Roland G. Fryer Jr. is an economics professor at Harvard. Distressed
by what he was seeing in the treatment of black men like Michael Brown
and Freddie Gray, Fryer commissioned a study on how the role race play
in the use of lethal force by police.
The study examined more than 1,000 police shootings from 10 large police departments in California, Florida and Texas.
The results? Not what Black Lives Matter would have you believe. The
study found no indication of racial bias associated with incidents in
which cops fired their guns.
The study concluded that police officers who had not been attacked
were more likely to shoot white suspects. This goes completly against
the mythology.
It also found that an equal number of blacks and whites were carrying
weapons when the police shot them. This doesn’t help those who claim
the cops are shooting unarmed blacks more frequently.
“It is the most surprising result of my career,” Fryer said in an
interview with the New York Times. He hadn’t expected to find such
balance.
“You know, protesting is not my thing. But data is my thing,” Fryer
said. And the anger he’d felt at the media’s portrayl of racial
injustice drove him to do the study. “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.”
Fryer’s conclusions aren’t the only ones challenging the racist cop
narrative. The Washington Post studied shooting deaths by law
enforcement officials in 2015. 494 white suspects were killed. That
number is almost double the number of black suspects killed: 258.
While the study can’t look at the motivations of individual officers
and some of the more notorious incidents, it does give credence to what
many cops have been saying for a long time. There’s much more to these
situations than race.
