Surprising New Evidence Shows Bias in Police Use of Force but Not in ...

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/12/upshot/surprising-new-evidence-s...

DATA DIVE

Surprising New Evidence Shows Bias in Police Use of Force

but Not in Shootings
By QUOCTRUNG BUI and AMANDA COX

JULY 11, 2016

A new study confirms that black men and women are treated differently in the hands of law enforcement. They are more likely
to be touched, handcuffed, pushed to the ground or pepper-sprayed by a police officer, even after accounting for how, where
and when they encounter the police.
But when it comes to the most lethal form of force police shootings the study finds no racial bias.
It is the most surprising result of my career, said Roland G. Fryer Jr., the author of the study and a professor of
economics at Harvard. The study examined more than 1,000 shootings in 10 major police departments, in Texas, Florida and
California.
The result contradicts the image of police shootings that many Americans hold after the killings (some captured on video)
of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo.; Tamir Rice in Cleveland; Walter Scott in South Carolina; Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge,
La.; and Philando Castile in Minnesota.
The study did not say whether the most egregious examples those at the heart of the nations debate on police shootings
are free of racial bias. Instead, it examined a larger pool of shootings, including nonfatal ones.
The counterintuitive results provoked debate after the study was posted on Monday, mostly about the volume of police
encounters and the scope of the data. Mr. Fryer emphasizes that the work is not the definitive analysis of police shootings, and
that more data would be needed to understand the country as a whole. This work focused only on what happens once the police
have stopped civilians, not on the risk of being stopped at all. Other research has shown that blacks are more likely to be
stopped by the police.
Mr. Fryer, the youngest African-American to receive tenure at Harvard and the first to win a John Bates Clark medal, a
prize given to the most promising American economist under 40, said anger after the deaths of Michael Brown, Freddie Gray
and others drove him to study the issue. You know, protesting is not my thing, he said. But data is my thing. So I decided
that I was going to collect a bunch of data and try to understand what really is going on when it comes to racial differences in
police use of force.
He and 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.
They examined 1,332 shootings between 2000 and 2015, coding police narratives to answer questions such as: How old
was the suspect? How many police officers were at the scene? Were they mostly white? Was the officer at the scene for a
robbery, violent activity, a traffic stop or something else? Was it nighttime? Did the officer shoot after being attacked or before
a possible attack? One goal was to determine if police officers were quicker to fire at black suspects.
In shootings in these 10 cities involving officers, officers were more likely to fire their weapons without having first been
attacked when the suspects were white. Black and white civilians involved in police shootings were equally likely to have been

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Surprising New Evidence Shows Bias in Police Use of Force but Not in ...

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carrying a weapon. Both results undercut the idea of racial bias in police use of lethal force.
But police shootings are only part of the picture. What about situations in which an officer might be expected to fire, but
doesnt?
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To answer this, Mr. Fryer focused on one city, Houston. The Police Department there let the researchers look at reports
not only for shootings but also for arrests when lethal force might have been justified. Mr. Fryer defined this group to include
encounters with suspects the police subsequently charged with serious offenses like attempting to murder an officer, or
evading or resisting arrest. He also considered suspects shocked with Tasers.
Mr. Fryer found that in such situations, officers in Houston were about 20 percent less likely to shoot if the suspects were
black. This estimate was not precise, and firmer conclusions would require more data. But in various models controlling for
different factors and using different definitions of tense situations, Mr. Fryer found that blacks were either less likely to be shot
or there was no difference between blacks and whites.
The study, a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper, relied on reports filled out by police officers and on
police departments willing to share those reports. Recent videos of police shootings have led to questions about the reliability
of such accounts. But the results were largely the same whether or not Mr. Fryer used information from narratives by officers.
Such results may not be true in every city. The cities Mr. Fryer used to examine officer-involved shootings make up only
about 4 percent of the nations population, and serve more black citizens than average.
Moreover, the results do not mean that the general publics perception of racism in policing is misguided. Lethal uses of
force are exceedingly rare. There were 1.6 million arrests in Houston in the years Mr. Fryer studied. Officers fired their
weapons 507 times. What is far more common are nonlethal uses of force.
And in these uses of force, Mr. Fryer found racial differences, which is in accord with public perception and other studies.
In New York City, blacks stopped by the police were about 17 percent more likely to experience use of force, according to
stop-and-frisk records kept between 2003 and 2013. (In the later year, a judge ruled that the tactic as employed then was
unconstitutional.)
That gap, adjusted for suspect behavior and other factors, was surprisingly consistent across various levels of force. Black
suspects were 18 percent more likely to be pushed up against a wall, 16 percent more likely to be handcuffed without being
arrested and 18 percent more likely to be pushed to the ground.
Even when the police said that civilians were compliant, blacks experienced more force.
Mr. Fryer also explored racial differences in force from the viewpoint of civilians, using data from a nationally
representative survey conducted by the federal government. Here, he found racial gaps in force that were larger than those he
found in the data reported from the officers perspective. But these gaps were also consistent across many different types of
force.
This is not news to the black community. Its at the root of the talk that many black parents give to their sons and
daughters about how to approach interactions with the police.
Mr. Fryer wonders if the divide between lethal force where he did not find racial disparities and nonlethal force
where he did might be related to costs. Officers face costs, legal and psychological, when they unnecessarily fire their guns.
But excessive use of lesser force is rarely tracked or punished. No officer has ever told me that putting their hands on
inner-city youth is a life-changing event, he said.
For Mr. Fryer, who has spent much of his career studying ways society can close the racial achievement gap, the failure to
punish excessive everyday force is an important contributor to young black disillusionment.

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Who the hell wants to have a police officer put their hand on them or yell and scream at them? Its an awful experience,
he said. Every black man I know has had this experience. Every one of them. It is hard to believe that the world is your oyster
if the police can rough you up without punishment. And when I talked to minority youth, almost every single one of them
http://nyti.ms/29J3K4O
mentions lower-level uses of force as the reason why they believe the world is corrupt.
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A version of this article appears in print on July 12, 2016, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Analysis Finds No Racial Bias in Lethal Force.

2016 The New York Times Company

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