Law Enforcment

[Undertoad]

Here's the Economist on it. It's in this week's edition so, tw, perhaps it is in the mail.

http://www.economist.com/news/united...es?frsc=dg%7Cd

Black Harvard prof (who is not Dr. Gates) studies the problem in depth in Houston. First, he removes his own bias:

AS A teenager, Roland Fryer had “unpleasant” run-ins with police. Officers pointed guns at him six or seven times. Even now, the youngest African-American to get tenure at Harvard wonders why police shout loudly at him as soon as he forgets to indicate when driving. But when the economist began researching racial differences in the use of force by police officers, he did not want his own experience to prejudice his findings. To understand how cops work he joined them on the beat in New Jersey and Texas.

Impressive! Key bits:

Based on the raw data, blacks and Hispanics were more than 50% more likely to encounter police force than whites...

...Blacks were 17.3% more likely to incur use of force after controlling for the characteristics of the civilian (such as age) and the encounter (such as if they ran away, complained or hit an officer)...

...blacks who were reported by cops as being perfectly compliant with police instructions during their interactions were still 21.1% more likely than whites to have some force used against them...

BUT THEN when it came to use of deadly force:

What shocked Mr Fryer was when he looked in detail at reports of police shootings. He got two separate research teams to read, code and analyse over 1,300 shootings between 2000 and 2015 in ten police departments, including Houston and Los Angeles. To his surprise, he found that blacks were no more likely to be shot before attacking an officer than non-blacks. This was apparent both in the raw data, and once the characteristics of the suspect and the context of the encounter were accounted for.

Mr Fryer dug deeper into the data. He combed through 6,000 incident reports from Houston, including all the shootings, incidents involving Tasers and a sample in which lethal force could have justifiably been used but was not. What he found was even more startling: black suspects appear less likely to be shot than non-black ones, fatally or otherwise.

So, Houston via the Economist, same as the WaPo: Blacks more likely to have to deal with police, more likely to have bad dealings... and less likely to be shot at.