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.
Roland G. Fryer, Jr. is the Henry Lee Professor of Economics at Harvard University and faculty director of the Education Innovation Laboratory (EdLabs). 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.
Contrary to the expected result, Fryer found an equal number of blacks and whites were carrying weapons when shot by the policem.
“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 portrayal 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.