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.
Don’t like ads? Become a supporter and enjoy The Good Men Project ad freeIf 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.
Don’t like ads? Become a supporter and enjoy The Good Men Project ad freeReaction 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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Race, Policing, and the Limits of Social Science
Here’s why I’m skeptical of Roland Fryer’s new, much-hyped study on police shootings
When Fryer (an economist by training) tells the Times that he got interested in police shootings because of “his anger after the deaths of Michael Brown and Freddie Gray,” and (in Fryer’s words) “decided I was going to collect a bunch of data and try to understand what really is going on,” that should be another humongous red flag.
ADIt implies that Fryer assumed he was doing something pioneering, rather than asking first what work was already being done and what he could add to the existing conversation. This is something that often happens when people in “quantitative” social sciences, like economics, develop an interest in topics covered in other social sciences — in this case, criminology: They assume that no rigorous empirical work is being done.
Ask yourself: How broad is this data? How broad are the claims being made about it?
The Times report does explain the data that Fryer and company used in the new study. But it turns out it’s not nearly as broad a sample as the conclusion “these results undercut the idea that the police wield lethal force with racial bias” would suggest:
(Fryer) and a group of student researchers spent about 3,000 hours assembling detailed data from police reports in Houston; Austin, Tex.; Dallas; Los Angeles; Orlando, Fla.; Jacksonville, Fla.; and four other counties in Florida.
That’s 10 police departments in three states, with a majority of them based in major cities. That allowed Fryer and his team to compile a database with a lot of different shootings — about 1,330 over 16 years, from 2000 to 2015 — but not a lot of different police departments or institutional cultures.
When it comes to policing, this is especially important, because so many issues of crime and policing are local. Different cities have different approaches to police-community relations; different tensions; different standards for use of force. (In fact, the cities Fryer and his team worked with are all members of a White House initiative on policing data launched in 2015 — and the kind of department that thinks data collection and transparency are important is likely to have different priorities in other regards than one that isn’t.)
In comparison, the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report database includes records from thousands of police departments around the country. The number of shootings in the Fryer data set, spanning 16 years, is about equivalent to what the Uniform Crime Report compiles in two or three.
More importantly, the UCR report includes not just major cities but small towns and rural areas; not just diverse cities but less diverse ones; not just departments that think carefully about data collection but departments for which it’s just a needed chore to qualify for government funds.
Ask yourself: Is the question the study answers the same one the public is asking?
The most revealing passage in the Times article is probably the one explaining what Fryer and his team didn’t include in their study:
It focused on what happens when police encounters occur, not how often they happen. Racial differences in how often police-civilian interactions occur reflect greater structural problems in society.
In other words, Fryer and company found that there weren’t big racial disparities in how often black and white suspects who’d already been stopped by police were killed. But they deliberately avoided the question of whether black citizens are more likely to be stopped to begin with (they are) and whether they’re more likely to be stopped without cause (yup).
Avoiding those issues makes sense for the question Fryer was trying to answer. He wanted to know what happens between the moment a police officer stops someone and the moment he pulls the trigger — and how those sequences of events vary by race.
But when people talk about racial disparities in police use of force, they’re usually not asking, Is a black American stopped by police treated the same as a white American in the same circumstances? They’re making a broader critique of the “greater structural problems” in society in general and the criminal justice system in particular. They’re saying that black Americans are more likely to get stopped by police, which makes them more likely to get killed.
Eric Garner was killed in 2014 when police tried to arrest him for selling loose cigarettes. Philando Castile had been pulled over 52 times on misdemeanors (including for driving without a muffler and not wearing a seatbelt) before he was shot and killed last week. Michael Brown was stopped by Darren Wilson for walking in the middle of the street.
Maybe it’s possible (maybe) that those encounters would have been just as likely to escalate to the point of lethal force if each of those men had been white — but it kind of misses the point to say that, because if they’d been white, the encounters probably never would have happened.
Controlling for variables is an extremely important thing in social science. It allows you to figure out which factors actually matter and which ones don’t. In this case, Fryer and his team have given us suggestive evidence that among major-city police forces, police in tense situations are not unusually likely to shoot black suspects. They’ve made a valuable addition to the literature. But it’s just that: an addition, not a discovery, and not the last word.
Roland Fryer is wrong: There is racial bias in shootings by police
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.
Roland Fryer, an economics professor at Harvard University, recently published a working paper at NBER on the topic of racial bias in police use of force and police shootings. The paper gained substantial media attention – a write-up of it became the top viewed article on the New York Times website. The most notable part of the study was its finding that there was no evidence of racial bias in police shootings, which Fryer called “the most surprising result of [his] career”. In his analysis of shootings in Houston, Texas, black and Hispanic people were no more likely (and perhaps even less likely) to be shot relative to whites.
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.
Breaking down the analysis of police shootings in Houston
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.
Fryer was not comparing rates of police shootings by race, however. Instead, his research asked whether these racial differences were the result of “racial bias” rather than merely “statistical discrimination”. Both terms have specific meanings in economics. Statistical discrimination occurs when an individual or institution treats people differently based on racial stereotypes that ‘truly’ reflect the average behavior of a racial group. For instance, if a city’s black drivers are 50% more likely to possess drugs than white drivers, and police officers are 50% more likely to pull over black drivers, economic theory would hold that this discriminatory policing is rational. If, however, police were to pull over black drivers at a rate that disproportionately exceeded their likelihood of drug possession, that would be an irrational behavior representing individual or institutional bias.
Once explained, it is possible to find the idea of “statistical discrimination” just as abhorrent as “racial bias”. One could point out that the drug laws police enforce were passed with racially discriminatory intent, that collectively punishing black people based on “average behavior” is wrong, or that – as a self-fulfilling prophecy – bias can turn into statistical discrimination (if black people’s cars are searched more thoroughly, for instance, it will appear that their rates of drug possession are higher). At the same time, studies assessing the extent of racial bias above and beyond statistical discrimination have been able to secure legal victories for civil rights. An analysis of stop-and-frisk data by Jeffrey Fagan, which found evidence racial bias, was an important part of the court case against the NYPD, and helped secure an injunction against the policy.
Even if one accepts the logic of statistical discrimination versus racial bias, it is an inappropriate choice for a study of police shootings. The method that Fryer employs has, for the most part, been used to study traffic stops and stop-and-frisk practices. In those cases, economic theory holds that police want to maximize the number of arrests for the possession of contraband (such as drugs or weapons) while expending the fewest resources. If they are acting in the most cost-efficient, rational manner, the officers may use racial stereotypes to increase the arrest rate per stop. This theory completely falls apart for police shootings, however, because officers are not trying to rationally maximize the number of shootings. The theory that is supposed to be informing Fryer’s choice of methods is therefore not applicable to this case. He seems somewhat aware of this issue. In his interview with the New York Times, he attributes his ‘surprising’ finding to an issue of “costs, legal and psychological” that happen following a shooting. In what is perhaps a case of cognitive dissonance, he seems to not have reflected on whether the question of cost renders his choice of methods invalid.
Economic theory aside, there is an even more fundamental problem with the Houston police shooting analysis. In a typical study, a researcher will start with a previously defined population where each individual is at risk of a particular outcome. For instance, a population of drivers stopped by police can have one of two outcomes: they can be arrested, or they can be sent on their way. Instead of following this standard approach, Fryer constructs a fictitious population of people who are shot by police and people who are arrested. The problem here is that these two groups (those shot and those arrested) are, in all likelihood, systematically different from one another in ways that cannot be controlled for statistically (UPenn Professor Uri Simonsohn expands on this point here). Fryer acknowledges this limitation in a brief footnote, but understates just how problematic it is. Properly interpreted, the actual result from Fryer’s analysis is that the racial disparity in arrest rates is larger than the racial disparity in police shootings. This is an unsurprising finding, and proves neither a lack of bias nor a lack of systematic discrimination.
Even if the difference in the arrest vs. shooting groups could be accounted for, Fryer tries to control for these differences using variables in police reports, such as if the suspect was described as ‘violently resisting arrest’. There is reason to believe that these police reports themselves are racially biased. An investigation of people charged with assaulting a police officer in Washington, DC found that this charge was applied disproportionately towards black residents even for situations in which no assault actually occurred. This was partly due to an overly broad definition of assault against police in DC law, but the principle – that police are likely to describe black civilians as more threatening – is applicable to other jurisdictions.
I’ll also briefly note that there was another analysis, using data from multiple cities, that looked at racial differences in whether or not civilians attacked officers before they were shot. Fryer himself downplays the credibility of this analysis, because it relied on reports from police who had every incentive to misrepresent the order of events.
Racial inequality in police shootings
Fryer’s study is far from the first to investigate racial bias or discrimination in police shootings. A number of studies have placed officers in shooting simulators, and most have shown a greater propensity for shooting black civilians relative to whites. Other research has found that cities with black mayors and city councilors have lower rates of police shootings than would otherwise be expected. A recent analysis of national data showed wide variation in racial disparities for police shooting rates between counties, and these differences were not associated with racial differences in crime rates. This is just a small sample of the dozens of studies on police killings published since the 1950s, most of which suggests that racial bias is indeed a problem.
It is a failure of journalism that the New York Times heavily promoted this study without seeking critical perspectives from experts in the field. Fryer makes basic methodological errors, overstates the quality of his results, and casually uses the term “racial bias” in a way that is nearly guaranteed to be misinterpreted by anyone who isn’t an economist.