By Rajiv Sethi, Professor of Economics, Barnard College, Columbia University. Cross posted from his blog.
I’ve been thinking a bit more about Roland Fryer’s working paper on police use of force, prompted by this thread by Europile and excellent posts by Michelle Phelps and Ezekeil Kweku.
The Europile thread contains a quick, precise, and insightful summary of the empirical exercise conducted by Fryer to look for racial bias in police shootings. There are two distinct pools of observations: an arrest pool and a shooting pool. The arrest pool is composed of “a random sample of police-civilian interactions from the Houston police department from arrests codes in which lethal force is more likely to be justified: attempted capital murder of a public safety officer, aggravated assault on a public safety officer, resisting arrest, evading arrest, and interfering in arrest.” The shooting pool is a sample of interactions that resulted in the discharge of a firearm by an officer, also in Houston.
Importantly, the latter pool is not a subset of the former, or even a subset of the set of arrests from which the former pool is drawn. Put another way, had the interactions in the shooting pool been resolved without incident, many of them would never have made it into the arrest pool. Think of the Castile traffic stop: had this resulted in a traffic violation or a warning or nothing at all, it would not have been recorded in arrest data of this kind.
The analysis in the paper is based on a comparison between the two pools. The arrest pool is 58% black while the shooting pool is 52% black, which is the basis for Fryer’s claim that blacks are less likely to be shot by whites in the raw data. He understands, of course, that there may be differences in behavioral and contextual factors that make the black subset of the arrest pool different from the white, and attempts to correct for this using regression analysis. He reports that doing so “does not significantly alter the raw racial differences.”
This analysis is useful, as far as it goes. But does this really imply that the video evidence that has animated the black lives matter movement is highly selective and deeply misleading, as initial reports on the paper suggested?
Not at all. The protests are about the killing of innocents, not about the treatment of those whose actions would legitimately plant them in the serious arrest pool. What Fryer’s paper suggests (if one takes the incident categorization by police at face value) is that at least in Houston, those who would assault or attempt to kill a public safety officer are treated in much the same way, regardless of race.
But think of the cases that animate the protest movement, for instance the list of eleven compiled here. Families of six of the eleven have already received large settlements (without admission of fault). Six led to civil rights investigations by the justice department. With one or two possible exceptions, it doesn’t appear to me that these interactions would have made it past Fryer’s arrest filter had they been handled more professionally.
The point is this: if there is little or no racial bias in the way police handle genuinely dangerous suspects, but there is bias that leads some mundane interactions to turn potentially deadly, then the kind of analysis conducted by Fryer would not be helpful in detecting it. Which in turn means that the breathless manner in which the paper was initially reported was really quite irresponsible.
For this the author bears some responsibility, having inserted the following into his discussion of the Houston findings:
Given the stream of video “evidence”, which many take to be indicative of structural racism in police departments across America, the ensuing and understandable outrage in black communities across America, and the results from our previous analysis of non-lethal uses of force, the results displayed in Table 5 are startling… Blacks are 23.8 percent less likely to be shot by police, relative to whites.
His claim that this was “the most surprising result of my career” was an invitation to misunderstand and misreport the findings, which are important but clearly limited in relevance and scope.
Update. If you follow the links at the start of this post, you’ll see a case made that Fryer’s own findings of bias in the use of non-lethal force suggest that the composition of the arrest pool will be altered by bias in the charging of innocents for resisting or evading arrest.
It occurred to me that the same data used to examine use of non-lethal force (from the citizen’s perspective) could also be used to get an estimate of this effect. This is the Bureau of Justice Statistics Police-Public Contact Survey. If anyone had done already this please let me know, I’d be interested to see the findings.
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I don’t know about this statement. A handful of videos outweighing a large body of data – does not seem to be in any way comparable or relevant. I suppose this is the nature of statistics – the difference between the law of large numbers and predicting the result of individual occurrences.
My personal opinion is that: 1) in many jurisdictions the police have become disconnected from communities they serve, 2) lethal weaponry should only be given to specially-trained officers (see UK practices) and 3) there are some bad apples (that are not specifically identified in Fryer’s paper) that must be rooted out and dealt with – but this can happen in any profession.
As for my own personal experience, I’ve been fortunate in that my encounters with the police have always been very professional and honourable ones, but this is obviously not the case for everyone and for all policemen based upon the video evidence.
On the subject of profession, my view is that policing should be treated as a profession, just like any other such as Accounting, Engineering or Law. Put them under independent training and certification. Permit the public to raise complaints regarding negligence and malpractice to an independent licensing board.
With all due respect, your comment makes no sense. You basically hand-wave at Sethi’s argument. You haven’t even begun to rebut it.
In addition, there is every reason to think the underlying data is bad. I have a friend who was the DA in a major East Coast city and he said cops plant evidence all time. When cops hurt or kill a suspect, their actions are subject to scrutiny and they are at risk in a way they aren’t in a normal arrest. So of course they will make the record show that their actions were warranted. Look at how there have been multiple cases where police said a victim was dangerous, and even got other cops to sign off officially on their version of the story, when a video would surface later and show the police story to be one big fabrication.
Um, if the shooting pool was 52% black, wouldn’t blacks have to make up more than 52% of the population in order for them to be more likely to be shot than whites? I mean, if 52% of the shooting pool were Jews, and Jews make up 2.5% of the population, then it would be impossible for them to be shot more often than “whites”.
Am I missing something?
Blacks, at just 13% if the population, commit around 50% of crimes in the US. So you have to look their rate of criminality to understand why they are so high a percentage of the arresting pool.
To look at this another way, lets say we wanted to study the percentage of fouls committed by race in the NBA. Suppose we did a study and found 80% of the fouls in the NBA are called on black players. Now with blacks being only 13% of the population, we might be then tempted to claim this discrepancy as evidence of systemic racism among NBA referees But a critic might point out that since blacks are 85% of the NBA players, they are actually called for proportionally fewer fouls than non-black players.
But the issue is people getting shot by the cops who have committed no crime, so no matter how many black people commit crime (and since the systematic looting of society via the financial system isn’t considered crime, and what Clinton did isn’t considered crime, one has to be careful with throwing around stats about who is committing crimes) the problem of cops killing black people they shouldn’t be killing remains.
The “crime” rate is used to project a “police interaction” rate. Obviously the higher the crime rate the higher the police interaction rate. And in order to get around the definition of crime (which is a valid point) the rate of murder is often used as a proxy.
You see this with gender. Men commit crime at a rate 19 higher than women. And men are shot down by the police at at a much higher rate than women. No one claims this to be a sign of systemic sexism against men.
In the recent cases, the rate of black crime does come into play, especially in the case of Philander Castile. He was pulled not because of a tail light but he resembled an armed robbery suspect and supposedly the car he was in resembled the getaway car. Philander apparently had his revolver on his lap, which is a common way to drive through high crime urban areas. Remember blacks are victims of crime at a much higher rate than other races. So while the dashcam video of the incident has not yet been released, there is little doubt that the world of crime in which Philander Castile swam (which is not to say he was a criminal himself) certainly contributed to the circumstances that led to his death at the hands of a Hispanic police officer — for which it is yet to be determined whether they were justified or not.
how do we know he was pulled over because of a resemblance to an “armed robbery suspect”, aside from the cop saying that?
There are images taking during the armed robbery (the perp did not wear a mask) and the suspect does indeed resemble images of Philander Castile although it is far from conclusive. The local police had isued a BOLO (Be on the lookout) concerning the armed robbery suspects the day before the Philander Castile shooting.
And yet somehow, armed, white mass murderers are often taken in peacefully, without even injury. White men can wave automatic weapons in the faces of police officers and sometimes aren’t even arrested. Black children can’t even play with toy guns safely.
Your analogy stops too soon – it assumes that there is a stable population of “criminals” who are individually of whatever race. The definition of crime (just like the definition of a foul!) is determined in part by the referee/cop.
In other words even if the fouls called were proportional (and they’re not) the complaint is that those foul calls for the unfavored group are unfair and the refs call fouls where there are none, and for the favored group the ref doesn’t see jack until the crowd is on its feet yelling in anger. Responding that the unfavored people commit more fouls and that’s why the refs watch them more closely is therefore beside the point and just parroting the point of view of the (crooked) ref.
The issue is that cops only look for crime in black neighborhoods, so that’s where they find it. Minor offenses (loitering, MJ possession, assault w/no injuries, etc.) are pursued like mad (major source of revenue for the dept and the city) in black neighborhoods ways that would shock and infuriate most white people if they had to live there. Those same occurrences simply would not be considered offenses and would be ignored in white neighborhoods.
The incidence of what you or I would consider “major crimes” like armed robbery or murder tends to follow poverty and not race. They’ve also been declining for years, while the # of innocent people shot just keeps going up.
Major crime has been declining since the 90’s while at the same time poverty rates have been rising. In light of this I do not understand how you say that major crime is linked to poverty if the statistics are saying the exact opposite.
It’s been pretty well shown (international studies) that the decline in crime rates is due to getting lead out of gas. The correlations are pretty astonishing.
There was a book published Ten Years ago, forgot the title, something like “Crazy Economics” that concluded (among other things) that the decrease in crime rates had a direct correlation to the passage of Roe v Wade in the early Seventies. In other words less unwanted children-less crime.
I have never read anything about the unleaded gas conclusion but that and the ability to terminate unwanted pregnancies brings up the ‘causation’ vs. ‘correlation’ issue no…? cheers…
“Blacks, at just 13% if the population, commit around 50% of crimes”
No, they are 50% of the people brought in by cops.
bingo!
As I alluded to above, murder rates are used to estimate total crime rates because murder stats are more difficult to manipulate. The Obama Administration released a study on murder and race which showed that 52.5% of murders were committed by blacks in the United States between 1980-2008. That is what I base the 50% number on.
Please refer to Table 7 on page 12 of the study.
http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/htus8008.pdf
“Blacks, at just 13% if the population, commit around 50% of crimes in the US.”
Umm, no. Of the people charged with a crime, 50% of those people are black, i.e. Afro Americans. Afro Americans do not commit 50% of the crimes in the US. I suspect that number belongs to the Caucasian group of Americans.
Particularly, when as Bill Black has pointed out, you have non-prosecutoin of rampant white collar crime.
There was a hastag on Twitter that I can’t recall now. It was started right after BLM got going, and it was white people tweeting about stuff they had done (in close proximity of cops) that would have gotten them arrested and maybe killed if they were black.
Except that we can’t simply ride with the 13:50 ratio and consider that meaningful information without controlling for economic and social status and differences in patrol levels, charging, and prosecution and plea policies.
I was wondering exactly the same thing, James. The only answer I can work out is that with the arrest pool at 58% black and the shooting pool at 52% black, the lower percentage of blacks who are shot compared to those arrested is the source of the statement that blacks are “less likely” to be shot than whites. If the percentage of blacks who are shot was larger than those arrested, then those numbers would indicate that blacks are more likely to be shot.
While Fryer’s statement that blacks are less likely to be shot may be an accurate reflection of the relationship of these two numbers, it is useless for any kind of reasonable analysis and is very misleading, as Sethi details in this essay.
He should’ve looked at arrests and shoots as per capita.
The count as of today of officers killing citizens stands at 587, so far this year. The URL below brakes the killings down by race in simple graph.
http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2015/jun/01/the-counted-police-killings-us-database
not necessarily.
The same Jew could be shot 52 times. And none of the other Jews shot even once.
that might total 52 shot Jews right there, even though there’s only one in the pool. Probably with all the blacks!
Ya gotta think outside the box! :-)
None of this is as easy as it seems using a calculator.
Good stuff, if the claim that police officers are “utility maximizers, a fraction of which have a preference for discrimination” in the abstract wasn’t enough to get you to bin this paper.
Correlation?
Causation?
Multivariate analysis?
If all racial bias was eliminated, would there be fewer killings overall? Well … my hypothesis would be yes.
However … would it stop all police shootings?
There are many variables which go into a police shooting. Is race the biggest predictor? Is race a bigger predictor than alcohol or drug use? Is race a bigger predictor than physical location or time of day? Is race a bigger predictor than employment status? Is previous arrests a bigger predictor than race?
Personally … I’m into “No More Wedgies”. So long as we remain wedged against each other we cannot find common ground and form coalitions to get at issues which effect us all.
As a public school teacher, I’m familiar with Fryer as a politically juiced – his rapid rise up the Ivy League ladder is hard to fathom unless you account for his research valorizing Overclass appetites – academic for hire, peddling discredited policies of so-called education reform such as paying children for higher tests scores and evaluating teachers based on student test scores.
Any information or analysis by this man should transact at an extremely high discount.
“The key limitation of the data is they only capture the police side of the story.”
At least it’s a try. Consider it a first swing at methodology.
My attention started slipping with the NY data: ” Adding precinct and year
fixed effects, which estimates racial differences in police use of force by restricting to variation
within a given police precinct in a given year reduces the black coefficient by 19.4 percent and the Hispanic coefficient by 26 percent, though both are still statistically larger than zero.” That’s a big swing. From precinct to neighborhood to unanalyzed racial distribution… The focus on the Houston data is misleading.
What I didn’t see (though someone else could find) is anything dealing with initiation of contact by the police; all these were post-choice. A bit like looking at malaria in Brooklyn, the circumstances of the initiating fact swamp the variance of the outcome. The mosquito is the vector. ‘Stop-and-frisk’ is dependent on an officer choosing to initiate a contact, which allows the opportunity for ‘aggravated ‘assault on a public safety officer, resisting arrest, evading arrest, and interfering in arrest.’
Results are being cherry-picked. Included are NYC data that should be noted.
Primary problem is all data is post-contact. The choice of contact in the first place (‘Stop-and-Frisk’) that allows the opportunity for ‘aggravated assault on a public safety officer, resisting arrest, evading arrest, and interfering in arrest’ is unexamined.
Steve H.
July 17, 2016 at 7:40 am
Good point – of course, I was going to bring up the very same point. I posted an article from Vox by a black police officer, where the officer had witnessed the police abuse of an innocent young black man, and than charge the young black man with a myriad of crimes.
I don’t think police are any worse than the typical citizen – what I object to his the presumption that they are all truth tellers all the time – and I note how ironic it is that the biggest skeptics of government power seem not to understand that government power is enforced by ….police.
There is no other way to explain the Kelly Thomas verdict other than the fact that Americans have an indoctrinated view that the police are all wonderful, instead of a more thoughtful and nuanced view that the police, like all government employees, should be carefully monitored for compliance with the law as well.
fresno dan,
I did a quick glance at the Kelly Thomas incident, and it looks to me like Orange County was sending a message, and the City of Fullerton paid the price.
I am reminded of when I lived in Naples, Florida. 10% of the population were millionaires, while Immokalee (also in Collier County) had an HIV rate of over a third of their population. Below, Ulysses talks about ‘enforce/defer’ zones. Within Naples, the police were ‘always enforce’ when called, as the 10% had self-sufficient condominium complexes with helipads and yacht docking, and if the jewels got took they called their insurer and not the police.
I don’t think police are worse than typical citizens either, and I think some are truth tellers all the time, but some are mean sob’s who gravitate to where the selection process is knowing who to punch and who not to punch.
I’ve been told the people are less corrupt the higher up you go, from local to state to fed. That makes it a big problem when Comey just showed his subordinates the precise technique of how to eat a sh*t sandwich. The straight arrows within the system have to be supported, or we get the systemic breakdown of legitimacy which the system requires to function. This years political conventions seem poised for a lively debate about the conundrums of government power which you bring up.
My quibble is not so much with the assertion that cops are just like the rest of us, but the idea (which you don’t state, but can often be implied with that statement) that that’s OK. It isn’t. Cops and judges and prosecutors have to be way better than average people: more honest, more thoughtful, more in control of their emotions and conscious of their own biases. These are very special and highly responsible positions. We’ve got to expect a lot more of these people.
Very well said! I’ve known decent people earnestly striving to do good in these roles– only to leave in frustration when the realization that the system destroys more than it helps becomes too much to bear.
According to City Data, which is taken from Census Dept. data, in 2014 Blacks constituted 22.6% of Houston’s population. http://www.city-data.com/city/Houston-Texas.html. Unless one includes a theory of innate Black criminality, at 58% of the arrest pool and 52% of the police shooting pool, something is deeply askew.
The NYTimes has skewered reports similar to Roland Fryer’s in the past http://takingnote.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/09/04/the-real-story-of-race-and-police-killings/?_r=0 with all involved concluding that the police data is suspect because it is self reported and departments that report racial bias face Federal sanction.
An honest take on the data and reasonable conclusions can be found here: https://www.propublica.org/article/deadly-force-in-black-and-white
Follow the link from the article to get to discussion of problems with the data
Just looking at the first couple of paragraphs of the pro-publica deadly force piece I see a big problem. They are extrapolating data from 15-19 year olds and assuming they apply across all age cohorts. Thus they reach the conclusions that blacks are 21 times more likely to be shot by police than whites. The Guardian did the same thing using data from 15-34 year olds which concluded that blacks were six times more likely to be shot by police. It’s cherry picking. Besides, Propublica’s expert on the use of deadly force, David Klinger, concluded that the FBI data, on which they based their analysis, had so many errors it was unusable.
Quite frankly, I would tend to believe the results produced by a winner of the John Bates Clark medal rather than a bunch of no name journalists.
And if Rajiv Sethi is suggesting that Michael Brown and Freddie Gray should not have been arrested, I respectfully disagree.
What’s missing from this discussion is the very pronounced racial and socio-economic segregation in U.S. housing. To use NYC as an example, the police are far more likely to arrest people for minor (if not completely imaginary) things in Eric Garner’s neighborhood, than they are in the wealthy white enclave of the upper East Side, where Mike Bloomberg has his apartment.
The city is divided into “enforcement” zones, and “deference” zones. In the latter your most likely interaction with a police officer will involve asking for directions, friendly banter about sports, weather, etc. In the former, “up against the wall, moth@#fu$#@!!” Indeed, a Latina domestic servant who works on Park Avenue is far less nervous when encountering police walking to the 6 on Lexington than she is when she gets off the 7 in Corona. If you are a white person, without any distinguishing markers to show bourgeois status, you too can get roughed up in Jamaica Queens or East New York if you happen to be in the vicinity of aggressive, or bored cops.
Similarly, my family is from an area of West Virginia that is effectively a white trash ghetto, with a nearby neighborhood that is majority black. I went to high school across town in a well to do neighborhood of whites and Asian immigrants. The area I lived in was absolutely an “enforcement” zone, while the area where I attended school and my classmates lived was a “deference” zone. But even within the “enforcement” zone, as my grandmother put it when we were discussing the Ferguson situation, “The cops is hard on everyone, but them n**ger boys get it worse than the rest.” No one living in such an area has any doubts about the racial bias in police activity, even while recognizing the broader issue of increasing militarization of police tactics and equipment.
My experience in high school was that white kids caught with drugs or driving drunk had parents who could afford lawyers to plead the offenses down. These people were white. How many black families can do that I don’t know, and how likely the DA’s office is to extend that opportunity to black kids compared to Catholic high school kids one can guess at, and my guess is, not nearly so likely.
Well said Ulysses. Mr. Castille had been pulled over 48 times in his vehicle over the past several years before the fatal incident. What the hell is that? None of us would put up with that sort of harassment.
Fryer’s research doesn’t touch stuff like that. In other words, it really is pretty much useless.
It’s a very useful paper for some and that”s all that matters.
Peter Moskos is a left of center former cop who has been covering this issue extensively for a while. His most recent post on the subject is here:
http://www.copinthehood.com/2016/07/reducing-police-involved-shooting.html
The general gist of his coverage(which goes back years) is that there is a problem w/police shootings, but the truly egregious cases are spread around. Off the top of my head and from memory, there’s the guy shot for no reason while climbing out of a wrecked car (official reason: “trying to escape”), the woman shot in the side of the head while supposedly trying to run over over police, the 70 yr old guy whose cane was supposedly mistaken for a rifle, the man shot for twitching while being tased, the guy who got out of the car and lay on the ground at request of cops and was then shot for non compliance because they said he wasn’t showing his hands even tho you could clearly see his hands, the guy who was forced to crawl across the ground of a parking lot of a hotel on his belly and whose pants were coming off and was shot when he reached back to pull them up, the guy who was beaten to death because cops told him to put his hands in the air and on the steering wheel and he refused to comply with both sets of instruction at once, and the mentally ill homeless guy guilty of “illegal camping” in the New Mexico desert who was surrounded by what looked like a full on swat team w/dogs and was shot multiple times both while backing up and agreeing to leave and while on the ground and almost certainly after he was already dead (which was also when he was handcuffed, iirc) (of all the you tube videos I have seen, this is the one I have the most trouble getting out of my head and I am not wanting to watch it again to check for accuracy, tho you can make an argument that many of the others were as bad or worse).
Most of these are on YouTube.
There are a lot of good people who are cops and heaven knows, I don’t think anyone who’s really thought about it for very long really wants the cops to go away (and if you think you do, as many left/anarchists seem to, really, think about this a bit, for real). But. There’s clearly a problem w/training or hiring practices in many departments. And we are moving more and more toward a full on police state, if we’re not already there. But the problems really aren’t primarily race-based, and I’d say focusing only on that angle or trying to portray that as the only or overwhelmingly predominant angle plays into the same narrative as trying to say everything is just fine for all white people and the only ones who aren’t prospering are the lazy malcontents, and if we just had adequate diversity everything would be fine.
More poor people interact w/the cops and the cops are on higher alert around poor people. Black people are disproportionately likely to be poor, and thus you have a disproportionately high # of shootings of black people (tho you can be a well off white kid and die too, like the kid who saw the officer driving down the rd w/his lights on bright and did what people usually do in this situation and quickly flashed his brights to let the officer know; he was the 3rd or 4th person to do this and the officer had had enough and pulled the kid over. Sadly, the kid had accidentally left his license at home. He tried to get out of admitting this by refusing to show his ID because he had done nothing wrong. This did not work out well)
The idea that black people are being murdered willy nilly and other races are getting a free pass while they do awful stuff is just wrong. Doesn’t mean there aren’t problems, there are multiple and huge problems, but the dominant media narrative gets it wrong and perpetuates a false narrative that isn’t helping things get better.
none of this makes sense to me. why on earth would they put people in a pool before shooting them? right away that seems ridiculously contrived. people get shot on the streets, in cars, in buildings, but very rarely in pools.
nothing about social science makes sense.
also some people are blacker than others and some white people are darker than even some black people. If they’re all in a pool together it might be hard to even know who is what,
the point is, if you have your own pool, you don’t get shot.
it’s actually good to be in a pool if you get shot.
I saw on some science video that water stops bullets almost immediately. it was amazing.
water is a strange thing. it’s stranger even than things that seem like they should be strange. they baptized people in water and in myths water plays a very transformative role.
I bet water is nothing like what people think. I bet it’s alive and conscious.
if you have you’re own pool you’re safe.
But if you’re standing next to the pool, you end up as a title for a Fitzgerald novel. Or narrating “Sunset Boulevard”.
A few years ago I became involved in a criminal justice “reform” led by academics who helicoptered-in after a colleague set one of our local judges up to be (correctly) portrayed as racist by a national media outlet. The system was actually working in a decently un-biased manner; we just wanted to get rid of the biased judge, but the academics who helicoptered-in based on the national media report were going to straighten us all out.
A particular ethnic group, who also happened to be targeted by local practitioners of identity politics, were over-represented in the incarcerated population — about 59 percent of those incarcerated, but only about 27 percent of the general population. This was of course seen by the helicoptered-in academics as evidence of systemic bias, not taking into account social factors such as the economic, educational, and social isolation of the group (who had a large component of exploited non-anglophones in their cohort). The academics proposed that they could “eliminate bias” through the use of “risk-assessment instruments” on which all arrestees would be scored.
You can guess where this is going. The “instruments” reflected the class and cultural bias of the academics who designed them — and once they were implemented, over-representation of the ethnic group in the incarcerated population sky-rocketed from 59 percent to 83 percent almost overnight. The academics skittered-off like cockroaches.
Until we (both private citizens and police) start looking at killings of people of color (and of children, of police officers, of soldiers) through the lens of a class-struggle against the neoliberal paradigm that certain people are “excess” human beings who must be “managed” through violence and incarceration, instead of as social capital with whom wealth should be shared, we are going to continue to see violence perpetrated between people in economically excluded groups and the agents of domination.
As for the studies referenced in the post:
Thought I left a comment in this thread yesterday morning but it turns out firefox ate it. Which turns out to be a good thing, since in my hurried morning rush to say something before I had to leave for the day, several important sentences, phrases and concepts that existed in my head failed to get typed. So thank you firefox. Or possibly, thank you mods, if you looked at this and said “wtf? let’s just keep that hidden coz inchoherence”.
Peter Moskos is a left of center former cop who has been covering the issue of misuse of deadly force fairly extensively over years. His blog is called “Cop in the Hood” and it contains a lot of excellent analysis of a lot of different shootings and overall patterns.
The general gist of his coverage(which goes back years) is that while there is a problem w/police shootings, the truly egregious cases are spread around. White people are just as likely to be offed for no or bad reasons as black people. Off the top of my head and from memory, bad fatal shootings or murders of white people by cops include:
The guy shot for no reason while climbing out of a wrecked car (official reason: “trying to escape” the vid cam showed the lie of this)
The woman shot in the side of the head while supposedly trying to run over over police.
The 70 yr old guy whose cane was supposedly mistaken for a rifle
The man shot for twitching while being tased
The guy who got out of the car and lay on the ground at request of cops and was then shot for non compliance because they said he wasn’t showing his hands even tho you could clearly see his hands in the video
The guy who was forced to crawl across the ground of a parking lot of a hotel on his belly and whose pants were coming off and was shot when he reached back to pull them up
The guy who was beaten to death because cops told him to put his hands in the air and on the steering wheel at the same time and he “refused” to comply with both sets of instruction at once
The mentally ill homeless guy guilty of “illegal camping” in the New Mexico desert who was surrounded by what looked like a full swat team complete w/dogs and was shot multiple times both while backing up and agreeing to leave and while on the ground and almost certainly after he was already dead (post-dying was also when he was handcuffed, iirc)(the german shepherds were also sent in to attack him after he was shot and lying on the ground, I really cant remember exact order of this vs. death; of all the you tube videos I have seen, this is the one I have the most trouble getting out of my head and I am not wanting to watch it again to check for accuracy, tho you can make an argument that many of the others were as bad or worse).
Most of these are on YouTube.
There are a lot of good people who are cops and heaven knows, I don’t think anyone who’s really thought about it for very long really wants the cops to go away (and if you think you do, as many left/anarchists seem to, really, think about this a bit, for real). But. There’s clearly a problem w/training or hiring practices in many departments. And we are moving more and more toward a full on police state, if we’re not already there. But the problems really aren’t primarily race-based, and I’d say focusing only on that angle or trying to portray that as the only or overwhelmingly predominant angle plays into the same narrative as trying to say everything is just fine for all white people and the only ones who aren’t prospering are the lazy malcontents, and if we just had adequate diversity everything would be fine.
Based on overall statistics from the Gaurdian and I think WaPo, whites are the most commonly shot, but less often than their % of the overall populace, hispanics about the same as their % of the populace, blacks at a much higher rate than their % of the overall populace, and asians are statistically the safest; can’t remember any native american data. OTOH there’s the counterargument that blacks are more likely to shoot police than whites, and are more likely to be involved in crimes, and compared to these things they are actually less likely to be shot. Again, I think focusing too much on race when it may not be (or, at least mostly, very much is not) the driving factor makes it less likely for whatever the problem w/hiring training of police to ever get fixed.
More poor people interact w/the cops and the cops are on higher alert around poor people. Black people are disproportionately likely to be poor, and thus you have a disproportionately high # of shootings of black people (tho you can be a well off white kid and die too, like the middle class white kid who saw the officer driving down the rd w/his lights on bright and did what people usually do in this situation and quickly flashed his brights to let the officer know he needed to dim his; he was the 3rd or 4th person to do this and the officer had had enough and pulled the kid over. Sadly, the kid had accidentally left his license at home. He tried to get out of admitting this by refusing to show his ID because he had done nothing wrong. This did not work out well)
The idea that black people are being murdered willy nilly and other races are getting a free pass while they do awful stuff is just wrong. Doesn’t mean there aren’t problems, there are multiple and huge problems, but the dominant media narrative gets it wrong and perpetuates a false narrative that isn’t helping things get better. Likewise the idea that cops are a monolithic group who all behave and think the same way. Again, there are a lot of genuinely good people who are cops. There are also a lot of people who are not. And some who might be good people but seem unsuited for the job. Tho given the prevalance of bad things happening, I think there’s more to it than just recruiting practices. At the same time, demonizing the police is going to make it more likely that only the worst people or the most naive keep applying, which is just going to make everything worse.
I would like to end with a preferred solution, but I don’t have one.
I have had interesting discussions with educated members of my family (white, upper class) who argued that profiling and other racial measures are justified since blacks commit so much crime. They argue that the economic cost is high and therefore warrants extreme measures. When I point out that Wall Street or the Defense Industry steals hundreds of times more, they revert to claiming blacks commit violent crimes which can’t be quantified. When I mention the physical and psychological suffering caused by the big banks and our military at home and abroad, they simply say they are not scared to walk past 25 Broad Street or a military base, but they are terrified of breaking down in Bedford-Sty.
Like here in France (with regard to Arabs) it still boils down to racism and/or prejudice. Since 9-11 we have empowered our armed services to respond with any level of violence they like. So now cops Taser when they used to talk, club when they used to wrestle, and shoot whenever they feel salty! The French are perversely pleased by these “terrorist” attacks since it allows them to justify their racism and talk about it overtly. In America, the BLM protests (“How dare they block traffic when decent white people are trying to take their children to ballet class!”) and the rare police shooting are used the same way.
I don’t have any solutions except perhaps to divert billions into education and training for minorities as well as tripling local policing. Oh, and getting rid of guns might help.
Does Fryer even stat? Has he ever taken a legitimate stats class, or is he just counting on his readers never having done so?