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STUDY: 'NO RACIAL DIFFERENCES' IN COP SHOOTINGS

'Black Lives Matter should seek solutions within their own communities'

Bob Unruh

A new preliminary study that looked at police shootings in several major cities over 15 years has found that there are “no racial differences” when officers have to draw a weapon and fire at an individual, suggesting that movements such as Black Lives Matter should go another direction from their current demands that cops change their behavior.

“The importance of our results for racial inequality in America is unclear,” the study found. “It is plausible that racial differences in lower level uses of force are simply a distraction and movements such as Black Lives Matter should seek solutions within their own communities rather than changing the behavior of police and other external forces.”

The study appeared on the website for the National Bureau of Economic Research and was assembled by Roland G. Fryer, Jr., of Harvard. However, it notes that it is a working paper that has not had peer review.

The copyrighted document drew the attention of the New York Times, which said for other scenarios, blacks are, indeed subjected to higher levels of use of force.

For example, police officers use their hands 2,165 times for every 10,000 stops in New York when the interaction is with blacks, but only 1,845 times with whites.

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For those totals, 10,000 stops, officers draw their weapons 155 times with blacks, 129 times with whites, push blacks to the ground 136 times and whites 114. They pointed their weapon 54 times with blacks and 43 times with whites.

But the gap for shooting at suspects was nonexistent.

“It is the most surprising result of my career,” the author, a professor at Harvard, told the Times.

It flies in the face of the assumptions being used to support protests of police shootings all across America, such as the protests that turned violent in Minnesota over the weekend, as well as those protests in Louisiana, and other points.

Last week, in both Louisiana and Minnesota, police officers shot and killed black men. Both were armed, including one who was legally allowed to be armed. The deaths sparked huge protests that even included violence.

“The study did not say whether the most egregious examples – the kind of killings at the heart of the nation’s debate on police shootings – are free of racial bias. Instead, it examined a much larger pool of shootings, including nonfatal ones. It focused on what happens when police encounters occur, not how often they happen,” the report said.

“Police State USA: How Orwell’s Nightmare Is Becoming Our Reality” chronicles how America has arrived at the point of being a de facto police state, and what led to an out-of-control government that increasingly ignores the Constitution. Order today!

The working paper used reports from police officers and police departments to assemble the information.

“We argue that the patterns in the data are consistent with a model in which polices officers are utility maximizers, a fraction of which have a preference for discrimination, who incur relatively high expected costs of officer-involved shootings,” Fryer wrote.

He explained, “Using data on NYC’s Stop and Frisk program, we demonstrate that on non-lethal uses of force – putting hands on civilians (which includes slapping or grabbing) or pushing individuals into a wall or onto the ground, there are large racial differences. … Blacks and Hispanics are more than 50 percent more likely to have an interaction with police which involves any use of force.”

But he noted, “In stark contrast to non-lethal uses of force, we find no racial differences in officer-involved shootings on either the extensive or intensive margins.”

A report from Media Research Center pointed out that the study did, in fact, reveal a slight racial difference.

But far from what many would expect.

The report said, “Using data from Houston, Texas – where we have both officer-involved shootings and a randomly chosen set of potential interactions with police where lethal force may have been justified – we find, in the raw data, that blacks are 23.8 percent less likely to be shot at by police relative to whites. Hispanics are 8.5 percent less likely.”

“Police State USA: How Orwell’s Nightmare Is Becoming Our Reality” chronicles how America has arrived at the point of being a de facto police state, and what led to an out-of-control government that increasingly ignores the Constitution. Order today!

Read more at http://www.wnd.com/2016/07/study-no-racial-differences-in-cop-shootings/#ocEqgT3UEahbqoyR.99