Researchers found that white police officers were no more likely to shoot minority citizens than non-white officers were
IN 2016 Roland Fryer, an economist, published a controversial paper. Having analysed thousands of police reports from ten American cities he found that police showed racial bias in all forms of force against African-Americans, except one: the use of guns. While blacks were more likely to be tasered, hit with a baton and generally roughed up, when it came to being shot by police they were in no more danger than whites.
Unsurprisingly, a storm of publicity followed. In recent years, police shootings of unarmed black men have sparked furious protests. Critics of Mr Fryer’s research focused on the fact that African-Americans are stopped by police more, and therefore have more interactions with them, some of which go wrong. Mr Fryer’s data, moreover, was focused on only a handful of cities.But this week, a nationwide study was published inthat supports Mr Fryer’s finding.
The researchers found that white police officers were no more likely to shoot minority citizens than non-white officers were. If anything, black police were more likely to kill black civilians, because police tend to be drawn from the communities they work in. The best predictor of the race of killed civilians, they found, was the rate of violent crime in the place they lived. In areas with high rates of violent crime by African-Americans, police were more likely to shoot dead a black person.
Do these findings have implications for policy-makers? When white officers shoot black civilians a common response is to talk about the need to increase racial diversity in police departments. Last month in South Bend, Indiana, Eric Logan, a black man, was shot dead by Ryan O’Neill, a white police officer whose body camera was switched off.
The report’s authors say that while increasing racial diversity in police departments may be positive for other reasons—it can increase trust between police departments and the communities they serve, for example—it is unlikely, by itself, to reduce racial disparity in police shootings.
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