Study shows, "No racial bias in police shootings".

[gollygee]

73. Vox: Here's why I'm skeptical of Roland Fryer's new, much-hyped study on police shootings

I'll copy one of the problems the article finds with this study below, but read the whole thing.

http://www.vox.com/2016/7/11/12149468/racism-police-shootings-data

It focused on what happens when police encounters occur, not how often they happen. Racial differences in how often police-civilian interactions occur reflect greater structural problems in society.

In other words, Fryer and company found that there weren’t big racial disparities in how often black and white suspects who’d already been stopped by police were killed. But they deliberately avoided the question of whether black citizens are more likely to be stopped to begin with (they are) and whether they’re more likely to be stopped without cause (yup).

Avoiding those issues makes sense for the question Fryer was trying to answer. He wanted to know what happens between the moment a police officer stops someone and the moment he pulls the trigger — and how those sequences of events vary by race.

But when people talk about racial disparities in police use of force, they’re usually not asking, Is a black American stopped by police treated the same as a white American in the same circumstances? They’re making a broader critique of the “greater structural problems” in society in general and the criminal justice system in particular. They’re saying that black Americans are more likely to get stopped by police, which makes them more likely to get killed.