, Fryer relied on stop-and-frisk data from New York for 2003–2013 and found that Black New Yorkers were 53 percent more likely than whites to be met with non-lethal force by the NYPD.

Interestingly, when he controlled for variables like civilian behavior during the stop — did they resist arrest, for instance — or the neighborhood crime rate, not only did this not reduce the disparity, it sometimes increased it.

This means police were using force against African Americans even in cases where they put up less resistance and in parts of town where crime rates were not elevated.

Nonetheless, when Fryer controlled for 125 supposedly non-racial variables, the observed disparity in non-lethal force fell from 53 percent to 17 percent — still significant, albeit less so.

But how is this possible?

If the disparity remained huge even when suspect behavior and neighborhood crime rates were held constant, what variables could have had such a depressive effect on disparity?

We don’t know for sure. The complete list wasn’t provided in Fryer’s paper. But what we do know about them is methodologically troubling.

Consider his controls for “community dangerousness.”

As noted previously, Fryer examined the neighborhood crime rates and actual suspect behavior during encounters because these would predictably increase the likelihood of police use of force.

But remember, neither of these controls reduced the racial disparities and tended to increase them.

So, where did the reductions come from?

According to Fryer, three “precinct effects” cut racial disparities in the use of force by nearly 20 percentage points — more than a third below their initial level. And what were those?

According to Fryer, they were socioeconomic variables often correlated with crime rates: median education levels, median income, and median levels of unemployment in a neighborhood. As Fryer puts it, these are “proxies for dangerousness.”

But why control for “proxies for dangerousness” when you’ve already controlled for neighborhood crime rates and the behavioral dynamics of particular stops?

At that point, Fryer has already controlled for dangerousness and by a more direct method than using socioeconomic proxies to estimate it.

If the crime rate in a neighborhood fails to explain the racial disparity, controlling for variables that are often correlated with a higher crime rate is superfluous. And if actual encounter dynamics failed to explain the racial disparity, controlling for variables that might predict greater resistance by civilians is equally absurd.

Either the person who was stopped resisted or they didn’t. If they had, Fryer would have already controlled for that. If they didn’t, the fact that there are many unemployed high school dropouts living on the block can hardly justify cops throwing someone who isn’t resisting against a wall.

Ultimately, even though he artificially minimizes the problem, Fryer’s data shows Black folks are much more likely to be handled violently by police. And this is so, even when they put up less resistance, comply with all demands, have no weapons, and have committed no crime.

Of course, this finding is ignored by those who point to Fryer’s research as vindication of their racism denial.

Lethal force data shows disparity too — Fryer’s data sets are garbage

When we look at Fryer’s data on lethal force, his conclusions are dubious to the point of being laughable.

First, let’s look at the data set from Houston, which consisted of interactions where officers fired at suspects or specific high-risk arrest scenarios where lethal force would have been most likely.

The Houston data doesn’t disprove racial bias

Here, Fryer discovered no real racial difference in the likelihood that Blacks, as opposed to whites, were shot by police once subjected to a stop or arrest.

But a central flaw in Fryer’s analysis is the suggestion that bias can only be operating if Black people are more likely to be shot by police than whites once both have been stopped.

Although such a position may seem intuitive, it doesn’t hold up to scrutiny for two reasons:

Racism can influence who gets stopped in the first place — and thus, how many encounters there are between cops and Blacks versus cops and whites — and,

Police could be confronting Black folks for more subjective, less legitimate reasons.

If the latter is true, this would naturally reduce the likelihood of those Black people being shot because they weren’t doing anything serious. Thus, there would be less likelihood of a violent reaction by the Black person stopped.

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If I’m Black and you stop me because of racialized suspicion and bias, and our encounter doesn’t result in a shooting — which it shouldn’t since I hadn’t even done anything to justify the stop — you can’t use your lack of deadly force against me as proof of goodwill.

And if police are more likely to stop Black folks in the first place for reasons of bias, then the risk they face in the general population would still be higher.

A hypothetical can demonstrate the point.

Imagine a community where the white-to-black population ratio is 5 to 1 (similar to the U.S.), with 120,000 people: 100,000 whites and 20,000 Blacks.

EXAMPLE: 1/200 vs 1/20000

And imagine that in a given year, police stopped 10,000 Black people (half the Black population) and 5,000 whites (5 percent of white folks). And of the 10,000 Blacks stopped, 100 were shot by police, and of the 5,000 whites stopped, 50 were.

In both cases, the odds of being shot once stopped would be one percent, but 1 in 200 Blacks would have been shot, compared to 1 in 2000 whites.

The question isn’t, “Once whites are stopped, are they as likely as Black people who’ve been stopped to be shot?”

The question is: “Are white people, walking down the street, driving their vehicle, or just living their lives, as likely to be stopped in the first place and then shot as Black people?”

The answer to that is no, and nothing in the Fryer study suggests otherwise.

The 10-city data set is no better

In addition to the special data set culled for him by the Houston PD, Fryer examined a 10-city data set from Florida, Texas, and Los Angeles involving interactions where officers had discharged their weapons.

Since everyone in the data set had been shot at by police, Fryer wasn’t seeking to determine the relative risk of whites or Blacks being shot by cops, but rather, how quickly officers had discharged their weapons.

Did police shoot before or after being attacked by the civilian? Ultimately, Fryer found there was no significant difference based on race.

Perhaps the question of how quickly an officer decided to shoot is an interesting one to explore. Still, it seems far more important to determine the relative risk of being shot as an unarmed Black person compared to an unarmed white person than to narrowly focus on a cop’s reaction time.

Although Fryer suggests it would have been impossible to answer this larger question, other researchers have been more ambitious.

One recent study found that the odds of being Black, unarmed, and shot by police in Los Angeles county (one of the places Fryer examined) are twenty times higher than the odds of being white, unarmed, and shot by police there.

And honestly, what fact do you think would be more important to the average Black person?

When they get shot by cops, unarmed whites are shot just as quickly as unarmed Blacks are, or

Unarmed white people are only one-twentieth as likely as unarmed Blacks to be shot in the first place.

I’ll wait.

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Reaction time differences are a stupid metric in that we shouldn’t expect them to vary all that much, especially in high-risk situations like the ones examined by Fryer. An officer doesn’t have the luxury of much reflecting when a gun is pointed at them, or they’re being attacked, no matter the suspect’s race.

But that hardly means that racial bias wasn’t operating at the point where the person was stopped in the first place.

Nor does it preclude bias regarding whether the officer perceived danger and chose to fire at all.

Imagine a community where police shot 500 black people in a year, 300 of whom were attacking, and 200 of whom were not; and only five whites, three of whom were attacking and two of whom were not. As per Fryer, there would be no racial bias: for both groups, 60 percent of the shootings occurred after the officer was attacked and 40 percent before an attack.

But seriously? Does it seem remotely logical to suggest there isn’t a problem here in terms of greater risk for black people, relative to their share of the population and non-attacking population?

What the facts say, deniers notwithstanding

The facts are these, no matter what liars and fools choose to believe:

Black folks killed by police are 2.3 times more likely than whites killed by police to have been unarmed at the time, and whites killed were about 50 percent more likely than black victims to have been shot while attacking the officer or another civilian.

Likewise, the rates of police-involved shootings bear little if any relationship to crime rates in the places where those shootings occur. This is why some communities with much higher crime rates have lower rates of police-involved shootings than cities with less serious crime problems.

Ultimately, police are just as likely to shoot an unarmed black person as an armed white person in this country.

That’s what matters — not the beliefs of internet trolls looking for any “evidence” to justify their biases and ways to rationalize disparate treatment of Black people.

Not that facts will likely matter to the kinds of folks who make these silly arguments.

But at least you can’t say we never offered a rebuttal to Roland Fryer and his white conservative fan club.

Some of y’all need to find a better mascot.

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