View source for Policing Statistics in Connection with Race - USA


=Contextual Quote=



"In plain english, the number of arrests for violent crime is proportional to the number of violent crimes actually committed by each group.  Black people are not arrested at a rate disproportionate to the number of crimes committed, suggesting that black neighborhoods are not “over policed”.  Instead, the reason more blacks are arrested for violent crimes is because black neighborhoods suffer more from violent crime.

In turn, the primary reason there are more arrests, confrontations with police and, consequently, police shootings in predominantly black neighborhoods is because police disproportionately encounter perpetrators of violent crime there.
Summary: Evidence and Falsehoods

In summary, the only evidence that I’ve been able to find that controls for the circumstances of police shootings suggests that police do not more readily shoot blacks than whites (though possibly, shoot whites slightly more readily than blacks).  And, the counter argument that so-called over-policing leads to more encounters, and thus more opportunities for confrontations that result in a shooting appears to contradict the data as well.

The core grievance of the BLM movement, that police are much more prone to use lethal force against black suspects, appears to be unambiguously false.  The truth is that the best available evidence suggests that they are not."

-  Isaac Kriegman [https://kriegman.substack.com/p/post-leading-to-termination-blm-falsehoods]

=Discussion=

Isaac Kriegman:

"This claim, that police are targeting blacks with lethal force, seems to be, if not the most important claims of the BLM movement, at least one of the most important claims.

The only problem:  it’s completely untrue.


==Benchmarks==

According to the Washington Post’s database of police shootings, over the last five years there have typically been between 30% and 100% more unarmed whites killed by police than unarmed blacks, with an average across the last five years of 39% more.  For instance, in 2020 there were 457 whites shot and killed by police, compared to 243 blacks.  Of those, 24 of the whites killed were unarmed compared to 18 blacks.  (It’s worth noting that in the vast majority of police shootings of both blacks and whites, police gunfire was justified in response to an armed and threatening suspect.)

If there are more unarmed whites than blacks shot by police each year, what is the basis for the claim that blacks are being targeted by police with lethal force?  The idea is that because blacks are 13% of the population, while whites are 76% of the population, if police were not targeting blacks with lethal force, whites would be shot by police at a rate 5-6 times the rate that blacks are shot.  In other words, we have to “benchmark” the higher number of shootings of whites to their larger population in order to have a fair comparison. While these disproportionate numbers certainly point to some kind of problem, is the problem police bias? 

To start approaching an answer to that question, we must consider the issue of benchmarks in more detail.  Police are not supposed to distribute lethal force randomly throughout the population in order to ensure equal application to each racial group. Instead, police are supposed to use lethal force only in response to threats of serious violence during encounters with criminal suspects.  Thus, if lethal force were applied by police without any bias whatsoever, we would expect the number of applications of lethal force for each racial group to be proportional to the number of high risk encounters members of each racial group have with police officers, and not with the population overall.  The correct benchmark for measuring bias in police use of lethal force is the number of high risk encounters for each group, and not the population of each group.

This is a critical distinction because there are definitive reasons to believe that police have very different rates of high risk encounters per member of different racial groups for reasons related to entirely legitimate policing objectives.  For instance, as the evidence in the following section demonstrates, on average, violent crime rates are dramatically higher in predominantly black communities than they are in predominantly white communities.  This violence takes a severe toll on those communities, can traumatize residents there, makes it virtually impossible for children to focus on school and academic success, and worse.  Because, on average, there is so much greater violence in predominantly black neighborhoods, in order to protect and defend the (mostly) black residents in those communities, police are disproportionately required to confront criminal suspects in those communities.  Therefore we should expect there to be more encounters in those communities for the purpose of achieving entirely legitimate and laudable policing objectives.

As another example of why it’s important to use a proper benchmark, there is a substantial body of evidence establishing that members of different racial groups resist arrest at very different rates.  Because the vast majority of potentially dangerous encounters happen when a suspect resists arrest, a greater rate of resisting arrest will be expected to increase the number of police shootings, even if police have absolutely no bias when deciding when to shoot.

Therefore, if we want to investigate whether there is bias in the application of lethal force, we need to look at the rate of police shooting per potentially violent encounter with criminal suspects—and not per member of a group’s overall population (most of whom are law abiding, peaceful citizens).  When you do so, the supposed anti-black bias disappears completely, and possibly, even reverses.

This investigation can be carried out in two main ways: (1) consideration of high-level descriptive statistics and (2) econometric analysis that controls for circumstances of encounters.  There is a considerable and growing body of research worth discussing, much of which I have studied.  While below I have space only to review the key findings from the research, I welcome further discussion and analysis with anyone who would like to investigate this topic in more detail with me.
Descriptive Statistics

A preliminary step when doing a statistical investigation is to consider the high-level descriptive statistics, if for nothing else, than as a sanity-check.  Although the descriptive statistics often won’t have the granularity to give definitive answers, you can at least discover broad patterns worth investigating.  In this case, we are interested in considering whether the number of police shootings of blacks is disproportionately large in relation to the number of potentially violent encounters between police and black suspects, but unfortunately we do not have reliable statistics about the number of potentially violent encounters nationwide.  When faced with a lack of data it is common to look for proxy data that we hypothesize will be highly correlated with our missing data.  As alluded to above, in this case, the obvious proxy for potentially violent encounters with suspects would be actually occurring violent crime, for which we do have data.

Here the evidence is very clear.  For instance, the Wall Street Journal reports that “African-Americans made up 53% of known homicide offenders in the U.S. and commit about 60% of robberies, though they are 13% of the population.”   As for non-homicide violent crime, the Justice Department’s National Crime Victimization Survey shows that whites commit about 48% of nonfatal violent crimes and blacks commit 35%.  When you look at just serious nonfatal violent crimes, whites commit about 41% and blacks commit about 43%.  

In other words, depending on the type of violent crime, whites either commit a slightly greater (non-fatal crimes) or slightly smaller (fatal, and serious non-fatal crimes) percentage of the total violent crime than blacks, but in all cases roughly in the same ballpark.  But, as referred to above, over the past 5 years, police have killed 39% more unarmed whites than unarmed blacks.  There are many more whites killed by police, even though whites account for a similar absolute number of violent offenders.  Thus, if the number of potentially violent encounters with police reflects the violent crime rates, then the raw statistics suggest that there is actually a slight anti-white bias in police applications of lethal force.  

But, what if the violent crime rate does not actually reflect the frequency at which police officers face risk of grievous injury from suspects?  Can we find a proxy variable that more directly reflects the frequency at which police officers face risk of grievous injury and thus must use lethal force?  Perhaps the most direct measure of the danger of grievous injury that police face is the rate at which they are actually murdered by criminals.  Thus, if we benchmark police shootings against the number of police murdered by criminals, we should obtain a very good indication of whether police use lethal force more readily in response to lower levels of threat for one group than another.  This yields similar results:  “Adjusted for the racial disparity at which police are feloniously killed, whites are 1.3 times more likely than blacks to die at the hands of police.”

In other words, if you measure police shootings against a legitimate benchmark, one that is actually related to how often police need to use lethal force for entirely lawful, ethical and moral reasons—such as defending themselves or others from grievous injury—there appears to be a clear anti-white bias.
Econometric Analysis

However, looking at the descriptive statistics like this leaves a lot of questions unanswered.  For example, perhaps police shoot whites at a higher rate per violent offender, because, hypothetically, whites are more violent in confrontations with police on average, and police are simply responding to legitimate threats.  Thus, to really investigate if there is bias, it’s necessary to look through thousands of examples of police confrontation, code them according to the circumstances, weapons involved, behavior of the suspect, and whether there was a shooting, and see if police on average use lethal force more readily in the same circumstances for one group than the other.  

Roland G. Fryer Jr. is a star economist at Harvard University.  He was one of the youngest professors to achieve tenure at Harvard, received a MacArthur “genius” grant, and won the most prestigious award for a young American economist, the John Bates Clark medal.  Without a doubt, he is one of the top researchers in the field of economics.  He also is black, grew up poor, personally witnessed episodes of his peers being roughed-up by police, and, initially at least, supported the BLM movement.  He set out to lay the empirical and intellectual foundations of the BLM movement by conducting a study exactly like that described above.  

In what he describes as “the most surprising result of my career”, his study “didn’t find evidence for anti-Black or anti-Hispanic disparity in police use of force across all shootings, and, if anything, found anti-White disparities when controlling for race-specific crime.”  Fryer was so shocked that he disbanded his original research team, hired an entirely new team, and repeated the entire data annotation and analysis process from scratch.  He found the same results.

This, perhaps, should not have been as surprising to Fryer as it was because it confirms exactly what the raw descriptive statistics reviewed above implied. (Fryer also found that the result did not change when you ignored the police’s reporting of the circumstances, further adding to the robustness of his findings, and rebutting a possible concern that police dishonestly exaggerate the threat of white suspects at a lower rate than with black suspects.)

It’s worth mentioning here that while Fryer’s results raise the possibility that police shoot and kill whites more readily, his results also show that police more readily use non-lethal force against blacks.  What could explain why police would more readily shove or hit blacks, but might more readily shoot and kill whites?  That remains an unanswered, and largely uninvestigated question.  

Unsurprisingly, Fryer’s study precipitated considerable criticism from researchers sympathetic to the BLM movement.  In the Appendix at the bottom of this post, I examine some of that criticism as well as other research in the field.  While much of that criticism seems to be motivated, at least in part, by the political and social agendas of the critics, it’s safe to say that Fryer’s study is not the final word on the subject.  More research is needed.

Nevertheless, thus far, Fryer’s research finding that there was no bias in shootings stands as the gold standard for investigating the question of police bias in use of force.  Although there are limitations to Fryer’s study, no properly designed study controlling for the circumstances of shootings has, before or since, produced any findings to the contrary.


==Improper Methods==

Unfortunately, it’s not uncommon for news-media and even researchers themselves to report research findings sloppily or falsely.  As an example, consider a recent study that is widely, but falsely, cited to support the contention of police bias in shootings.  This study is based on the National Violent Death Reporting System (NVDRS), which contains only data about encounters that led to someone’s death.  Because the data contain no information about the total number of police encounters (including both those that result in death and those that do not) it’s impossible to calculate, for any racial group, the rate that any particular type of police encounter will result in a police shooting—and the researchers make no attempt to do so.  

Nevertheless, ABC news misleadingly reports that “In the new study, black Americans were three times more likely to be shot and killed by police officers during interactions where the victim appeared to pose little or no threat to officers, the researchers found.”  In fact, the study did not investigate the likelihood of black suspects being shot during interactions where they posed little or no threat to officers, because the dataset contained no information about how many such interactions there were and thus calculating such a likelihood would be impossible.  Instead, the study found, yet again, that the number of such shootings was disproportionate to the black population, which, as discussed above, gives us no information about bias. (In fairness to ABC News, the paper appears to be almost deliberately written to make this sort of misleading reporting more likely.  See the Appendix below for a more in-depth exploration of the issues with this study and research in this field in general.)

A simple example should suffice to illustrate how crucial this distinction is:  according to the Washington Post’s database of police shootings, police shoot and kill 10 times more unarmed, fleeing men than unarmed, fleeing women, a disparity that dwarfs any racial disparity in the data.  Since we are dealing with unarmed, fleeing men and women, we can assume that both the men and women posed no threat to the officers.  Can we thus infer that any difference must be due to lethal gender discrimination?  Is it “open season” for police to “hunt” and kill men?  

Or, alternatively, is it possible that police shoot so many more men who pose no threat than women, simply because police have many more encounters with male suspects who pose no threat than they do with female suspects who pose no threat?  The answer is, of course, that if the rate of fatal police error is exactly the same for both men and women, we’d expect vastly more men to be shot simply because police have so many more encounters with male suspects.

In order to investigate whether one group of suspects is more likely to be shot than another in similar circumstances, you must know the number of such circumstances where nobody is shot, and this is what sets Roland Fryer’s study apart from all others.  He had access not just to death reports, but to incident reports in general, including those where lethal force was not used.  And he was able to code the specifics of the circumstances according to 290 variables.  This allowed him to calculate the rates that a given set of circumstances would lead to use of lethal force for different groups.  And the result clearly showed there was no detectable bias towards shooting black suspects.

I have been unable to find any study that supports the narrative of anti-black bias by police in the application of lethal force while properly accounting for the circumstances of shootings.  The raw statistics, and the studies that account for those critical factors, both seem to agree that police do not more readily shoot blacks.


==Supposed “Over-policing”==

When these facts are pointed out to BLM proponents, one common response is to say that police are more likely to confront black people because of bias or racism. This artificially creates more police confrontations with blacks, so even if police are not more likely to shoot a black person in any given confrontation, because there are more confrontations, it results in an excessive number of shootings.  In other words, police aren’t legitimately responding to vastly higher crime rates in many black communities in order to protect the residents.  Rather, racial bias causes black communities to be “over-policed,” which causes more confrontations with police officers.

But, even a cursory examination of crime rates shows the flaws in this argument.  As an example, consider the city where I live, Boston.  Every year Boston has dozens of murder victims.  Here are pictures of the victims:

https://www.universalhub.com/yir/2019/murders

https://www.universalhub.com/yir/2020/murders

Please take a minute to look at them.  These were all human beings whose lives were cut short by the brutal violence of neighborhood criminals.  Their families and friends will never stop grieving for them.  Each murder victim leaves an indelible mark on the entire community.  Each leaves hundreds of neighborhood children traumatized, unable to focus on school and building the skills they need to be successful in life, always on guard, wondering if they will be next.

If you look through their faces, you’ll quickly notice that there are hardly any pictures of whites among Boston’s murder victims, despite the fact that there are roughly twice as many whites as blacks in the city.  That’s because nearly all the murders happen in predominantly black neighborhoods, like Dorchester and Roxbury.  In my neighborhood, Jamaica Plain, right next to Dorchester and Roxbury, but skewing somewhat wealthier and whiter, there are few if any murders each year.

The reason that police have more confrontations in predominantly black neighborhoods in Boston is because that is where the great bulk of violent crime is occuring.  (Murders are a valuable proxy for violent crime in general because murders, unlike other crimes, rarely go unreported, and those reports can’t be inflated.  As a result, they are not as susceptible to statistical manipulation, biased police reporting, differences in rates of calling the police, etc.) These neighborhoods are plagued and traumatized by the most violent criminals.  I wonder how people can claim that the reason there are more encounters and arrests in these neighborhoods is not because there is vastly more violent crime, but rather because these neighborhoods are “over policed”.  If there is not vastly more violent crime in these neighborhoods, why do almost all the murders happen there?

Looking at an anecdotal example like Boston is instructive, but there are also systematic investigations of the question of whether black communities are “over policed”.  The Justice Department’s Bureau of Justice Statistics released a report looking into exactly this question on a national scale. “It found that for nonfatal violent crimes that victims said were reported to police, whites accounted for 48% of offenders and 46% of arrestees. Blacks accounted for 35% of offenders and 33% of arrestees. Asians accounted for 2% of offenders and 1% of arrestees. None of these differences between the percentage of offenders and the percentage of arrestees of a given race were statistically significant.”  [Emphasis added.]  

In plain english, the number of arrests for violent crime is proportional to the number of violent crimes actually committed by each group.  Black people are not arrested at a rate disproportionate to the number of crimes committed, suggesting that black neighborhoods are not “over policed”.  Instead, the reason more blacks are arrested for violent crimes is because black neighborhoods suffer more from violent crime.

In turn, the primary reason there are more arrests, confrontations with police and, consequently, police shootings in predominantly black neighborhoods is because police disproportionately encounter perpetrators of violent crime there.
Summary: Evidence and Falsehoods

In summary, the only evidence that I’ve been able to find that controls for the circumstances of police shootings suggests that police do not more readily shoot blacks than whites (though possibly, shoot whites slightly more readily than blacks).  And, the counter argument that so-called over-policing leads to more encounters, and thus more opportunities for confrontations that result in a shooting appears to contradict the data as well.

The core grievance of the BLM movement, that police are much more prone to use lethal force against black suspects, appears to be unambiguously false.  The truth is that the best available evidence suggests that they are not."

(https://kriegman.substack.com/p/post-leading-to-termination-blm-falsehoods)

[[Category:Identity Politics]]
[[Category:Race]]
[[Category:Statistics]]