NEW YORK — A new study confirms that black men and women are treated differently in the hands of law enforcement. But when it comes to the most lethal form of force — police shootings — the study finds no racial bias.
"It is the most surprising result of my career," said Roland G. Fryer Jr., author of the study and professor of economics at Harvard. The study examined 1,000-plus shootings in 10 major police departments, in Texas, Florida, and California.
Blacks are more likely to be touched, handcuffed, pushed to the ground, or pepper-sprayed by a police officer, even after accounting for how, where, and when they encounter the police, the researchers found.
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But the result on lethal force contradicts the image of police shootings many Americans hold in the aftermath of the killings (some captured on video) of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo.; Laquan McDonald in Chicago; Tamir Rice in Cleveland; Walter Scott in South Carolina; Samuel DuBose in Cincinnati; Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, La.; and Philando Castile in Minnesota.
The study did not say whether the most egregious examples — the kind of killings at the heart of the nation's debate on police shootings — are free of racial bias. Instead, it examined a much larger pool of shootings, including nonfatal ones.
It focused on what happens when police encounters occur, not how often they happen. (There's a disproportionate number of tense interactions between blacks and the police when shootings could occur, and thus a disproportionate outcome for blacks.)
Official statistics on police shootings are poor. James Comey, the FBI director, has called the lack of data "embarrassing and ridiculous." Even when data exist, the conditions under which officers decide to fire their weapons are deeply nuanced and complex.
Fryer is the youngest African-American to receive tenure at Harvard and the first one to receive a John Bates Clark medal, a prize given to the most promising American economist under 40. He is not afraid of controversial questions. He has studied the possibility of genetic differences in intelligence and shown that high-achieving black and Hispanic students have fewer friends.
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Fryer said his anger after the deaths of Brown and Freddie Gray drove him to study the police issue. "You know, protesting is not my thing," he said. "But data is my thing. 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 and student researchers spent 3,000 hours assembling data from police reports in Houston; Austin, Texas; Dallas; Los Angeles; Orlando and Jacksonville in Florida; and four other counties in Florida.
They examined 1,332 shootings from 2000 to 2015, systematically coding police narratives to answer questions such as: How old was the suspect? How many police officers were at the scene? Were they mostly white? Was the officer at the scene for a robbery, violent activity, traffic stop, or something else?
One goal was to figure out whether police were quicker to fire at black suspects. In officer-involved shootings in these 10 cities, officers were more likely to fire 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.
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But this line of analysis included only encounters in which a shooting took place. A more fundamental question still remained: In the tense moments when a shooting may occur, are police more likely to fire if the suspect is black?
To answer this question, Fryer focused on one city, Houston. The police there allowed the researchers to look at reports not only for shootings but for arrests when lethal force might have been justified. Fryer defined this group to include suspects charged with serious offenses like attempting to murder an officer.
And in the arena of "shoot" or "don't shoot," Fryer found that, in tense situations, officers in Houston were about 20 percent less likely to shoot suspects if the suspects were black.
This estimate was not precise, and firmer conclusions would require more data. But in a variety of models that control for different factors and use different definitions of tense situations, Fryer found that blacks were either less likely to be shot or there was no difference between blacks and whites.