The contrast between Roland Fryer and Claudine Gay is a case study of class warfare. He grew up in the hood with no parents and worked fast food jobs to put himself through state school, then became a rock star economist at Harvard. She had rich parents who sent her to Exeter, rose through the DIE commissar ranks with plagiarism, then suspended him from Harvard after his research found no correlation between police violence and race. Kudos to Bari for giving him the accolades and attention he richly deserves.
Yuri, don't forget that there are serious question about the data that Gay used for her magnum opus on voter turnout among whites when they have a black representative.
She has for years refused to release her dataset. But there is enough known to show signs of cherry picking data and general BS.
The contrast between Roland Fryer and Claudine Gay is more than a study of class warfare. It is a case study of sexism.
During the congressional hearing on anti-Semitism on college campuses, Rep. Lucy McBath of GA made a point of saying that "it is not lost on me that the intellect, the intelligence that we have on this panel today, the most intelligent minds that are leading our highest Institutions are women." What?
As leading institutions battle egregious acts of prejudice on U.S. college campuses and a recent genocide in Gaza, a female Rep. of George makes a point of throwing in the sex-card. And if anyone was watching, the panel of presidents gloated.
McBath goes on to offer up softball comments and question. Would the questions and comments have been so soft if these presidents were male? Not a chance.
Few want to talk openly about the massive bias on college campuses against males, who are grossly under-represented in the student population. From 2016 to 2020, 2.85 million more women graduated from college than men. And males are now outnumbered on college campuses by nearly 20% (59% to 41%).
This is what partly makes Fryer's experience unique. He's a black male who dared to raise his voice against the DEI narrative that landed people like Claudine Gay her career. They hate him for it. They cannot go after his blackness, so they attack his manhood. They punished him for being a tough, strong, intelligent male.
Our institutions have been corrupted by the ideological stench of a particular rhetoric that hates men like Roland Fryer because he does not capitulate to the ideological wiles leading our corrupt institutions in government, media, and education.
It’s about “agency”, too. The Manichean framework of oppressor/oppressed says that the individual is defined and limited by the constraints of their group (their race, their gender, their sexuality, etc.).
Clearly, Roland Fryer believes that individuals have agency; that, despite their membership in any given group, each of us has the ability to determine our future through maximizing our potential — even if we are a member of a disfavored minority.
Freedom requires responsibility. While I agree individuals have agency regardless of their social restraints or advantages, as the case may be, far to many abdicate their beliefs to avoid responsibility. Their comfort inside their group trumps the fear of shame associated with any dissent to the group's narrative. Sheep to slaughter.
His thing apparently is talent identification. He wants to extend it down to the poorest neighborhoods as he believes, like him, there are some folks that are uber-talented. One thing I am trying to work out in my mind is that both him and Rob Henderson were able to reach great heights despite their childhoods. Doesn't that indicate the system worked for them? Or are they arguing that they were just lucky? Or did they have some other qualities that allowed them to succeed?
Rob Henderson is very bullish on how his own decisions (albeit some through mentorship) and hard work were the path to success. It sounds like Roland Fryer believes the same. Not luck, not group identity, but good decisions, and hard work.
I think they had some other qualities. If you asked me to define it, I wouldn't know where to start, and I note he had trouble defining it, too (he called it "the dog"). But I know it when I see it. It's not common, and it's not environment-independent (as he clearly noted). It's something innate that couples native intelligence (yeah, I know I'm treading on this ice here, but that's the best description I know) with an unstoppable drive. When you boil it down, I guess you could say it's luck, but not the luck of opportunity (indeed, his point is to find such people and give them opportunity). The luck of being born with it.
His commitment is to the truth, wherever it might lead.........as he asserts.
The disturbing part of all this is how his peers at Harvard treated him and he tells us how they counseled him to not report the truth so as to appease and maintain his position. Going to graduate school in Boston during the 1990s and having free reign to whatever research I wanted to, being able to walk into any professors office, no matter what their school affiliation was, using resources at any of the consortium schools and audit/take any classes has apparently been replaced with naked careerism we see in bureaucracies throughout. One thing that hasn't changed is that the majority of graduate students at elite institutions come from the upper 5-10% of society. I compare this to my undergraduate alumni institution (Florida State), where a criminologist has been producing research on gun use that runs counter to liberal orthodoxy for decades and despite taking barbs from outside sources is left alone to do his research without institutional attacks.
It is becoming more apparent that to average folks, that the true pursuit of, knowledge and truth are secondary to the academics' self interests in advancement. I don't know of a more blatant example of an echo chamber than the elite universities tenure, publishing and peer review system. The "peers" are much more interested in preserving their conclusions than objectively evaluating any dissent to their position. It's amazing to observe from the outside. These, allegedly, brilliant people can't seem to grasp the idea that their actions only lead to stagnation and diminishment of worth.
For me, the amazing part is how quickly it happened. Within 1 generation.........same with post-structuralist thought, something we were reading in the 1990s, but was thought to be attractive to just a few. It became incredibly attractive to the entire generation of graduate students and through biased hiring practices, became a totalizing theory that captured the entire system of elite universities (contemporarily with the increase in administrators directing all things to the faculty).
Dave, I don't know that this "post-structuralist" thought came about in only one generation. As far as I can tell, this has been a result of previous generations lack of true guidance for their progeny. Fat, Dumb and Happy describes my generation and subsequent ones as well. We really haven't faced facts until recently. Who else is to blame for this train wreck. Like it or not, the responsibility lies with the lazy, ill informed electorate.
Yup he sounds like a classical liberal. Freedom of speech, equality of opportunity. Power to him. And kudos to him for trying to change a woke school from the inside.
Comprof, you keep repeating that as if it's true....
Here, quoted rom the study, a brief description of the FOUR SEPARATE major datasets (and many millions of observations contained therein) why they were chosen and how they were used:
"A primary obstacle to the study of police use of force has been the lack of readily available data.
Data on lower level uses of force, which happen more frequently than officer-involved shootings, are virtually non-existent. This is due, in part, to the fact that most police precincts don’t explicitly collect data on use of force, and in part, to the fact that even when the data is hidden in plain view within police narrative accounts of interactions with civilians, it is exceedingly diffcult to extract. Moreover, the task of compiling rich data on ocer-involved shootings is burdensome. Until recently, data on officer-involved shootings were extremely rare and contained little information on the details surrounding an incident. A simple count of the number of police shootings that occur does little to explore whether racial differences in the frequency of officer-involved shootings are due to police malfeasance or dfferences in suspect behavior. 2
In this paper, we estimate the extent of racial differences in police use of force using four separate datasets – two constructed for the purposes of this study.3
Unless otherwise noted, all results are conditional on an interaction. Understanding potential selection into police data sets due to bias in who police interacts with is a difficult endeavor. Section 3 attempts to help get a sense of potential bias in police interactions. Put simply, if one assumes police simply stop whomever they want for no particular reason, there seem to be large racial differences. If one assumes they are trying to prevent violent crimes, then evidence for bias is exceedingly small.
Of the four datasets, the first comes from NYC’s Stop, Question, and Frisk program (hereafter Stop and Frisk). Stop and Frisk is a practice of the New York City police department in which police stop and question a pedestrian, then can frisk them for weapons or contraband. The dataset contains roughly five million observations. And, important for the purposes of this paper, has detailed information on a wide range of uses of force – from putting hands on civilians to striking them with a baton. The second dataset is the Police-Public Contact Survey, a triennial survey of a nationally representative sample of civilians, which contains – from the civilian point of view – a description of interactions with police, which includes uses of force. Both these datasets are public-use and readily available. 4
The other two datasets were assembled for the purposes of this research. We use event summaries from all incidents in which an officer discharges his weapon at civilians – including both hits and misses – from three large cities in Texas (Austin, Dallas, Houston), six large Florida counties, and Los Angeles County, to construct a dataset in which one can investigate racial differences in officer-involved shootings. Because all individuals in these data have been involved in a police shooting, analysis of these data alone can only estimate racial differences on the intensive margin (e.g., did the officer discharge their weapon before or after the suspect attacked).
To supplement, our fourth dataset contains a random sample of police-civilian interactions from the Houston Police department from arrests codes in which lethal force is more likely to be justified: attempted capital murder of a public safety officer, aggravated assault on a public safety officer, resisting arrest, evading arrest, and interfering in arrest. Similar to the event studies above, these data come from arrest narratives that range in length from two to one hundred pages. A team of researchers was responsible for reading arrest reports and collecting almost 300 variables on each incident. Combining this with the officer-involved shooting data from Houston allows us to estimate both the extensive (e.g., whether or not a police officer decides to shoot) and intensive margins.
Further, the Houston arrests data contain almost 4,500 observations in which officers discharged charged electronic devices (e.g., tasers). This is the second most extreme use of force, and in some cases, is a substitute for lethal use of force."
Footnotes from the above excerpt:
1. Author’s calculations based on ProPublica research that analyzes FBI data between 1980 and 2012.2. Newspapers such as the Washington Post estimate that there were 965 officer-involved shootings in 2015. Websites such as fatal encounters estimate that the number of annual shootings is approximately 704 between 2000 and 2015.
3. Throughout the text, I depart from custom by using the terms “we,” “our,” and so on. Although this is sole authored work, it took a large team of talented individuals to collect the data necessary for this project. Using “I”
seems disingenuous.
4 . The NYC Stop and Frisk data has been used in Gelman et al. (2012) and Coviello and Persico (2015) to understand whether there is evidence of racial discrimination in proactive policing, and Ridgeway (2009) to develop a
statistical method to identify problem officers. The Police-Public Contact Survey has been used, mainly in criminology, to study questions such as whether police treatment of citizens impacts the broader public opinion of the police (Miller et al., 2004).
2020 update: The specific flaws of Roland Fryer's paper have now been characterized in two studies (by other scholars, not myself). Knox, Lowe, and Mummolo (2019) reanalyze Fryer's data to find it understates racial biases. Ross, Winterhalder, and McElreath (2018) do something similar through a statistical simulation.
Roland Fryer, an economics professor at Harvard University, recently published a working paper at NBER on the topic of racial bias in police use of force and police shootings. The paper gained substantial media attention – a write-up of it became the top viewed article on the New York Times website. The most notable part of the study was its finding that there was no evidence of racial bias in police shootings, which Fryer called “the most surprising result of [his] career”. In his analysis of shootings in Houston, Texas, black and Hispanic people were no more likely (and perhaps even less likely) to be shot relative to whites.
Fryer’s analysis is highly flawed, however. It suffers from major theoretical and methodological errors, and he has communicated the results to news media in a way that is misleading. While there have long been problems with the quality of police shootings data, there is still plenty of evidence to support a pattern of systematic, racially discriminatory use of force against black people in the United States.
Breaking down the analysis of police shootings in Houston
There should be no argument that black and Latino people in Houston are much more likely to be shot by police compared to whites. I looked at the same Houston police shooting dataset as Fryer for the years 2005-2015, which I supplemented with census data, and found that black people were over 5 times as likely to be shot relative to whites. Latinos were roughly twice as likely to be shot versus whites.
Fryer was not comparing rates of police shootings by race, however. Instead, his research asked whether these racial differences were the result of “racial bias” rather than merely “statistical discrimination”. Both terms have specific meanings in economics. Statistical discrimination occurs when an individual or institution treats people differently based on racial stereotypes that ‘truly’ reflect the average behavior of a racial group. For instance, if a city’s black drivers are 50% more likely to possess drugs than white drivers, and police officers are 50% more likely to pull over black drivers, economic theory would hold that this discriminatory policing is rational. If, however, police were to pull over black drivers at a rate that disproportionately exceeded their likelihood of drug possession, that would be an irrational behavior representing individual or institutional bias.
Once explained, it is possible to find the idea of “statistical discrimination” just as abhorrent as “racial bias”. One could point out that the drug laws police enforce were passed with racially discriminatory intent, that collectively punishing black people based on “average behavior” is wrong, or that – as a self-fulfilling prophecy – bias can turn into statistical discrimination (if black people’s cars are searched more thoroughly, for instance, it will appear that their rates of drug possession are higher). At the same time, studies assessing the extent of racial bias above and beyond statistical discrimination have been able to secure legal victories for civil rights. An analysis of stop-and-frisk data by Jeffrey Fagan, which found evidence racial bias, was an important part of the court case against the NYPD, and helped secure an injunction against the policy.
Even if one accepts the logic of statistical discrimination versus racial bias, it is an inappropriate choice for a study of police shootings. The method that Fryer employs has, for the most part, been used to study traffic stops and stop-and-frisk practices. In those cases, economic theory holds that police want to maximize the number of arrests for the possession of contraband (such as drugs or weapons) while expending the fewest resources. If they are acting in the most cost-efficient, rational manner, the officers may use racial stereotypes to increase the arrest rate per stop. This theory completely falls apart for police shootings, however, because officers are not trying to rationally maximize the number of shootings. The theory that is supposed to be informing Fryer's choice of methods is therefore not applicable to this case. He seems somewhat aware of this issue. In his interview with the New York Times, he attributes his ‘surprising’ finding to an issue of “costs, legal and psychological” that happen following a shooting. In what is perhaps a case of cognitive dissonance, he seems to not have reflected on whether the question of cost renders his choice of methods invalid.
Economic theory aside, there is an even more fundamental problem with the Houston police shooting analysis. In a typical study, a researcher will start with a previously defined population where each individual is at risk of a particular outcome. For instance, a population of drivers stopped by police can have one of two outcomes: they can be arrested, or they can be sent on their way. Instead of following this standard approach, Fryer constructs a fictitious population of people who are shot by police and people who are arrested. The problem here is that these two groups (those shot and those arrested) are, in all likelihood, systematically different from one another in ways that cannot be controlled for statistically (UPenn Professor Uri Simonsohn expands on this point here). Fryer acknowledges this limitation in a brief footnote, but understates just how problematic it is. Properly interpreted, the actual result from Fryer’s analysis is that the racial disparity in arrest rates is larger than the racial disparity in police shootings. This is an unsurprising finding, and proves neither a lack of bias nor a lack of systematic discrimination.
Even if the difference in the arrest vs. shooting groups could be accounted for, Fryer tries to control for these differences using variables in police reports, such as if the suspect was described as 'violently resisting arrest'. There is reason to believe that these police reports themselves are racially biased. An investigation of people charged with assaulting a police officer in Washington, DC found that this charge was applied disproportionately towards black residents even for situations in which no assault actually occurred. This was partly due to an overly broad definition of assault against police in DC law, but the principle - that police are likely to describe black civilians as more threatening - is applicable to other jurisdictions.
I’ll also briefly note that there was another analysis, using data from multiple cities, that looked at racial differences in whether or not civilians attacked officers before they were shot. Fryer himself downplays the credibility of this analysis, because it relied on reports from police who had every incentive to misrepresent the order of events.
Racial inequality in police shootings
Fryer’s study is far from the first to investigate racial bias or discrimination in police shootings. A number of studies have placed officers in shooting simulators, and most have shown a greater propensity for shooting black civilians relative to whites. Other research has found that cities with black mayors and city councilors have lower rates of police shootings than would otherwise be expected. A recent analysis of national data showed wide variation in racial disparities for police shooting rates between counties, and these differences were not associated with racial differences in crime rates. This is just a small sample of the dozens of studies on police killings published since the 1950s, most of which suggests that racial bias is indeed a problem.
It is a failure of journalism that the New York Times heavily promoted this study without seeking critical perspectives from experts in the field. Fryer makes basic methodological errors, overstates the quality of his results, and casually uses the term “racial bias” in a way that is nearly guaranteed to be misinterpreted by anyone who isn’t an economist.
He also said that he went into the study about police violence expecting (or even hoping; I heard the interview a while back and don't recall his exact words) to back the liberal view with hard data. What he found surprised him, and he published what he found, because that is what good scholarship requires. That investigation and his other big project (again, if I recall) to figure out what interventions do and don't work in Houston public schools and charters suggest that he is interested in topics that would typically align him with liberals. But, he goes where the data leads him; he doesn't contort data to support pre-desired conclusions.
I'm quite certain he does not self-identify as a conservative. I'm not sure whether he'd call himself liberal or progressive.
Comprof, you keep repeating that as if it's true....
Here, quoted rom the study, a brief description of the FOUR SEPARATE major datasets (and many millions of observations contained therein) why they were chosen and how they were used:
"A primary obstacle to the study of police use of force has been the lack of readily available data.
Data on lower level uses of force, which happen more frequently than officer-involved shootings, are virtually non-existent. This is due, in part, to the fact that most police precincts don’t explicitly collect data on use of force, and in part, to the fact that even when the data is hidden in plain view within police narrative accounts of interactions with civilians, it is exceedingly diffcult to extract. Moreover, the task of compiling rich data on ocer-involved shootings is burdensome. Until recently, data on officer-involved shootings were extremely rare and contained little information on the details surrounding an incident. A simple count of the number of police shootings that occur does little to explore whether racial differences in the frequency of officer-involved shootings are due to police malfeasance or dfferences in suspect behavior. 2
In this paper, we estimate the extent of racial differences in police use of force using four separate datasets – two constructed for the purposes of this study.3
Unless otherwise noted, all results are conditional on an interaction. Understanding potential selection into police data sets due to bias in who police interacts with is a difficult endeavor. Section 3 attempts to help get a sense of potential bias in police interactions. Put simply, if one assumes police simply stop whomever they want for no particular reason, there seem to be large racial differences. If one assumes they are trying to prevent violent crimes, then evidence for bias is exceedingly small.
Of the four datasets, the first comes from NYC’s Stop, Question, and Frisk program (hereafter Stop and Frisk). Stop and Frisk is a practice of the New York City police department in which police stop and question a pedestrian, then can frisk them for weapons or contraband. The dataset contains roughly five million observations. And, important for the purposes of this paper, has detailed information on a wide range of uses of force – from putting hands on civilians to striking them with a baton. The second dataset is the Police-Public Contact Survey, a triennial survey of a nationally representative sample of civilians, which contains – from the civilian point of view – a description of interactions with police, which includes uses of force. Both these datasets are public-use and readily available. 4
The other two datasets were assembled for the purposes of this research. We use event summaries from all incidents in which an officer discharges his weapon at civilians – including both hits and misses – from three large cities in Texas (Austin, Dallas, Houston), six large Florida counties, and Los Angeles County, to construct a dataset in which one can investigate racial differences in officer-involved shootings. Because all individuals in these data have been involved in a police shooting, analysis of these data alone can only estimate racial differences on the intensive margin (e.g., did the officer discharge their weapon before or after the suspect attacked).
To supplement, our fourth dataset contains a random sample of police-civilian interactions from the Houston Police department from arrests codes in which lethal force is more likely to be justified: attempted capital murder of a public safety officer, aggravated assault on a public safety officer, resisting arrest, evading arrest, and interfering in arrest. Similar to the event studies above, these data come from arrest narratives that range in length from two to one hundred pages. A team of researchers was responsible for reading arrest reports and collecting almost 300 variables on each incident. Combining this with the officer-involved shooting data from Houston allows us to estimate both the extensive (e.g., whether or not a police officer decides to shoot) and intensive margins.
Further, the Houston arrests data contain almost 4,500 observations in which officers discharged charged electronic devices (e.g., tasers). This is the second most extreme use of force, and in some cases, is a substitute for lethal use of force."
Footnotes from the above excerpt:
1. Author’s calculations based on ProPublica research that analyzes FBI data between 1980 and 2012.2. Newspapers such as the Washington Post estimate that there were 965 officer-involved shootings in 2015. Websites such as fatal encounters estimate that the number of annual shootings is approximately 704 between 2000 and 2015.
3. Throughout the text, I depart from custom by using the terms “we,” “our,” and so on. Although this is sole authored work, it took a large team of talented individuals to collect the data necessary for this project. Using “I”
seems disingenuous.
4 . The NYC Stop and Frisk data has been used in Gelman et al. (2012) and Coviello and Persico (2015) to understand whether there is evidence of racial discrimination in proactive policing, and Ridgeway (2009) to develop a
statistical method to identify problem officers. The Police-Public Contact Survey has been used, mainly in criminology, to study questions such as whether police treatment of citizens impacts the broader public opinion of the police (Miller et al., 2004).
The pronounced and remarkable aspect of UATX, theFP and the entire cast of characters from the weekend in Austin (Fryer included) is that you never questioned that many may be liberal, progressive, conservative or otherwise. It didn't matter. Everyone there was focused on the pursuit of academic freedom and the pursuit of the truth. It was refreshing.
I had a simple question because there is a difference in points of view. It tells me a lot about a person. There is a very big difference between the old school liberals and the woke progressives of today.
Does matter what label you put on him? Is it necessary to label everyone? Must everyone be put in a box so that they can conveniently be put on the shelf and never thought about again?
Ask Mike what his motives are. I think there's a differnece between naming and labeling. Labeling has social conotations and there's a difference between humans and things. That's a lamp, she's a trollop.
It's one of those deluded moments when it looks like there's hope. Something absolutely abominable will no doubt happen tomorrow to get me straight again.
Your position is he was reprimanded because he grew up poor? I see zero evidence of that. It’s pretty clear he was punished because his research went against the current dogma. Also, it’s important to be truthful about what the research shows: police KILLINGS of black men are roughly proportional (somewhat lower than you would expect) to crime rates, however harassment and non-lethal physical encounters are not. Black men experience both at higher rates.
Again, your links don’t demonstrate, show, or prove how and where Fryer’s conclusions are wrong.
They are perhaps methodological suggestions on how data collection for such a study could be done better. But until someone does that work, you and they are nowhere.
The only argument you can make, that has any logical basis, is to question whether Fryer’s conclusions based on 10 police departments is generalizable to ALL police departments. The answer would be no, unless someone goes out and demonstrates that they can be.
So maybe you should confine your criticism to, for example, say that just because Fryer didn’t find lethal force bias in those 10 departments, doesn’t prove that this won’t happen in Armpitville, Kansas. But that’s just a variant of “absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence”, which is obviously true, but neither is it evidence of presence either, which you seem to want to suggest.
Never heard of them, but it looks like they're trying to do a good job. I like that they say they put all the data out there. However, their "key findings" were all kind of "duh", and the research was a bit superficial - a good place to start. As they learn more maybe they'll get a bit more granular (read: useful) in their analysis.
Of course you haven't heard of them. Not surprising at all.
The analysis is superb, as they describe in their "About" section by using objective/3rd party data instead of self-reported PD data and "ride along" interviews.
Their "key findings" are that Fryer is wrong re: Houston and I'm pretty sure if you plug in any other city, one will find the same.
That's all the "granularity" (read: accurate) needed for this discussion, as their "depth" and "granularity" is the same as Fryer's.
So, leave the goalpost alone. :)
Btw, Fryer had drama at Harvard because of sexual harrassment accusations, not because of his "working paper" that has suddenly become the irrefutable totem for certain segments of society.
OK, Comprof, I'm back. First of all I want to say I appreciate your references in response to my challenge for the substantiation of your position. That's the best way to have a constructive dialogue.
As to your 3 citations, I will summarize them in reverse order. The SSRN piece hypothesizes that the discretion used by police in terms of who they choose to go after is itself subjective and therefore invalidates any subsequent statistical outcomes. This implies that some random cohort of law enforcement let n black criminal suspects get away in order to show a higher shooting fatality rate with whites. That's a stretch. It's like saying that if it is documented that I hit four people the data points are irrelevant because I thought of hitting several more but didn't. Why measure anything? Only in Academia can you get away with nonsense like that.
Hoping for a different perspective in the Nature piece, and though a different study and year and authors, it said essentially the same thing.
Lastly I turned to the Harvard paper - interesting because Fryer also works at Harvard - I'm sure there's an inside baseball story there. The Harvard paper merely summarized the SSRN and Nature pieces and tried to extract a single data set to underscore the same unprovable theory.
My conclusion: Fryer's data stands. With a shortage of police in many urban departments, however, and with the lower bar for new hires, who knows where the data will lead us in the future.
Well said. I’ve read the 3 links and come to the same conclusion. Charitably, they offer theoretical constructs of how the research could be done better moving forward. But no one seems to have done that work, or put those theories in practice.
It’s akin to saying “Fryer’s conclusions should be discounted because his research could have been done better” without ever actually going out and doing it better. It’s at the level of pointless navel gazing.
That was my conclusion as well. When you discard data because you're speculating about what actions people did or didn't take that could have led to a different result, you're on pretty thin ice. None of these "studies" attempted to do the heavy lifting of a better analysis, they just whined from the sidelines. Weak.
The principle issue is that Fryer controls for the rate of interactions with the police, but that rate is effectively determined entirely by police officers (who have wide discretion in who to stop/pull over) and departmental policy (i.e. how many patrols get assigned to which neighborhoods). This means that we've already prevented ourselves from considering one major avenue where we have very solid evidence that racial bias is introduced, and, in particular, it means that the group "white people stopped by the police" is not identical to the group "black people stopped by the police:" black folks are substantially less likely to be engaged in criminal activity when they interact with the police.
But the short version is this -- if the police are stopping more 'innocent' black folks (i.e. people with no contraband, weapons, or outstanding warrants on them at the time), but they're still being killed at a roughly equal rate to whites, this doesn't demonstrate an absence of bias at all. Quite to the contrary, it suggests that there is racial bias at play: there appears to be a lower threshold for killing black suspects than white ones.
As an analogy, imagine you're testing a new medication to prevent breast cancer, and you let doctors just recruit people for the study that they think could benefit from it. The doctors recommend that most of their female patients join their study, because breast cancer is a common problem for women, but they only recruit a handful of men who show some additional risk factor (e.g. a particular genetic marker). At the end of the study, you find that 0.1% of people who take the medication develop breast cancer within one year. Upon further examination of the data, you realize that this number is true across all groups: i.e. 0.1% of men who take the medication develop breast cancer, and 0.1% of women who take the medication develop breast cancer. Would you say that this medication is equally dangerous for all groups? If so, you're missing the fact that these two groups didn't have equal risks for breast cancer to begin with -- the drug could actually be lowering the risk for one group, while raising it for the other.
So…ummm….HOW MUCH is Fryer “underestimating” police bias then?
Oh, you don’t know, right….cuz it’s still just a criticism in theory. And no one has yet to do a better study that attempts to or better eliminates the factors of bias.
538 is great, and Nate Silver is statistician extraordinaire….but that particular article provides no answers. They offer no way to even adjust for this “collider bias”…even in theory. So at BEST, you might say Fryer’s analysis represents the floor of police bias wrt shootings….and the real level of bias MIGHT be higher (although you have no basis for saying how much higher, and you have no basis to exclude the possibility of that adjustment factor being ZERO).
So it boils down to this: you are free to assert that police shootings have more racial bias than shown by Fryer. But the burden is on you to prove it. Anything else is just idle noise.
Right, but you can't measure what you don't know. The misconstructed clinical study is a bad analogy. A more germane example is the attempt to measure unreported crimes, which everyone in law enforcement agrees is a much larger figure than reported crimes. There is considerable evidence that the incidence of unreported crimes in minority neighborhoods is in fact much higher than in (predominantly) "white" neighborhoods. If we had some way to capture this, this would skew crime data much higher towards minority participants. But we don't have that data. Should we just guess? Should we ignore the data we do have? You can't use speculation to dismiss facts. The takeaway is to get better data.
Comprof, you keep repeating that as if it's true....
Here, quoted rom the study, a brief description of the FOUR SEPARATE major datasets (and many millions of observations contained therein) why they were chosen and how they were used:
"A primary obstacle to the study of police use of force has been the lack of readily available data.
Data on lower level uses of force, which happen more frequently than officer-involved shootings, are virtually non-existent. This is due, in part, to the fact that most police precincts don’t explicitly collect data on use of force, and in part, to the fact that even when the data is hidden in plain view within police narrative accounts of interactions with civilians, it is exceedingly diffcult to extract. Moreover, the task of compiling rich data on ocer-involved shootings is burdensome. Until recently, data on officer-involved shootings were extremely rare and contained little information on the details surrounding an incident. A simple count of the number of police shootings that occur does little to explore whether racial differences in the frequency of officer-involved shootings are due to police malfeasance or dfferences in suspect behavior. 2
In this paper, we estimate the extent of racial differences in police use of force using four separate datasets – two constructed for the purposes of this study.3
Unless otherwise noted, all results are conditional on an interaction. Understanding potential selection into police data sets due to bias in who police interacts with is a difficult endeavor. Section 3 attempts to help get a sense of potential bias in police interactions. Put simply, if one assumes police simply stop whomever they want for no particular reason, there seem to be large racial differences. If one assumes they are trying to prevent violent crimes, then evidence for bias is exceedingly small.
Of the four datasets, the first comes from NYC’s Stop, Question, and Frisk program (hereafter Stop and Frisk). Stop and Frisk is a practice of the New York City police department in which police stop and question a pedestrian, then can frisk them for weapons or contraband. The dataset contains roughly five million observations. And, important for the purposes of this paper, has detailed information on a wide range of uses of force – from putting hands on civilians to striking them with a baton. The second dataset is the Police-Public Contact Survey, a triennial survey of a nationally representative sample of civilians, which contains – from the civilian point of view – a description of interactions with police, which includes uses of force. Both these datasets are public-use and readily available. 4
The other two datasets were assembled for the purposes of this research. We use event summaries from all incidents in which an officer discharges his weapon at civilians – including both hits and misses – from three large cities in Texas (Austin, Dallas, Houston), six large Florida counties, and Los Angeles County, to construct a dataset in which one can investigate racial differences in officer-involved shootings. Because all individuals in these data have been involved in a police shooting, analysis of these data alone can only estimate racial differences on the intensive margin (e.g., did the officer discharge their weapon before or after the suspect attacked).
To supplement, our fourth dataset contains a random sample of police-civilian interactions from the Houston Police department from arrests codes in which lethal force is more likely to be justified: attempted capital murder of a public safety officer, aggravated assault on a public safety officer, resisting arrest, evading arrest, and interfering in arrest. Similar to the event studies above, these data come from arrest narratives that range in length from two to one hundred pages. A team of researchers was responsible for reading arrest reports and collecting almost 300 variables on each incident. Combining this with the officer-involved shooting data from Houston allows us to estimate both the extensive (e.g., whether or not a police officer decides to shoot) and intensive margins.
Further, the Houston arrests data contain almost 4,500 observations in which officers discharged charged electronic devices (e.g., tasers). This is the second most extreme use of force, and in some cases, is a substitute for lethal use of force."
Footnotes from the above excerpt:
1. Author’s calculations based on ProPublica research that analyzes FBI data between 1980 and 2012.2. Newspapers such as the Washington Post estimate that there were 965 officer-involved shootings in 2015. Websites such as fatal encounters estimate that the number of annual shootings is approximately 704 between 2000 and 2015.
3. Throughout the text, I depart from custom by using the terms “we,” “our,” and so on. Although this is sole authored work, it took a large team of talented individuals to collect the data necessary for this project. Using “I”
seems disingenuous.
4 . The NYC Stop and Frisk data has been used in Gelman et al. (2012) and Coviello and Persico (2015) to understand whether there is evidence of racial discrimination in proactive policing, and Ridgeway (2009) to develop a
statistical method to identify problem officers. The Police-Public Contact Survey has been used, mainly in criminology, to study questions such as whether police treatment of citizens impacts the broader public opinion of the police (Miller et al., 2004).
He obviously skimmed the article and it proves his reading comprehension skill suck.
In the article he says, "And those experiences helped me understand what types of data to collect. We collected millions of observations on everyday use of force that wasn’t lethal. We collected thousands of observations on lethal force. And the key question is not just these arbitrary, silly snapshots that some journalists do a lot, which is “black people are 13 percent of the population, and they are 50 percent of the police shootings.” I’m sorry about that, but I don’t know what that has to do with the question. And it was in this moment in 2016 that I realized people lose their minds when they don’t like the result."
The ride along were to get a real experience and were just a small part of his paper.
Apparently, the moron couldn't quite grasp this. Maybe he has been too busy organizing and leading pro-Hamas rallies at Moron U. The school for the not so bright.
Hmmm...I sense a college educated idiot. A Harvard peer review is meaningless (except for sucking up to the Harvard administration itself). The "peers" at Harvard are the same ones that thought Claudine Gay was the cat's meow.
"Growing up without a mother is hard. And I’m never going to forget the difference. I remember what it was like to go to bed hungry. I vividly remember what it was like to go to bed scared. I know what gunshots sound like at night at 8 or 9 years old. That’s hard."
The trouble with America today can be laid down to this: the Powerful have never experienced the life of the Disempowered; the Elite, who pretend to speak for the Poor, have never experienced Poor.
My father's generation was damaged by machine guns and mines and it barely kept them down. The current generation is damaged by bad jokes, and people's lives are getting ruined. What the hell happened? It's a rhetorical question, I think all of us know the answer.
Was incredibly inspired by this conversation, what an amazing man! Bari thanks for bringing Dr. Fryer to my attention, been on a deep dive of his work since this first dropped, absolutely fascinating...
Appreciate everyone involved, keep up the great work folks!
Comprof, you keep repeating that as if it's true....
Here, quoted rom the study, a brief description of the FOUR SEPARATE major datasets (and many millions of observations contained therein) why they were chosen and how they were used:
"A primary obstacle to the study of police use of force has been the lack of readily available data.
Data on lower level uses of force, which happen more frequently than officer-involved shootings, are virtually non-existent. This is due, in part, to the fact that most police precincts don’t explicitly collect data on use of force, and in part, to the fact that even when the data is hidden in plain view within police narrative accounts of interactions with civilians, it is exceedingly diffcult to extract. Moreover, the task of compiling rich data on ocer-involved shootings is burdensome. Until recently, data on officer-involved shootings were extremely rare and contained little information on the details surrounding an incident. A simple count of the number of police shootings that occur does little to explore whether racial differences in the frequency of officer-involved shootings are due to police malfeasance or dfferences in suspect behavior. 2
In this paper, we estimate the extent of racial differences in police use of force using four separate datasets – two constructed for the purposes of this study.3
Unless otherwise noted, all results are conditional on an interaction. Understanding potential selection into police data sets due to bias in who police interacts with is a difficult endeavor. Section 3 attempts to help get a sense of potential bias in police interactions. Put simply, if one assumes police simply stop whomever they want for no particular reason, there seem to be large racial differences. If one assumes they are trying to prevent violent crimes, then evidence for bias is exceedingly small.
Of the four datasets, the first comes from NYC’s Stop, Question, and Frisk program (hereafter Stop and Frisk). Stop and Frisk is a practice of the New York City police department in which police stop and question a pedestrian, then can frisk them for weapons or contraband. The dataset contains roughly five million observations. And, important for the purposes of this paper, has detailed information on a wide range of uses of force – from putting hands on civilians to striking them with a baton. The second dataset is the Police-Public Contact Survey, a triennial survey of a nationally representative sample of civilians, which contains – from the civilian point of view – a description of interactions with police, which includes uses of force. Both these datasets are public-use and readily available. 4
The other two datasets were assembled for the purposes of this research. We use event summaries from all incidents in which an officer discharges his weapon at civilians – including both hits and misses – from three large cities in Texas (Austin, Dallas, Houston), six large Florida counties, and Los Angeles County, to construct a dataset in which one can investigate racial differences in officer-involved shootings. Because all individuals in these data have been involved in a police shooting, analysis of these data alone can only estimate racial differences on the intensive margin (e.g., did the officer discharge their weapon before or after the suspect attacked).
To supplement, our fourth dataset contains a random sample of police-civilian interactions from the Houston Police department from arrests codes in which lethal force is more likely to be justified: attempted capital murder of a public safety officer, aggravated assault on a public safety officer, resisting arrest, evading arrest, and interfering in arrest. Similar to the event studies above, these data come from arrest narratives that range in length from two to one hundred pages. A team of researchers was responsible for reading arrest reports and collecting almost 300 variables on each incident. Combining this with the officer-involved shooting data from Houston allows us to estimate both the extensive (e.g., whether or not a police officer decides to shoot) and intensive margins.
Further, the Houston arrests data contain almost 4,500 observations in which officers discharged charged electronic devices (e.g., tasers). This is the second most extreme use of force, and in some cases, is a substitute for lethal use of force."
Footnotes from the above excerpt:
1. Author’s calculations based on ProPublica research that analyzes FBI data between 1980 and 2012.2. Newspapers such as the Washington Post estimate that there were 965 officer-involved shootings in 2015. Websites such as fatal encounters estimate that the number of annual shootings is approximately 704 between 2000 and 2015.
3. Throughout the text, I depart from custom by using the terms “we,” “our,” and so on. Although this is sole authored work, it took a large team of talented individuals to collect the data necessary for this project. Using “I”
seems disingenuous.
4 . The NYC Stop and Frisk data has been used in Gelman et al. (2012) and Coviello and Persico (2015) to understand whether there is evidence of racial discrimination in proactive policing, and Ridgeway (2009) to develop a
statistical method to identify problem officers. The Police-Public Contact Survey has been used, mainly in criminology, to study questions such as whether police treatment of citizens impacts the broader public opinion of the police (Miller et al., 2004).
Man, this guy is so incredibly inspiring. I am going to do something - something with kids in school. Teach reading, be a positive force. I'm getting off my ass. Thank you!
Schools need long-term substitutes. Someone who doesn’t have to bother with the admin but becomes someone the kids can trust. Pick one district, and one school, even one teacher, and show up.
Hold on a sec.. he invited people over to his house for a Thanksgiving dinner. He made jokes.. however inappropriate. Those people didn’t like the jokes and they … reported him? To the point he was suspended. 🤯
I really don’t understand how this world operates.
I don’t either. And I don’t get how publishing what some people don’t want to hear gets him having to have security. Harvard must be full of scared fascists.
You have to understand. Regressive elitists don’t really like blacks. They’ll tolerate them, they definitely use them, but scratch them and they hold blacks in contempt. Once he went against the narrative, he was fair game.
It’s like Trump. Until 2016, NYC loved him. They wanted to be near him. Hell the Clinton’s cozied up to him for his money and invites. But he dared go against the dem narrative
And that’s all it takes for them to turn on you like a pack of slavering wild animals
But Natalia-- you must have witnessed some things like this? People I knew in Cuba had this kind of thing happen, as did Romanian refugees I knew. And-academia has always been a hot-bed of backstabbers!
But Kate, of course I have. Both, my past and my proximity to the US academia taught me a lot. As an Immigrant who tends to treat coworkers and friends as family I feel deeply for Roland Fryer, so I honestly felt like posting “Aaaaaaaaaaaa” when I read that part of his story.
I opted for “I don’t understand” only because words failed me.
A small but important part of the story: His dinner guests also laughed... and then later they turned on him, showing them as hypocrites and traitors as well as cowards!
Agreed. And his repeated refrain of “I was wrong because I didn’t understand this thing called “power dynamics”” is straight out of the struggle session apology playbook.
I am a huge supporter of RF’s academic integrity, but something about his language in this part was really sad to me. Even someone as self assured and willing to stand up for what is right still ultimately cowers to the Marxist “power dynamics” narrative and endorses it via a scripted apology.
I also noted that he sees the college's role in the world to be activist as well. Unless I was misunderstanding at the end when he kept saying he was helping inner city kids because that is what the school is there for. It sounds like he really wants to be an activist not a college professor. So he is mixing the two.
Have no issue with him doing it, good for him for walking the walk, but that is NOT what Harvard is there for.
*puts on his tinfoil hat* The complaint came after his research...it is possible that the complaint was simply a way to punish him for wrongthink. Like a warning. And, if he were white, it may not have been a warning.
Of course I don't actually know anything. But I seem to see a lot of stories that make me believe it is at least in the realm of possibility.
I see it's "NataliA," sorry. I was responding to, "I don't really understand how this world operates." So I meant to suggest you keep coming here to learn more, like I do.
I am filled with a new hope for our nation and race relations when I read articles such as this and books like ‘The End of Race Politics: Arguments for a Colorblind America’ by Colman Hughes. Bravo Bari…again!
There's a lot of work to be done, but many of my friends and family who are registered, dyed-in-the-wool Democrats are beginning to come around to the idea that DEI is a divisive, toxic ideology that does more harm than good.
It doesn't help that we are led by a senile, imbecilic grifter braying lies about 'white nationalists" and fomenting a grievance culture based on that.
This was an outstanding interview. Hopefully many will hear it or read it. Roland Fryer is a gift and a rare example of what an academic can be. And he is a personification of the American Dream that I stubbornly continue to believe in.
I’m so proud to be a founding member of UATX. And, I’m beyond grateful for people like Fryer; brilliant, excellent and persevering in the pursuit of truth. Isn’t it crazy and maddening how brave one needs to be to tell it?
We’ve entered a modern dark age. May you, dear Bari, UATX, Schellenberger, Fryer, and so many more lead us all to a modern enlightenment, post haste.
I applaud the idea behind UATX,, but I fear for the outcome. The decision to seek accreditation does not bode well.
It took UATX two years to even get students into the classroom. Meanwhile, there are small (underfunded) colleges already at work and graduating students. Modesty forbids me to mention my own Mount Liberty College, so I'll cite Belmont Abbey College in North Carolina.
Respectfully, perhaps you are thinking of a different institution? The UATX got full accreditation a few months ago, and are currently actively screening well over 400 applicants for 100 openings for the Fall of 2024. The team at UATX has done a phenomenal job getting this University off the ground.
Respectfully, nothing you said contradicts what I said. In order to get accreditation, UATX had to decide to seek accreditation. I foresee that that decision will, in the end, turn UATX into another UTAA. Accreditation is the tool the establishment uses to enforce conformity. The tragedy is that UATX had the resources and backing to fight the gods of accreditation. Doing so could have led to an unshackling of all existing universities, and allowed the establishment of hundreds of new ones free to follow learning where it leads instead of where the accreditors want it to go.
I just think all the encomiums UATX reaps are a tad premature. Given their reported $20 million in startup funds, it should not have taken two years to open. Not blessed with that kind of money, and determined to avoid the accreditation trap, Mount Liberty took six months to start, and has already produced graduates.
"I am here because I have seen so much talent in these neighborhoods, and I know they know bullshit when they see it. So I’m not going to lie to them. I wouldn’t be able to show my face in these places if I told lies to them." - This man is a leader, a rare thing.
" it’s not in my personality to go over to two people who seem to be enjoying an inappropriate conversation and say, “I don’t think that’s appropriate for the office.” And so I didn’t shut those kinds of conversations down. I thought this was a good thing. I honestly did." - And yet, all too naively human.
"So I guess I want to ask, do you believe in karma?
RF: I hear it’s a motherfucker. " - And oh so FUNNY!
Claudine Gay suspended Roland Fryer for 2 years without pay because he told and was amused by some politically incorrect jokes that (according to her) upset some folks at Harvard. However, she found nothing wrong with threats of violence against Jewish students. She also tried to justify her own plagiarism. What's wrong with that picture?
We need more people with the guts and honesty of Roland Fryer. I hired a young guy as a starting lawyer years back who is like Fryer in many ways, except he came from a stable family. He was the best hire I ever made and remains a friend and colleague to this day who made me a better lawyer and person. Having a friend who refuses to compromise with the truth and tells you what you need to hear - not what you want to hear - is worth its weight in gold.
NO! Fryer must continue teaching Harvard students to seek the truth (Veritas). And how to do research wherever it takes them. Although Harvard could clearly use an actual leader with the vision and backbone to change Harvard's direction. He or she could start by finding the rest of the Fryers, Rob Hendersons, and millions of other talented kids written off by public schools.
I almost never have the patience to listen to these, let alone watch them. I watched this one from end to end on you tube. This guy is amazing. If we put him in charge of inner city education, the world would be changed. Thank you, Bari.
I note that Maria Rey liked my post. Any relation to the Maria Rey who co-authored some of the more recent Curious George books? I loved reading them to my kids.
The contrast between Roland Fryer and Claudine Gay is a case study of class warfare. He grew up in the hood with no parents and worked fast food jobs to put himself through state school, then became a rock star economist at Harvard. She had rich parents who sent her to Exeter, rose through the DIE commissar ranks with plagiarism, then suspended him from Harvard after his research found no correlation between police violence and race. Kudos to Bari for giving him the accolades and attention he richly deserves.
Name and shame the Harvard Corporation board members for overseeing the destruction of our leading university and truth itself: https://yuribezmenov.substack.com/p/how-to-get-into-harvard-gay-bobo-corporation
Yuri, don't forget that there are serious question about the data that Gay used for her magnum opus on voter turnout among whites when they have a black representative.
She has for years refused to release her dataset. But there is enough known to show signs of cherry picking data and general BS.
The contrast between Roland Fryer and Claudine Gay is more than a study of class warfare. It is a case study of sexism.
During the congressional hearing on anti-Semitism on college campuses, Rep. Lucy McBath of GA made a point of saying that "it is not lost on me that the intellect, the intelligence that we have on this panel today, the most intelligent minds that are leading our highest Institutions are women." What?
As leading institutions battle egregious acts of prejudice on U.S. college campuses and a recent genocide in Gaza, a female Rep. of George makes a point of throwing in the sex-card. And if anyone was watching, the panel of presidents gloated.
McBath goes on to offer up softball comments and question. Would the questions and comments have been so soft if these presidents were male? Not a chance.
Few want to talk openly about the massive bias on college campuses against males, who are grossly under-represented in the student population. From 2016 to 2020, 2.85 million more women graduated from college than men. And males are now outnumbered on college campuses by nearly 20% (59% to 41%).
This is what partly makes Fryer's experience unique. He's a black male who dared to raise his voice against the DEI narrative that landed people like Claudine Gay her career. They hate him for it. They cannot go after his blackness, so they attack his manhood. They punished him for being a tough, strong, intelligent male.
Our institutions have been corrupted by the ideological stench of a particular rhetoric that hates men like Roland Fryer because he does not capitulate to the ideological wiles leading our corrupt institutions in government, media, and education.
Would you consider him liberal or conservative? I don't know much about him.
I don't think the conservative vs. liberal labels work anymore. It's more of a free will, common sense stance or not.
It’s about “agency”, too. The Manichean framework of oppressor/oppressed says that the individual is defined and limited by the constraints of their group (their race, their gender, their sexuality, etc.).
Clearly, Roland Fryer believes that individuals have agency; that, despite their membership in any given group, each of us has the ability to determine our future through maximizing our potential — even if we are a member of a disfavored minority.
Freedom requires responsibility. While I agree individuals have agency regardless of their social restraints or advantages, as the case may be, far to many abdicate their beliefs to avoid responsibility. Their comfort inside their group trumps the fear of shame associated with any dissent to the group's narrative. Sheep to slaughter.
His thing apparently is talent identification. He wants to extend it down to the poorest neighborhoods as he believes, like him, there are some folks that are uber-talented. One thing I am trying to work out in my mind is that both him and Rob Henderson were able to reach great heights despite their childhoods. Doesn't that indicate the system worked for them? Or are they arguing that they were just lucky? Or did they have some other qualities that allowed them to succeed?
Rob Henderson is very bullish on how his own decisions (albeit some through mentorship) and hard work were the path to success. It sounds like Roland Fryer believes the same. Not luck, not group identity, but good decisions, and hard work.
Isn't this also know as "grit," as defined by Angela Duckworth?
I think they had some other qualities. If you asked me to define it, I wouldn't know where to start, and I note he had trouble defining it, too (he called it "the dog"). But I know it when I see it. It's not common, and it's not environment-independent (as he clearly noted). It's something innate that couples native intelligence (yeah, I know I'm treading on this ice here, but that's the best description I know) with an unstoppable drive. When you boil it down, I guess you could say it's luck, but not the luck of opportunity (indeed, his point is to find such people and give them opportunity). The luck of being born with it.
His commitment is to the truth, wherever it might lead.........as he asserts.
The disturbing part of all this is how his peers at Harvard treated him and he tells us how they counseled him to not report the truth so as to appease and maintain his position. Going to graduate school in Boston during the 1990s and having free reign to whatever research I wanted to, being able to walk into any professors office, no matter what their school affiliation was, using resources at any of the consortium schools and audit/take any classes has apparently been replaced with naked careerism we see in bureaucracies throughout. One thing that hasn't changed is that the majority of graduate students at elite institutions come from the upper 5-10% of society. I compare this to my undergraduate alumni institution (Florida State), where a criminologist has been producing research on gun use that runs counter to liberal orthodoxy for decades and despite taking barbs from outside sources is left alone to do his research without institutional attacks.
It is becoming more apparent that to average folks, that the true pursuit of, knowledge and truth are secondary to the academics' self interests in advancement. I don't know of a more blatant example of an echo chamber than the elite universities tenure, publishing and peer review system. The "peers" are much more interested in preserving their conclusions than objectively evaluating any dissent to their position. It's amazing to observe from the outside. These, allegedly, brilliant people can't seem to grasp the idea that their actions only lead to stagnation and diminishment of worth.
For me, the amazing part is how quickly it happened. Within 1 generation.........same with post-structuralist thought, something we were reading in the 1990s, but was thought to be attractive to just a few. It became incredibly attractive to the entire generation of graduate students and through biased hiring practices, became a totalizing theory that captured the entire system of elite universities (contemporarily with the increase in administrators directing all things to the faculty).
Dave, I don't know that this "post-structuralist" thought came about in only one generation. As far as I can tell, this has been a result of previous generations lack of true guidance for their progeny. Fat, Dumb and Happy describes my generation and subsequent ones as well. We really haven't faced facts until recently. Who else is to blame for this train wreck. Like it or not, the responsibility lies with the lazy, ill informed electorate.
You are so right.
Exactly! Who cares? I don't care if he thinks the world is flat. He has intelligence and integrity and guts. Fryer for president.
I agree.
Conservatives like him, liberals don’t, if that tells you anything. But I’m pretty sure he just considers himself a scholar.
I guess he doesn't push the BLM agenda.
I believe Fryer is a Liberal of the old school. Pursuit of truth without agenda - other than getting tat truth.
Yup he sounds like a classical liberal. Freedom of speech, equality of opportunity. Power to him. And kudos to him for trying to change a woke school from the inside.
"Truth": Self-reporting data from 10 police departments.
Comprof, you keep repeating that as if it's true....
Here, quoted rom the study, a brief description of the FOUR SEPARATE major datasets (and many millions of observations contained therein) why they were chosen and how they were used:
"A primary obstacle to the study of police use of force has been the lack of readily available data.
Data on lower level uses of force, which happen more frequently than officer-involved shootings, are virtually non-existent. This is due, in part, to the fact that most police precincts don’t explicitly collect data on use of force, and in part, to the fact that even when the data is hidden in plain view within police narrative accounts of interactions with civilians, it is exceedingly diffcult to extract. Moreover, the task of compiling rich data on ocer-involved shootings is burdensome. Until recently, data on officer-involved shootings were extremely rare and contained little information on the details surrounding an incident. A simple count of the number of police shootings that occur does little to explore whether racial differences in the frequency of officer-involved shootings are due to police malfeasance or dfferences in suspect behavior. 2
In this paper, we estimate the extent of racial differences in police use of force using four separate datasets – two constructed for the purposes of this study.3
Unless otherwise noted, all results are conditional on an interaction. Understanding potential selection into police data sets due to bias in who police interacts with is a difficult endeavor. Section 3 attempts to help get a sense of potential bias in police interactions. Put simply, if one assumes police simply stop whomever they want for no particular reason, there seem to be large racial differences. If one assumes they are trying to prevent violent crimes, then evidence for bias is exceedingly small.
Of the four datasets, the first comes from NYC’s Stop, Question, and Frisk program (hereafter Stop and Frisk). Stop and Frisk is a practice of the New York City police department in which police stop and question a pedestrian, then can frisk them for weapons or contraband. The dataset contains roughly five million observations. And, important for the purposes of this paper, has detailed information on a wide range of uses of force – from putting hands on civilians to striking them with a baton. The second dataset is the Police-Public Contact Survey, a triennial survey of a nationally representative sample of civilians, which contains – from the civilian point of view – a description of interactions with police, which includes uses of force. Both these datasets are public-use and readily available. 4
The other two datasets were assembled for the purposes of this research. We use event summaries from all incidents in which an officer discharges his weapon at civilians – including both hits and misses – from three large cities in Texas (Austin, Dallas, Houston), six large Florida counties, and Los Angeles County, to construct a dataset in which one can investigate racial differences in officer-involved shootings. Because all individuals in these data have been involved in a police shooting, analysis of these data alone can only estimate racial differences on the intensive margin (e.g., did the officer discharge their weapon before or after the suspect attacked).
To supplement, our fourth dataset contains a random sample of police-civilian interactions from the Houston Police department from arrests codes in which lethal force is more likely to be justified: attempted capital murder of a public safety officer, aggravated assault on a public safety officer, resisting arrest, evading arrest, and interfering in arrest. Similar to the event studies above, these data come from arrest narratives that range in length from two to one hundred pages. A team of researchers was responsible for reading arrest reports and collecting almost 300 variables on each incident. Combining this with the officer-involved shooting data from Houston allows us to estimate both the extensive (e.g., whether or not a police officer decides to shoot) and intensive margins.
Further, the Houston arrests data contain almost 4,500 observations in which officers discharged charged electronic devices (e.g., tasers). This is the second most extreme use of force, and in some cases, is a substitute for lethal use of force."
Footnotes from the above excerpt:
1. Author’s calculations based on ProPublica research that analyzes FBI data between 1980 and 2012.2. Newspapers such as the Washington Post estimate that there were 965 officer-involved shootings in 2015. Websites such as fatal encounters estimate that the number of annual shootings is approximately 704 between 2000 and 2015.
3. Throughout the text, I depart from custom by using the terms “we,” “our,” and so on. Although this is sole authored work, it took a large team of talented individuals to collect the data necessary for this project. Using “I”
seems disingenuous.
4 . The NYC Stop and Frisk data has been used in Gelman et al. (2012) and Coviello and Persico (2015) to understand whether there is evidence of racial discrimination in proactive policing, and Ridgeway (2009) to develop a
statistical method to identify problem officers. The Police-Public Contact Survey has been used, mainly in criminology, to study questions such as whether police treatment of citizens impacts the broader public opinion of the police (Miller et al., 2004).
Way too many words and numbers for Comprof.
Mencken was obviously talking about compro.
"It is the classic fallacy of our time that a moron run through a university and decorated with a Ph.D.
will thereby cease to be a moron."
H. L. Mencken
Here's some words and numbers for you:
2020 update: The specific flaws of Roland Fryer's paper have now been characterized in two studies (by other scholars, not myself). Knox, Lowe, and Mummolo (2019) reanalyze Fryer's data to find it understates racial biases. Ross, Winterhalder, and McElreath (2018) do something similar through a statistical simulation.
Roland Fryer, an economics professor at Harvard University, recently published a working paper at NBER on the topic of racial bias in police use of force and police shootings. The paper gained substantial media attention – a write-up of it became the top viewed article on the New York Times website. The most notable part of the study was its finding that there was no evidence of racial bias in police shootings, which Fryer called “the most surprising result of [his] career”. In his analysis of shootings in Houston, Texas, black and Hispanic people were no more likely (and perhaps even less likely) to be shot relative to whites.
Fryer’s analysis is highly flawed, however. It suffers from major theoretical and methodological errors, and he has communicated the results to news media in a way that is misleading. While there have long been problems with the quality of police shootings data, there is still plenty of evidence to support a pattern of systematic, racially discriminatory use of force against black people in the United States.
Breaking down the analysis of police shootings in Houston
There should be no argument that black and Latino people in Houston are much more likely to be shot by police compared to whites. I looked at the same Houston police shooting dataset as Fryer for the years 2005-2015, which I supplemented with census data, and found that black people were over 5 times as likely to be shot relative to whites. Latinos were roughly twice as likely to be shot versus whites.
Fryer was not comparing rates of police shootings by race, however. Instead, his research asked whether these racial differences were the result of “racial bias” rather than merely “statistical discrimination”. Both terms have specific meanings in economics. Statistical discrimination occurs when an individual or institution treats people differently based on racial stereotypes that ‘truly’ reflect the average behavior of a racial group. For instance, if a city’s black drivers are 50% more likely to possess drugs than white drivers, and police officers are 50% more likely to pull over black drivers, economic theory would hold that this discriminatory policing is rational. If, however, police were to pull over black drivers at a rate that disproportionately exceeded their likelihood of drug possession, that would be an irrational behavior representing individual or institutional bias.
Once explained, it is possible to find the idea of “statistical discrimination” just as abhorrent as “racial bias”. One could point out that the drug laws police enforce were passed with racially discriminatory intent, that collectively punishing black people based on “average behavior” is wrong, or that – as a self-fulfilling prophecy – bias can turn into statistical discrimination (if black people’s cars are searched more thoroughly, for instance, it will appear that their rates of drug possession are higher). At the same time, studies assessing the extent of racial bias above and beyond statistical discrimination have been able to secure legal victories for civil rights. An analysis of stop-and-frisk data by Jeffrey Fagan, which found evidence racial bias, was an important part of the court case against the NYPD, and helped secure an injunction against the policy.
Even if one accepts the logic of statistical discrimination versus racial bias, it is an inappropriate choice for a study of police shootings. The method that Fryer employs has, for the most part, been used to study traffic stops and stop-and-frisk practices. In those cases, economic theory holds that police want to maximize the number of arrests for the possession of contraband (such as drugs or weapons) while expending the fewest resources. If they are acting in the most cost-efficient, rational manner, the officers may use racial stereotypes to increase the arrest rate per stop. This theory completely falls apart for police shootings, however, because officers are not trying to rationally maximize the number of shootings. The theory that is supposed to be informing Fryer's choice of methods is therefore not applicable to this case. He seems somewhat aware of this issue. In his interview with the New York Times, he attributes his ‘surprising’ finding to an issue of “costs, legal and psychological” that happen following a shooting. In what is perhaps a case of cognitive dissonance, he seems to not have reflected on whether the question of cost renders his choice of methods invalid.
Economic theory aside, there is an even more fundamental problem with the Houston police shooting analysis. In a typical study, a researcher will start with a previously defined population where each individual is at risk of a particular outcome. For instance, a population of drivers stopped by police can have one of two outcomes: they can be arrested, or they can be sent on their way. Instead of following this standard approach, Fryer constructs a fictitious population of people who are shot by police and people who are arrested. The problem here is that these two groups (those shot and those arrested) are, in all likelihood, systematically different from one another in ways that cannot be controlled for statistically (UPenn Professor Uri Simonsohn expands on this point here). Fryer acknowledges this limitation in a brief footnote, but understates just how problematic it is. Properly interpreted, the actual result from Fryer’s analysis is that the racial disparity in arrest rates is larger than the racial disparity in police shootings. This is an unsurprising finding, and proves neither a lack of bias nor a lack of systematic discrimination.
Even if the difference in the arrest vs. shooting groups could be accounted for, Fryer tries to control for these differences using variables in police reports, such as if the suspect was described as 'violently resisting arrest'. There is reason to believe that these police reports themselves are racially biased. An investigation of people charged with assaulting a police officer in Washington, DC found that this charge was applied disproportionately towards black residents even for situations in which no assault actually occurred. This was partly due to an overly broad definition of assault against police in DC law, but the principle - that police are likely to describe black civilians as more threatening - is applicable to other jurisdictions.
I’ll also briefly note that there was another analysis, using data from multiple cities, that looked at racial differences in whether or not civilians attacked officers before they were shot. Fryer himself downplays the credibility of this analysis, because it relied on reports from police who had every incentive to misrepresent the order of events.
Racial inequality in police shootings
Fryer’s study is far from the first to investigate racial bias or discrimination in police shootings. A number of studies have placed officers in shooting simulators, and most have shown a greater propensity for shooting black civilians relative to whites. Other research has found that cities with black mayors and city councilors have lower rates of police shootings than would otherwise be expected. A recent analysis of national data showed wide variation in racial disparities for police shooting rates between counties, and these differences were not associated with racial differences in crime rates. This is just a small sample of the dozens of studies on police killings published since the 1950s, most of which suggests that racial bias is indeed a problem.
It is a failure of journalism that the New York Times heavily promoted this study without seeking critical perspectives from experts in the field. Fryer makes basic methodological errors, overstates the quality of his results, and casually uses the term “racial bias” in a way that is nearly guaranteed to be misinterpreted by anyone who isn’t an economist.
And yet, all those words do not change:
1. Self-reported/submitted data from 10 police departments.
2. Not peer reviewed.
https://scholar.harvard.edu/jfeldman/blog/roland-fryer-wrong-there-racial-bias-shootings-police
Hahaha - very true.
This is for you:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IU_y9FB0QKk
Hysterical
He also said that he went into the study about police violence expecting (or even hoping; I heard the interview a while back and don't recall his exact words) to back the liberal view with hard data. What he found surprised him, and he published what he found, because that is what good scholarship requires. That investigation and his other big project (again, if I recall) to figure out what interventions do and don't work in Houston public schools and charters suggest that he is interested in topics that would typically align him with liberals. But, he goes where the data leads him; he doesn't contort data to support pre-desired conclusions.
I'm quite certain he does not self-identify as a conservative. I'm not sure whether he'd call himself liberal or progressive.
I call him sensible and a true scholar.
His research is based on the self-reported data from 10 police departments.
Comprof, you keep repeating that as if it's true....
Here, quoted rom the study, a brief description of the FOUR SEPARATE major datasets (and many millions of observations contained therein) why they were chosen and how they were used:
"A primary obstacle to the study of police use of force has been the lack of readily available data.
Data on lower level uses of force, which happen more frequently than officer-involved shootings, are virtually non-existent. This is due, in part, to the fact that most police precincts don’t explicitly collect data on use of force, and in part, to the fact that even when the data is hidden in plain view within police narrative accounts of interactions with civilians, it is exceedingly diffcult to extract. Moreover, the task of compiling rich data on ocer-involved shootings is burdensome. Until recently, data on officer-involved shootings were extremely rare and contained little information on the details surrounding an incident. A simple count of the number of police shootings that occur does little to explore whether racial differences in the frequency of officer-involved shootings are due to police malfeasance or dfferences in suspect behavior. 2
In this paper, we estimate the extent of racial differences in police use of force using four separate datasets – two constructed for the purposes of this study.3
Unless otherwise noted, all results are conditional on an interaction. Understanding potential selection into police data sets due to bias in who police interacts with is a difficult endeavor. Section 3 attempts to help get a sense of potential bias in police interactions. Put simply, if one assumes police simply stop whomever they want for no particular reason, there seem to be large racial differences. If one assumes they are trying to prevent violent crimes, then evidence for bias is exceedingly small.
Of the four datasets, the first comes from NYC’s Stop, Question, and Frisk program (hereafter Stop and Frisk). Stop and Frisk is a practice of the New York City police department in which police stop and question a pedestrian, then can frisk them for weapons or contraband. The dataset contains roughly five million observations. And, important for the purposes of this paper, has detailed information on a wide range of uses of force – from putting hands on civilians to striking them with a baton. The second dataset is the Police-Public Contact Survey, a triennial survey of a nationally representative sample of civilians, which contains – from the civilian point of view – a description of interactions with police, which includes uses of force. Both these datasets are public-use and readily available. 4
The other two datasets were assembled for the purposes of this research. We use event summaries from all incidents in which an officer discharges his weapon at civilians – including both hits and misses – from three large cities in Texas (Austin, Dallas, Houston), six large Florida counties, and Los Angeles County, to construct a dataset in which one can investigate racial differences in officer-involved shootings. Because all individuals in these data have been involved in a police shooting, analysis of these data alone can only estimate racial differences on the intensive margin (e.g., did the officer discharge their weapon before or after the suspect attacked).
To supplement, our fourth dataset contains a random sample of police-civilian interactions from the Houston Police department from arrests codes in which lethal force is more likely to be justified: attempted capital murder of a public safety officer, aggravated assault on a public safety officer, resisting arrest, evading arrest, and interfering in arrest. Similar to the event studies above, these data come from arrest narratives that range in length from two to one hundred pages. A team of researchers was responsible for reading arrest reports and collecting almost 300 variables on each incident. Combining this with the officer-involved shooting data from Houston allows us to estimate both the extensive (e.g., whether or not a police officer decides to shoot) and intensive margins.
Further, the Houston arrests data contain almost 4,500 observations in which officers discharged charged electronic devices (e.g., tasers). This is the second most extreme use of force, and in some cases, is a substitute for lethal use of force."
Footnotes from the above excerpt:
1. Author’s calculations based on ProPublica research that analyzes FBI data between 1980 and 2012.2. Newspapers such as the Washington Post estimate that there were 965 officer-involved shootings in 2015. Websites such as fatal encounters estimate that the number of annual shootings is approximately 704 between 2000 and 2015.
3. Throughout the text, I depart from custom by using the terms “we,” “our,” and so on. Although this is sole authored work, it took a large team of talented individuals to collect the data necessary for this project. Using “I”
seems disingenuous.
4 . The NYC Stop and Frisk data has been used in Gelman et al. (2012) and Coviello and Persico (2015) to understand whether there is evidence of racial discrimination in proactive policing, and Ridgeway (2009) to develop a
statistical method to identify problem officers. The Police-Public Contact Survey has been used, mainly in criminology, to study questions such as whether police treatment of citizens impacts the broader public opinion of the police (Miller et al., 2004).
Don’t hold your breath for comprof’s erudite unpacking.
Let me unpack.
1. Self-reporting/self-volunteered data from 10 police departments.
2. Not peer reviewed.
There you go!
Ignore Comprof2.0!
Fascinating....keep saying it because it is true.
1. Self-reported/submitted data from 10 police departments.
2. Not peer reviewed.
I don't think it matters what label you give him. He seems like a man of principle, a straight shooter who goes were the data not the mob takes him.
The pronounced and remarkable aspect of UATX, theFP and the entire cast of characters from the weekend in Austin (Fryer included) is that you never questioned that many may be liberal, progressive, conservative or otherwise. It didn't matter. Everyone there was focused on the pursuit of academic freedom and the pursuit of the truth. It was refreshing.
I had a simple question because there is a difference in points of view. It tells me a lot about a person. There is a very big difference between the old school liberals and the woke progressives of today.
gonna guess a "soft" Libertarian
Does matter what label you put on him? Is it necessary to label everyone? Must everyone be put in a box so that they can conveniently be put on the shelf and never thought about again?
I don't know about Mike's motives, but I do know that naming something is important to allow people to discuss and understand it.
Ask Mike what his motives are. I think there's a differnece between naming and labeling. Labeling has social conotations and there's a difference between humans and things. That's a lamp, she's a trollop.
It's one of those deluded moments when it looks like there's hope. Something absolutely abominable will no doubt happen tomorrow to get me straight again.
Your position is he was reprimanded because he grew up poor? I see zero evidence of that. It’s pretty clear he was punished because his research went against the current dogma. Also, it’s important to be truthful about what the research shows: police KILLINGS of black men are roughly proportional (somewhat lower than you would expect) to crime rates, however harassment and non-lethal physical encounters are not. Black men experience both at higher rates.
Fryer's study is based on self-reported data from 10 police departments.
No one has refuted Fryer’s data. If you are doing so, please provide resources.
That is not going to happen. He’ll just continue to repeat his embarrassing mischaracterization of Fryer’s research
The guy is an ill informed, obnoxious, asshole. He embarrasses himself every time he posts here but is too stupid to realize it.
Yes, but other than that how do you like him?
https://policescorecard.org/tx/police-department/houston
Ouch....
1. https://scholar.harvard.edu/jfeldman/blog/roland-fryer-wrong-there-racial-bias-shootings-police
2. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-018-0110-z
3. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3336338
Again, your links don’t demonstrate, show, or prove how and where Fryer’s conclusions are wrong.
They are perhaps methodological suggestions on how data collection for such a study could be done better. But until someone does that work, you and they are nowhere.
The only argument you can make, that has any logical basis, is to question whether Fryer’s conclusions based on 10 police departments is generalizable to ALL police departments. The answer would be no, unless someone goes out and demonstrates that they can be.
So maybe you should confine your criticism to, for example, say that just because Fryer didn’t find lethal force bias in those 10 departments, doesn’t prove that this won’t happen in Armpitville, Kansas. But that’s just a variant of “absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence”, which is obviously true, but neither is it evidence of presence either, which you seem to want to suggest.
666
Oh, it most certainly will happen. Here you go. Enjoy! :)
1. https://scholar.harvard.edu/jfeldman/blog/roland-fryer-wrong-there-racial-bias-shootings-police
2. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-018-0110-z
3. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3336338
https://policescorecard.org/tx/police-department/houston
Never heard of them, but it looks like they're trying to do a good job. I like that they say they put all the data out there. However, their "key findings" were all kind of "duh", and the research was a bit superficial - a good place to start. As they learn more maybe they'll get a bit more granular (read: useful) in their analysis.
Of course you haven't heard of them. Not surprising at all.
The analysis is superb, as they describe in their "About" section by using objective/3rd party data instead of self-reported PD data and "ride along" interviews.
Their "key findings" are that Fryer is wrong re: Houston and I'm pretty sure if you plug in any other city, one will find the same.
That's all the "granularity" (read: accurate) needed for this discussion, as their "depth" and "granularity" is the same as Fryer's.
So, leave the goalpost alone. :)
Btw, Fryer had drama at Harvard because of sexual harrassment accusations, not because of his "working paper" that has suddenly become the irrefutable totem for certain segments of society.
Here you go. Enjoy! :)
1. https://scholar.harvard.edu/jfeldman/blog/roland-fryer-wrong-there-racial-bias-shootings-police
2. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-018-0110-z
3. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3336338
OK, Comprof, I'm back. First of all I want to say I appreciate your references in response to my challenge for the substantiation of your position. That's the best way to have a constructive dialogue.
As to your 3 citations, I will summarize them in reverse order. The SSRN piece hypothesizes that the discretion used by police in terms of who they choose to go after is itself subjective and therefore invalidates any subsequent statistical outcomes. This implies that some random cohort of law enforcement let n black criminal suspects get away in order to show a higher shooting fatality rate with whites. That's a stretch. It's like saying that if it is documented that I hit four people the data points are irrelevant because I thought of hitting several more but didn't. Why measure anything? Only in Academia can you get away with nonsense like that.
Hoping for a different perspective in the Nature piece, and though a different study and year and authors, it said essentially the same thing.
Lastly I turned to the Harvard paper - interesting because Fryer also works at Harvard - I'm sure there's an inside baseball story there. The Harvard paper merely summarized the SSRN and Nature pieces and tried to extract a single data set to underscore the same unprovable theory.
My conclusion: Fryer's data stands. With a shortage of police in many urban departments, however, and with the lower bar for new hires, who knows where the data will lead us in the future.
Well said. I’ve read the 3 links and come to the same conclusion. Charitably, they offer theoretical constructs of how the research could be done better moving forward. But no one seems to have done that work, or put those theories in practice.
It’s akin to saying “Fryer’s conclusions should be discounted because his research could have been done better” without ever actually going out and doing it better. It’s at the level of pointless navel gazing.
That was my conclusion as well. When you discard data because you're speculating about what actions people did or didn't take that could have led to a different result, you're on pretty thin ice. None of these "studies" attempted to do the heavy lifting of a better analysis, they just whined from the sidelines. Weak.
This applies to compro:
It is the classic fallacy of our time that a moron run through a university and decorated with a Ph.D. will thereby cease to be a moron.
H. L. Mencken
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-statistics-dont-capture-the-full-extent-of-the-systemic-bias-in-policing/
Your conclusion is wrong.
The principle issue is that Fryer controls for the rate of interactions with the police, but that rate is effectively determined entirely by police officers (who have wide discretion in who to stop/pull over) and departmental policy (i.e. how many patrols get assigned to which neighborhoods). This means that we've already prevented ourselves from considering one major avenue where we have very solid evidence that racial bias is introduced, and, in particular, it means that the group "white people stopped by the police" is not identical to the group "black people stopped by the police:" black folks are substantially less likely to be engaged in criminal activity when they interact with the police.
But the short version is this -- if the police are stopping more 'innocent' black folks (i.e. people with no contraband, weapons, or outstanding warrants on them at the time), but they're still being killed at a roughly equal rate to whites, this doesn't demonstrate an absence of bias at all. Quite to the contrary, it suggests that there is racial bias at play: there appears to be a lower threshold for killing black suspects than white ones.
As an analogy, imagine you're testing a new medication to prevent breast cancer, and you let doctors just recruit people for the study that they think could benefit from it. The doctors recommend that most of their female patients join their study, because breast cancer is a common problem for women, but they only recruit a handful of men who show some additional risk factor (e.g. a particular genetic marker). At the end of the study, you find that 0.1% of people who take the medication develop breast cancer within one year. Upon further examination of the data, you realize that this number is true across all groups: i.e. 0.1% of men who take the medication develop breast cancer, and 0.1% of women who take the medication develop breast cancer. Would you say that this medication is equally dangerous for all groups? If so, you're missing the fact that these two groups didn't have equal risks for breast cancer to begin with -- the drug could actually be lowering the risk for one group, while raising it for the other.
So…ummm….HOW MUCH is Fryer “underestimating” police bias then?
Oh, you don’t know, right….cuz it’s still just a criticism in theory. And no one has yet to do a better study that attempts to or better eliminates the factors of bias.
538 is great, and Nate Silver is statistician extraordinaire….but that particular article provides no answers. They offer no way to even adjust for this “collider bias”…even in theory. So at BEST, you might say Fryer’s analysis represents the floor of police bias wrt shootings….and the real level of bias MIGHT be higher (although you have no basis for saying how much higher, and you have no basis to exclude the possibility of that adjustment factor being ZERO).
So it boils down to this: you are free to assert that police shootings have more racial bias than shown by Fryer. But the burden is on you to prove it. Anything else is just idle noise.
Right, but you can't measure what you don't know. The misconstructed clinical study is a bad analogy. A more germane example is the attempt to measure unreported crimes, which everyone in law enforcement agrees is a much larger figure than reported crimes. There is considerable evidence that the incidence of unreported crimes in minority neighborhoods is in fact much higher than in (predominantly) "white" neighborhoods. If we had some way to capture this, this would skew crime data much higher towards minority participants. But we don't have that data. Should we just guess? Should we ignore the data we do have? You can't use speculation to dismiss facts. The takeaway is to get better data.
This applies to you.
It is the classic fallacy of our time that a moron run through a university and decorated with a Ph.D. will thereby cease to be a moron.
H. L. Mencken
Thanks. It’ll take me a day or so to go over them.
Comprof, you keep repeating that as if it's true....
Here, quoted rom the study, a brief description of the FOUR SEPARATE major datasets (and many millions of observations contained therein) why they were chosen and how they were used:
"A primary obstacle to the study of police use of force has been the lack of readily available data.
Data on lower level uses of force, which happen more frequently than officer-involved shootings, are virtually non-existent. This is due, in part, to the fact that most police precincts don’t explicitly collect data on use of force, and in part, to the fact that even when the data is hidden in plain view within police narrative accounts of interactions with civilians, it is exceedingly diffcult to extract. Moreover, the task of compiling rich data on ocer-involved shootings is burdensome. Until recently, data on officer-involved shootings were extremely rare and contained little information on the details surrounding an incident. A simple count of the number of police shootings that occur does little to explore whether racial differences in the frequency of officer-involved shootings are due to police malfeasance or dfferences in suspect behavior. 2
In this paper, we estimate the extent of racial differences in police use of force using four separate datasets – two constructed for the purposes of this study.3
Unless otherwise noted, all results are conditional on an interaction. Understanding potential selection into police data sets due to bias in who police interacts with is a difficult endeavor. Section 3 attempts to help get a sense of potential bias in police interactions. Put simply, if one assumes police simply stop whomever they want for no particular reason, there seem to be large racial differences. If one assumes they are trying to prevent violent crimes, then evidence for bias is exceedingly small.
Of the four datasets, the first comes from NYC’s Stop, Question, and Frisk program (hereafter Stop and Frisk). Stop and Frisk is a practice of the New York City police department in which police stop and question a pedestrian, then can frisk them for weapons or contraband. The dataset contains roughly five million observations. And, important for the purposes of this paper, has detailed information on a wide range of uses of force – from putting hands on civilians to striking them with a baton. The second dataset is the Police-Public Contact Survey, a triennial survey of a nationally representative sample of civilians, which contains – from the civilian point of view – a description of interactions with police, which includes uses of force. Both these datasets are public-use and readily available. 4
The other two datasets were assembled for the purposes of this research. We use event summaries from all incidents in which an officer discharges his weapon at civilians – including both hits and misses – from three large cities in Texas (Austin, Dallas, Houston), six large Florida counties, and Los Angeles County, to construct a dataset in which one can investigate racial differences in officer-involved shootings. Because all individuals in these data have been involved in a police shooting, analysis of these data alone can only estimate racial differences on the intensive margin (e.g., did the officer discharge their weapon before or after the suspect attacked).
To supplement, our fourth dataset contains a random sample of police-civilian interactions from the Houston Police department from arrests codes in which lethal force is more likely to be justified: attempted capital murder of a public safety officer, aggravated assault on a public safety officer, resisting arrest, evading arrest, and interfering in arrest. Similar to the event studies above, these data come from arrest narratives that range in length from two to one hundred pages. A team of researchers was responsible for reading arrest reports and collecting almost 300 variables on each incident. Combining this with the officer-involved shooting data from Houston allows us to estimate both the extensive (e.g., whether or not a police officer decides to shoot) and intensive margins.
Further, the Houston arrests data contain almost 4,500 observations in which officers discharged charged electronic devices (e.g., tasers). This is the second most extreme use of force, and in some cases, is a substitute for lethal use of force."
Footnotes from the above excerpt:
1. Author’s calculations based on ProPublica research that analyzes FBI data between 1980 and 2012.2. Newspapers such as the Washington Post estimate that there were 965 officer-involved shootings in 2015. Websites such as fatal encounters estimate that the number of annual shootings is approximately 704 between 2000 and 2015.
3. Throughout the text, I depart from custom by using the terms “we,” “our,” and so on. Although this is sole authored work, it took a large team of talented individuals to collect the data necessary for this project. Using “I”
seems disingenuous.
4 . The NYC Stop and Frisk data has been used in Gelman et al. (2012) and Coviello and Persico (2015) to understand whether there is evidence of racial discrimination in proactive policing, and Ridgeway (2009) to develop a
statistical method to identify problem officers. The Police-Public Contact Survey has been used, mainly in criminology, to study questions such as whether police treatment of citizens impacts the broader public opinion of the police (Miller et al., 2004).
Because it is true.
1. Self-reported from 10 police departments.
2. Not peer reviewed.
Compost's data is based on his observations outside the local Popeye's. With a healthy dose of Zinn and Fanon.
He obviously skimmed the article and it proves his reading comprehension skill suck.
In the article he says, "And those experiences helped me understand what types of data to collect. We collected millions of observations on everyday use of force that wasn’t lethal. We collected thousands of observations on lethal force. And the key question is not just these arbitrary, silly snapshots that some journalists do a lot, which is “black people are 13 percent of the population, and they are 50 percent of the police shootings.” I’m sorry about that, but I don’t know what that has to do with the question. And it was in this moment in 2016 that I realized people lose their minds when they don’t like the result."
The ride along were to get a real experience and were just a small part of his paper.
Apparently, the moron couldn't quite grasp this. Maybe he has been too busy organizing and leading pro-Hamas rallies at Moron U. The school for the not so bright.
https://policescorecard.org/tx/police-department/houston
Yawn....he can say whatever he wants.
1. Self-reported/submitted data from 10 police departments.
2. Not peer reviewed.
Sorry...is what it is.
Maybe you can comprehend that. Probably not :)
Hmmm...I sense a college educated idiot. A Harvard peer review is meaningless (except for sucking up to the Harvard administration itself). The "peers" at Harvard are the same ones that thought Claudine Gay was the cat's meow.
Hmmm....I sense a general idiot.
1. Data based on self-reporting by 10 police departments.
2. Not peer reviewed....by anyone. Harvard or anyone.
Although it has been taken apart: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3336338
Lol.
Which is more than Fryer's.
666
"Growing up without a mother is hard. And I’m never going to forget the difference. I remember what it was like to go to bed hungry. I vividly remember what it was like to go to bed scared. I know what gunshots sound like at night at 8 or 9 years old. That’s hard."
The trouble with America today can be laid down to this: the Powerful have never experienced the life of the Disempowered; the Elite, who pretend to speak for the Poor, have never experienced Poor.
Bless you, Roland Fryer.
So true so true. Moreover, when the elite inadvertently encounter the poor and/or unempowered, they get bent. Generally they can't handle it.
My father's generation was damaged by machine guns and mines and it barely kept them down. The current generation is damaged by bad jokes, and people's lives are getting ruined. What the hell happened? It's a rhetorical question, I think all of us know the answer.
Keep up the good work, Roland.
Was incredibly inspired by this conversation, what an amazing man! Bari thanks for bringing Dr. Fryer to my attention, been on a deep dive of his work since this first dropped, absolutely fascinating...
Appreciate everyone involved, keep up the great work folks!
His research is based on the self-reporting data from 10 police departments.
Comprof, you keep repeating that as if it's true....
Here, quoted rom the study, a brief description of the FOUR SEPARATE major datasets (and many millions of observations contained therein) why they were chosen and how they were used:
"A primary obstacle to the study of police use of force has been the lack of readily available data.
Data on lower level uses of force, which happen more frequently than officer-involved shootings, are virtually non-existent. This is due, in part, to the fact that most police precincts don’t explicitly collect data on use of force, and in part, to the fact that even when the data is hidden in plain view within police narrative accounts of interactions with civilians, it is exceedingly diffcult to extract. Moreover, the task of compiling rich data on ocer-involved shootings is burdensome. Until recently, data on officer-involved shootings were extremely rare and contained little information on the details surrounding an incident. A simple count of the number of police shootings that occur does little to explore whether racial differences in the frequency of officer-involved shootings are due to police malfeasance or dfferences in suspect behavior. 2
In this paper, we estimate the extent of racial differences in police use of force using four separate datasets – two constructed for the purposes of this study.3
Unless otherwise noted, all results are conditional on an interaction. Understanding potential selection into police data sets due to bias in who police interacts with is a difficult endeavor. Section 3 attempts to help get a sense of potential bias in police interactions. Put simply, if one assumes police simply stop whomever they want for no particular reason, there seem to be large racial differences. If one assumes they are trying to prevent violent crimes, then evidence for bias is exceedingly small.
Of the four datasets, the first comes from NYC’s Stop, Question, and Frisk program (hereafter Stop and Frisk). Stop and Frisk is a practice of the New York City police department in which police stop and question a pedestrian, then can frisk them for weapons or contraband. The dataset contains roughly five million observations. And, important for the purposes of this paper, has detailed information on a wide range of uses of force – from putting hands on civilians to striking them with a baton. The second dataset is the Police-Public Contact Survey, a triennial survey of a nationally representative sample of civilians, which contains – from the civilian point of view – a description of interactions with police, which includes uses of force. Both these datasets are public-use and readily available. 4
The other two datasets were assembled for the purposes of this research. We use event summaries from all incidents in which an officer discharges his weapon at civilians – including both hits and misses – from three large cities in Texas (Austin, Dallas, Houston), six large Florida counties, and Los Angeles County, to construct a dataset in which one can investigate racial differences in officer-involved shootings. Because all individuals in these data have been involved in a police shooting, analysis of these data alone can only estimate racial differences on the intensive margin (e.g., did the officer discharge their weapon before or after the suspect attacked).
To supplement, our fourth dataset contains a random sample of police-civilian interactions from the Houston Police department from arrests codes in which lethal force is more likely to be justified: attempted capital murder of a public safety officer, aggravated assault on a public safety officer, resisting arrest, evading arrest, and interfering in arrest. Similar to the event studies above, these data come from arrest narratives that range in length from two to one hundred pages. A team of researchers was responsible for reading arrest reports and collecting almost 300 variables on each incident. Combining this with the officer-involved shooting data from Houston allows us to estimate both the extensive (e.g., whether or not a police officer decides to shoot) and intensive margins.
Further, the Houston arrests data contain almost 4,500 observations in which officers discharged charged electronic devices (e.g., tasers). This is the second most extreme use of force, and in some cases, is a substitute for lethal use of force."
Footnotes from the above excerpt:
1. Author’s calculations based on ProPublica research that analyzes FBI data between 1980 and 2012.2. Newspapers such as the Washington Post estimate that there were 965 officer-involved shootings in 2015. Websites such as fatal encounters estimate that the number of annual shootings is approximately 704 between 2000 and 2015.
3. Throughout the text, I depart from custom by using the terms “we,” “our,” and so on. Although this is sole authored work, it took a large team of talented individuals to collect the data necessary for this project. Using “I”
seems disingenuous.
4 . The NYC Stop and Frisk data has been used in Gelman et al. (2012) and Coviello and Persico (2015) to understand whether there is evidence of racial discrimination in proactive policing, and Ridgeway (2009) to develop a
statistical method to identify problem officers. The Police-Public Contact Survey has been used, mainly in criminology, to study questions such as whether police treatment of citizens impacts the broader public opinion of the police (Miller et al., 2004).
it wouldn’t be a party without you professor
Man, this guy is so incredibly inspiring. I am going to do something - something with kids in school. Teach reading, be a positive force. I'm getting off my ass. Thank you!
Schools need long-term substitutes. Someone who doesn’t have to bother with the admin but becomes someone the kids can trust. Pick one district, and one school, even one teacher, and show up.
Hold on a sec.. he invited people over to his house for a Thanksgiving dinner. He made jokes.. however inappropriate. Those people didn’t like the jokes and they … reported him? To the point he was suspended. 🤯
I really don’t understand how this world operates.
I don’t either. And I don’t get how publishing what some people don’t want to hear gets him having to have security. Harvard must be full of scared fascists.
I get all that. But those who reported him were invited into his f..-ing home. 🤦♀️ which is the new low. And I’ve seen low. I am a Soviet immigrant.
You have to understand. Regressive elitists don’t really like blacks. They’ll tolerate them, they definitely use them, but scratch them and they hold blacks in contempt. Once he went against the narrative, he was fair game.
It’s like Trump. Until 2016, NYC loved him. They wanted to be near him. Hell the Clinton’s cozied up to him for his money and invites. But he dared go against the dem narrative
And that’s all it takes for them to turn on you like a pack of slavering wild animals
But Natalia-- you must have witnessed some things like this? People I knew in Cuba had this kind of thing happen, as did Romanian refugees I knew. And-academia has always been a hot-bed of backstabbers!
But Kate, of course I have. Both, my past and my proximity to the US academia taught me a lot. As an Immigrant who tends to treat coworkers and friends as family I feel deeply for Roland Fryer, so I honestly felt like posting “Aaaaaaaaaaaa” when I read that part of his story.
I opted for “I don’t understand” only because words failed me.
But actually it is “AAAAAAAA…” 🙀
“They smile in your face
All the time they want to take your place
The back stabbers
Their blades are long
Clenched tight in their fist
Aiming straight at your back
And I don’t think they’ll miss” ~The O’Jays~ A Black ‘70’s Super Motown Group
From Ohio, one of the original ‘Philadelphia Sound’ bands. Never on Motown though. “For the Love of Money” may be their best.
That said, the lyrics are ever apropos.
OK, Natalia - that was FUNNY!
A small but important part of the story: His dinner guests also laughed... and then later they turned on him, showing them as hypocrites and traitors as well as cowards!
Agreed. And his repeated refrain of “I was wrong because I didn’t understand this thing called “power dynamics”” is straight out of the struggle session apology playbook.
I am a huge supporter of RF’s academic integrity, but something about his language in this part was really sad to me. Even someone as self assured and willing to stand up for what is right still ultimately cowers to the Marxist “power dynamics” narrative and endorses it via a scripted apology.
I also noted that he sees the college's role in the world to be activist as well. Unless I was misunderstanding at the end when he kept saying he was helping inner city kids because that is what the school is there for. It sounds like he really wants to be an activist not a college professor. So he is mixing the two.
Have no issue with him doing it, good for him for walking the walk, but that is NOT what Harvard is there for.
Sycophants and cowards are rewarded that's how
Wanna change it? Make "snitches get stiches" mean what it used to mean.
*puts on his tinfoil hat* The complaint came after his research...it is possible that the complaint was simply a way to punish him for wrongthink. Like a warning. And, if he were white, it may not have been a warning.
Of course I don't actually know anything. But I seem to see a lot of stories that make me believe it is at least in the realm of possibility.
Natalie, your last sentence is a big part of the problem. Keep coming back.
Michael, elaborate.
I see it's "NataliA," sorry. I was responding to, "I don't really understand how this world operates." So I meant to suggest you keep coming here to learn more, like I do.
I am filled with a new hope for our nation and race relations when I read articles such as this and books like ‘The End of Race Politics: Arguments for a Colorblind America’ by Colman Hughes. Bravo Bari…again!
There's a lot of work to be done, but many of my friends and family who are registered, dyed-in-the-wool Democrats are beginning to come around to the idea that DEI is a divisive, toxic ideology that does more harm than good.
It doesn't help that we are led by a senile, imbecilic grifter braying lies about 'white nationalists" and fomenting a grievance culture based on that.
This was an outstanding interview. Hopefully many will hear it or read it. Roland Fryer is a gift and a rare example of what an academic can be. And he is a personification of the American Dream that I stubbornly continue to believe in.
I’m so proud to be a founding member of UATX. And, I’m beyond grateful for people like Fryer; brilliant, excellent and persevering in the pursuit of truth. Isn’t it crazy and maddening how brave one needs to be to tell it?
We’ve entered a modern dark age. May you, dear Bari, UATX, Schellenberger, Fryer, and so many more lead us all to a modern enlightenment, post haste.
Many thanks!
I applaud the idea behind UATX,, but I fear for the outcome. The decision to seek accreditation does not bode well.
It took UATX two years to even get students into the classroom. Meanwhile, there are small (underfunded) colleges already at work and graduating students. Modesty forbids me to mention my own Mount Liberty College, so I'll cite Belmont Abbey College in North Carolina.
Respectfully, perhaps you are thinking of a different institution? The UATX got full accreditation a few months ago, and are currently actively screening well over 400 applicants for 100 openings for the Fall of 2024. The team at UATX has done a phenomenal job getting this University off the ground.
Respectfully, nothing you said contradicts what I said. In order to get accreditation, UATX had to decide to seek accreditation. I foresee that that decision will, in the end, turn UATX into another UTAA. Accreditation is the tool the establishment uses to enforce conformity. The tragedy is that UATX had the resources and backing to fight the gods of accreditation. Doing so could have led to an unshackling of all existing universities, and allowed the establishment of hundreds of new ones free to follow learning where it leads instead of where the accreditors want it to go.
I just think all the encomiums UATX reaps are a tad premature. Given their reported $20 million in startup funds, it should not have taken two years to open. Not blessed with that kind of money, and determined to avoid the accreditation trap, Mount Liberty took six months to start, and has already produced graduates.
Interesting perspective to ponder.
"RF: Can we change the language of “controversy.” I mean, do you mean “interesting”? I’m just showing you the data." And there you have it. Brilliant.
"I am here because I have seen so much talent in these neighborhoods, and I know they know bullshit when they see it. So I’m not going to lie to them. I wouldn’t be able to show my face in these places if I told lies to them." - This man is a leader, a rare thing.
" it’s not in my personality to go over to two people who seem to be enjoying an inappropriate conversation and say, “I don’t think that’s appropriate for the office.” And so I didn’t shut those kinds of conversations down. I thought this was a good thing. I honestly did." - And yet, all too naively human.
"So I guess I want to ask, do you believe in karma?
RF: I hear it’s a motherfucker. " - And oh so FUNNY!
Claudine Gay suspended Roland Fryer for 2 years without pay because he told and was amused by some politically incorrect jokes that (according to her) upset some folks at Harvard. However, she found nothing wrong with threats of violence against Jewish students. She also tried to justify her own plagiarism. What's wrong with that picture?
We need more people with the guts and honesty of Roland Fryer. I hired a young guy as a starting lawyer years back who is like Fryer in many ways, except he came from a stable family. He was the best hire I ever made and remains a friend and colleague to this day who made me a better lawyer and person. Having a friend who refuses to compromise with the truth and tells you what you need to hear - not what you want to hear - is worth its weight in gold.
There is a superb 25-min documentary which came to my attention a couple of years ago on Dr. Fryer via Drs. Glenn Loury and John McWhorter:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m8xWOlk3WIw
BTW, make note of the fact that Claudine Gay attempted to use her power to revoke his tenure.
Thanks for sharing this. I stumbled upon this documentary from the same interview you did. A great watch!
In a just world he would be running Harvard, not the person who was recently removed from the job.
NO! Fryer must continue teaching Harvard students to seek the truth (Veritas). And how to do research wherever it takes them. Although Harvard could clearly use an actual leader with the vision and backbone to change Harvard's direction. He or she could start by finding the rest of the Fryers, Rob Hendersons, and millions of other talented kids written off by public schools.
Great to sit down with Roland Fryer for this hour or so. I hope this reaches a broad audience.
I almost never have the patience to listen to these, let alone watch them. I watched this one from end to end on you tube. This guy is amazing. If we put him in charge of inner city education, the world would be changed. Thank you, Bari.
I note that Maria Rey liked my post. Any relation to the Maria Rey who co-authored some of the more recent Curious George books? I loved reading them to my kids.