Police and Race

Studies comparing Russian roulette using Glock 19 or Smith and Wesson 686 shows the Glock much the safer gun. Stats can indicate only what's asked.


                                    Police and Race

Mr. Fryer is a professor of economics at Harvard. This is from a recent article that summarized some of his recent investigations. Some are subjective.

There are large racial differences in police use of nonlethal force. 
hen 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. 

Compliance by civilians doesn’t eliminate racial differences in police use of force.
Black civilians who were recorded as compliant by police were 21% more likely to suffer police aggression than compliant whites. We also found that the benefits of compliance differed significantly by race. Compliance does make you less likely to endure a beat-down—but the benefit is larger if you are white.

We didn’t find racial differences in officer-involved shootings. 
 But at least two other studies, both published in 2016—by Phillip Atiba Goff et al. and Ted R. Miller et al.—have since found the same using different data. Those statistics, however, cannot address the fundamental question: When a shooting might be justified by department standards, are police more likely actually to shoot if the civilian is black? 

 Investigating police departments can have unintended consequences.
We found that investigations not preceded by viral incidents of deadly force, on average, reduced homicides and total felony crime. But for the five investigations that were preceded by a viral incident of deadly force, there was a stark increase in crime—893 more homicides and 33,472 more felonies than would have been expected with no investigation. The increases in crime coincide with an abrupt change in the quantity of policing activity. In Chicago alone after the killing of Laquan McDonald, the number of police-civilian interactions decreased by 90% in the month the investigation was announced.