Study finds ‘no racial bias’ in US police shootings. But do the numbers add up?

The shooting deaths of two black men last week have reignited a debate over the rate at which African-Americans are the targets for police bullets. But a new study from a Harvard University professor looks into whether there is indeed racial bias when cops fire their guns.

The finding of the study was “the most surprising of my career,” economics professor Ronald G. Fryer Jr. told the New York Times

Looking at 1,322 shootings between 2000 to 2015, Fryer and his team of student researchers found there were significantly fewer instances of white people being subject to non-lethal police use of force — handcuffing, drawing or pointing a weapon, using pepper spray or a baton — than was the case for black people.

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“In the raw data, blacks are 21.3 percent more likely to be involved in an interaction with police in which at least a weapon is drawn than whites and the difference is statistically significant,” Fryer wrote.

But when it came to police shootings, his research found “no racial differences in either the raw data or when contextual factors are taken into account.”

“On the most extreme use of force – officer-involved shootings – we are unable to detect any racial differences in either the raw data or when accounting for controls,” Fryer’s study concluded.

This finding is somewhat counter to media tabulations such as The Guardian‘s The Counted or The Washington Post‘s Fatal Force, both of which used a mix of news reports, verified crowdsourced reports, independent monitoring and available law enforcement data to track police killings.

Both of those projects found higher rates of black victims in police killings but the actual number of white victims was higher in both The Counted and Fatal Force.

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There are also questions about the outcome of Fryer’s study.

The Guardian pointed out the study, a working paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research, had not been peer reviewed, while Vox criminal justice reporter Dara Lind noted the data Fryer used was from 10 police departments in just three states — and mostly looked at major cities.

“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,” Lind wrote.