Why Roland Fryer’s Study on Racial Bias in Police Shootings is Misleading

Roland G. Fryer—an economics professor at Harvard—has been catapulted to national attention after he released a study that found no racial bias in police shootings across the country. The study, which came out following a series of high-profile police shootings in June and July, has been very controversial, largely because of its conclusion. While it found racial bias in the use of police force, such as using handcuffs and drawing weapons, it found that black and white people are equally likely to be shot by the police.

I find Fryer’s study to be faulty because it lacks strong, overarching question, “do black people get stopped by police more often than whites”?

Fryer draws his data from 10 police departments from only three states across the country—six of which are in major cities. His data pulls from places with similar demographic makeups and misses out on data from broader areas. Police shootings aren’t limited to just major cities. They can happen anywhere. Police departments in different towns, different cities, and different states all run their departments differently. Police killings happen in more than three states. The states of Alaska, Utah, and Oklahoma had the most police killings of black people between the years of 2013-2016, yet none of those states were included in Fryer’s data. Because Fryer is an economist, he focused on the numbers.

The FBI’s Uniform Crime Report, which covers official data of crime in America contains details about police homicides from all over the U.S., including rural areas and small towns that Fryer could have accessed to broaden his data.

Furthermore, Fryer only studied cities with diverse populations. Houston, one of 10 cities included in Fryer’s data, is known to be one of the most racially diverse cities in the U.S.  In fact, Los Angeles and Dallas, TX, also included in the study are two of the ten cities that have the highest number of black American in the nation. The majority of Fryer’s data focuses on places in the U.S. with high populations of black American. If he broadened the scope of his data, would his results have been different?

A previous study, done by Cody T. Ross, an anthropologist at University of California at Davis, shows that there is racial bias in police shootings of black people. Ross pulled data from the U.S. Police-Shooting Database, which includes information about non-fatal shootings, two-thirds of Fryer’s data was non-fatal shootings.  The data included in Ross’ paper covered police departments across the country. Ross’ study showed that an unarmed black person is 3.5 times more likely to be shot by the police than a white person. However, neither study is perfect. Ross’ study includes vague data throughout the country, whereas  Fryer’s study includes very specific information from a few cities.

Fryer’s data also does not address the rate at which black and white people are stopped by the police. He focuses only on what happens between the time a person are stopped to the time the police officer pulls the trigger. If a black man is more likely to be stopped by the police, many believe the likelihood that he will be shot by the police also rises.

The rate at which police homicides occur against black people show a moral problem in police departments and society as a whole. Fryer’s study avoids the question of how often black people get stopped and the reason they are stopped compared to whites and focuses primarily on what happens after they are stopped. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, black drivers are more likely to be stopped and searched than white or Hispanic drivers. Sixty-eight percent of black drivers thought they had been stopped for a legitimate reason, compared to the 84 percent of white drivers and 74 percent of hispanic drivers.

If Fryer wanted to actual dig deep into why these police homicides are happening, he should have investigated who is being targeted by the police.

Fryer isn’t the first person to study treatment of black people by the police, nor will he be the last to study or analysis of police homicides. His study is just a step that helps us understand the racial disparities that have been put under a spotlight in the country. Fryer’s study helped bring to light the fact that racial discrimination continues to plague the justice system, particularly when force is used in a police encounter. Hopefully, data like Fryer’s–though it is flawed–will generate conversation about racial injustice in America that will ultimately incite the change needed to fight discrimination.