Editor's note: This article originally published in 2020. It's reprinted in the interest of readers.
There are racial differences in use of nonlethal force, but not in officer-involved shootings.
I have led two starkly different lives—that of a Southern black boy who grew up without a mother and knows what it’s like to swallow the bitter pill of police brutality, and that of an economics nerd who believes in the power of data to inform effective policy.
In 2015, after watching Walter Scott get gunned down, on video, by a North Charleston, S.C., police officer, I set out on a mission to quantify racial differences in police use of force. To my dismay, this work has been widely misrepresented and misused by people on both sides of the ideological aisle. It has been wrongly cited as evidence that there is no racism in policing, that football players have no right to kneel during the national anthem, and that the police should shoot black people more often. Here’s what my work does say:
• There are large racial differences in police use of nonlethal force. My research team analyzed nearly five million police encounters from New York City. We found that when police reported the incidents, they were 53% more likely to use physical force on a black civilian than a white one. In a separate, nationally representative dataset asking civilians about their experiences with police, we found the use of physical force on blacks to be 350% as likely. This is true of every level of nonlethal force, from officers putting their hands on civilians to striking them with batons. We controlled for every variable available in myriad ways. That reduced the racial disparities by 66%, but blacks were still significantly more likely to endure police force.
Continue reading the entire piece here at The Wall Street Journal (paywall)
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Roland G. Fryer, Jr., a John A. Paulson Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, is professor of economics at Harvard University and founder of Equal Opportunity Ventures.
This piece originally appeared in The Wall Street Journal