Racial tensions in America are the highest they’ve been in decades. It seems like every day there’s another news story about a shooting between white police officers and black civilians. Are white police officers targeting black civilians? If this is the case, then it is a serious problem.
Let’s first consider what would be true if white officers were targeting blacks:
- White officers would be more likely to shoot black suspects than non-white officers
- Black suspects would be shot at a higher rate than white suspects
Next, let’s take a look at some numbers:
Data on suspects shot by police is not easy to find. The Washington Post has compiled their own database for the years of 2015 and 2016.[ref]See https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/national/police-shootings-2016/ and https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/national/police-shootings/?tid=a_inl[/ref] Here is the pertinent data:
[supsystic-tables id=’1′]
Here are some initial thoughts: Blacks certainly comprise a higher % of people shot dead than their percentage of the population. This is often stated as blacks “being shot disproportionately to their population.” This is an accusatory phrase which is used to suggest racial bias in police shootings. But for us to determine racial bias, we need to know if race is the reason why blacks are shot disproportionately to their population.
For the vast majority of encounters police have with civilians, there are no shootings involved. It is logical to assume a shooting is more likely during a contact which is the arrest of a civilian for a violent crime. The most recent FBI statistics for total arrests by race are from 2014.[ref]https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2014/crime-in-the-u.s.-2014/tables/table-43[/ref]
[supsystic-tables id=’2′]
Unfortunately, the FBI includes Hispanic crime statistics in the category of whites and makes no distinction. The data is still legitimate for our purposes, however, because the main-stream narrative is declaring blacks to be the main target.
This data provides the context for the first table’s data. While a higher % of blacks are fatally shot by police than whites, this data suggests the % of black criminals fatally shot by police is less than that of whites. The ratio of white civilians fatally shot to white civilians arrested for violent crime is over 1.5X that of blacks. According to this data, the biggest reason blacks are fatally shot disproportionately to their population is that blacks commit violent crimes disproportionately to their population. Yes, it sounds bad that blacks are 12% of the population and 25% of people shot dead by police. But this sounds even worse: blacks are 12% of the population and commit 38% of the violent crime!
Now let’s turn our attention to some studies and see if they concur with the data from the Washington Post and FBI. We will first look at a study conducted by the DOJ. They looked at the use of deadly force in the Philadelphia Police Department and released their findings in March of 2015.[ref]http://ric-zai-inc.com/Publications/cops-w0753-pub.pdf[/ref] Here are some of the numbers: Blacks were 80% of the suspects in Officer Involved Shootings (OISs). White suspects were unarmed in 25% of the OISs and blacks were unarmed in 16% of them.
The study also examined “threat perception failure.” Threat perception failure occurred when the officer evaluated the level of threat they were facing as higher than it really was. The results were incredibly interesting. Officers were most likely to have a threat perception failure with black suspects. This certainly suggests racial bias, but here’s the twist: The threat perception failure for white officers was 6.8%. For black officers it was 11.4% and for Hispanic officers it was 16.7%. This runs completely contrary to the theory of white officers targeting black civilians.
The New York Police Department studied police use of deadly force within their department between 2004 and 2006.[ref]http://amstat.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/2330443X.2015.1129918[/ref] The study found black officers were 3.3 times more likely to shoot than other officers. If white officers were targeting blacks, we would expect them to be the most likely to pull the trigger.
And here’s the best study. Professor Fryer is a black Harvard economist who was the youngest to ever receive tenure at Harvard. He and his students spent over 3,000 hours examining data on police shootings from 2000 to 2015. Here is a summary of their results:[ref]See http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/07/12/upshot/surprising-new-evidence-shows-bias-in-police-use-of-force-but-not-in-shootings.html and http://www.thecollegefix.com/post/28107/[/ref]
In officer-involved shootings in these cities, 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 carrying a weapon. Both of these results undercut the idea that the police wield lethal force with racial bias.
Fryer looked at the city of Houston in more detail and found black suspects were less likely to be shot. In his own words:
in tense situations, officers in Houston were about 20 percent less likely to shoot a suspect if the suspect was black. This estimate was not very precise, and firmer conclusions would require more data. But, in a variety of models that controlled for different factors and used 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.
Fryer stated the findings were “the most surprising result of my career.”
Let’s wrap this all together. We first looked at data of people shot dead by police and arrests for violent crimes broken down by race. It is a fact blacks are a higher % of people shot dead than they are a % of the population. This is concerning, and worthy of examination. However, the FBI arrest data seemed to suggest race is not the cause for the racial disparity and black suspects were actually less likely to be shot than whites.
The findings of the studies we examined supported both of these suggestions. The DOJ found black and Hispanic officers were much more likely to wrongly evaluate the threat level a black suspect presented. I am unsure why this is the case, but it is the exact opposite of what we would expect if white officers were targeting blacks because of their race. On a similar note, the NYPD found black officers were 3.3 times more likely to shoot their guns. Finally, the study conducted by Prof. Fryer agreed with both of our findings: there is no racial bias when officers pull the trigger, and if anything, black suspects are actually less likely to be shot.
This turns both of our criteria on their head. It’s conclusive: race is not determining when an officer pulls the trigger, and white officers are not targeting black civilians.
Say something funny about Donald