13+ Studies Indicating No Police Racial Bias + Counterpoint Studies

LINK TO THIS PAGE: https://tinyurl.com/13-studies-no-racial-bias-cops

RESOURCES ON THE VIOLENT EFFECTS OF CHARGING POLICE AS RACIST: https://tinyurl.com/Ferguson-Effect-Real | KEY URL ON HOW SYSTEM IS NOT SYSTEMICALLY RACIST: https://tinyurl.com/4-steps-crime-just-bias | SHORT VERSION: https://tinyurl.com/The-Real-Crime-Stat-Myths | 10+ FERGUSON EFFECT PAPERS: https://tinyurl.com/10-Plus-Ferguson-Effect-Papers

These 2 charts clearly show what 13 papers below also prove: No systemic racism in police violence.

https://tinyurl.com/9-studies-no-racist-police
https://tinyurl.com/10-studies-racial-bias-police

https://tinyurl.com/13-studies-no-racial-bias-cops

Also - Dataset countering BLM and #SayHerName myths I put together on Fatal Force using 3 years of Washington Post data: https://tinyurl.com/http-blm-sayhername-myths

On this doc:

10 13 studies with detailed excerpts indicating no racial bias in police use of lethal force or negligible force differences
10 13 studies with no excerpts (copy & paste)
Bonus 2018 study: Use of force is rare, used in less than 1 in 1100 calls for service
Counterpoint studies (easily debunked, but available - click here)
How “implicit bias training” doesn’t really work

Here are 10 studies (updated in 2019 from 7, then 9, with a 10th added in 2020) published since 2016 that prove that overall police shooting outcomes today aren’t racially biased against African Americans. Some say, in fact, police shootings are biased against white Americans. Others say black-white use of force disparities are either non-existent or negligible. Listed in chronological order starting at the most recently published.

UPDATE: As of Sept 2020 I’ve listed 12 TOTAL sources, including one from 1977! And in 2021 I added a 13th study!

BONUS: Americans exaggerate the death count of killings of blacks by police significantly. Most pm the left believe 100 times more unarmed blacks are killed by cops than reality. Some believe 10,000 unarmed blacks are killed, 1,000 times more than reality.

Skeptic Magazine polling indicates HALF the population on the political left is off by a multiplier of almost 100 as to how many unarmed black men are killed by police every year? i.e. Saying 1,000 killed unarmed instead of around 10.

https://www.skeptic.com/research-center/reports/Research-Report-CUPES-007.pdf

But also data doesn’t change minds, Prof Justin Nix shows. He looks at overall people shot (his linked paper is not working now, but data shown) and his data is slightly different than above.

https://twitter.com/jnixy/status/1590685906251698179?s=46&t=MZCOiwfvbVfj_PknJuh8Hg

But please keep reading anyways below:

10 STUDIES

(13, actually. Feel free to share or copy & paste; longer excerpts on page 8 of this doc; shortest list at end of doc.)

Here are 10 studies indicating blacks are NOT likely to be injured or shot more often than whites or other racial groups by police:

http://www.nber.org/papers/w22399 (Roland Fryer at Harvard: “An Empirical Analysis of Racial Differences in Police Use of Force”)
See also Fryer’s 2018 follow-up article to the same study titled “Reconciling Results on Racial Differences in Police Shootings” where he reiterates that “blacks are 27.4% less likely to be shot at by police relative to non-black, non-Hispanics” https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/fryer/files/fryer_police_aer.pdf
Published Apr 2019 in the Journal of Political Economy (JPE): https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/701423

NEW June 2018:

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/puar.12956 (“Do White Law Enforcement Officers Target Minority Suspects?”)
EXCERPT: “Less than 1 percent of the victims of police killing in our data were unarmed.” And: “Exposure to police given crime rate differences likely accounts for the higher per capita rate of fatal police shootings for Blacks, at least when analyzing all shootings.”

NEW June 2018:

http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1948550618775108 (“Is There Evidence of Racial Disparity in Police Use of Deadly Force? Analyses of Officer-Involved Fatal Shootings in 2015–2016”) - Full paper (says 2019 for print): https://docs.wixstatic.com/ugd/b44013_a5fc6189326849fab031bc3fedae7c3d.pdf
ALSO: Author’s earlier analysis: https://www.cesariolab.com/race-bias-in-shooting
RELATED: “Supplemental Material #2: Why Biased Policing Does Not Account for the Results” https://docs.wixstatic.com/ugd/b44013_23920f7547cc4b019b3aa915cf7e18de.pdf

NEW July 2019 study:

https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2019/07/16/1903856116 (“Officer characteristics and racial disparities in fatal officer-involved shootings”)
EXCERPT: “We find no evidence of anti-Black or anti-Hispanic disparities across shootings.” And: “As the proportion of White officers in a fatal officer-involved shooting increased, a person fatally shot was not more likely to be of a racial minority.”

NOTE: Authors pulled the article in 2020 after George Floyd protests and pushback by other academics, including at Congressional hearings by Phillip Atiba Goff. There are multiple signs of academia buckling to political pressure on this issue. See 3rd bullet point I wrote here: https://link.medium.com/dUWm1hvXLdb

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/1745-9133.12269 (“A Bird’s Eye View of Civilians Killed by Police in 2015” Criminology and Public Policy)

http://injuryprevention.bmj.com/content/early/2016/07/27/injuryprev-2016-042023 (Injury and Prevention: “Perils of police action: a cautionary tale from US data sets”)

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2870189 (College of William and Mary Department of Economics and the Crime Prevention Research Center: “Do White Police Officers Unfairly Target Black Suspects?”)
EXCERPT: “When either the violent crime rate or the demographics of a city are accounted for, we find that white police officers are not significantly more likely to kill a black suspect … We find no evidence that body cameras affect either the number of police killings or the racial composition of those killings.”

#8
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1745-9133.12187/abstract (Washington State‪ University‬ shooting study showing police shoot unarmed whites more in training than unarmed blacks DESPITE showing greater implicit bias against blacks: “The Reverse Racism Effect”)

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/1745-9133.12174 (“Race, Crime, and the Micro‐Ecology of Deadly Force.”) says, “The results indicate that neither the racial composition of neighborhoods nor their level of economic disadvantage directly increase the frequency of police shootings.” Study co-author David Klinger, PhD, a Professor of Criminology & Criminal Justice at the University of Missouri–St. Louis said on CNN with host Anderson Cooper rebutting sociologist Michael Eric Dyson, “There’s absolutely no empirical evidence from the field that indicates that police are quicker on the trigger when it’s a black suspect versus a white suspect.”

#10
10th study from University of Chicago: https://faculty.chicagobooth.edu/bernd.wittenbrink/research/pdf/cpjwsk07.pdf
NOTE: Taken down after 2020 George Floyd protests from the University of Chicago. But it’s still here in the archives, snapshot from 2020:
https://web.archive.org/web/20200603014337/https://faculty.chicagobooth.edu/bernd.wittenbrink/research/pdf/cpjwsk07.pdf

https://www.phillypolice.com/assets/directives/cops-w0753-pub.pdf

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-myth-of-systemic-police-racism-11591119883?fbclid=IwAR0QXw5Rq0WVD6ga9yjHn2dLDZiK9mgrRQdI6tyxjV7A5Lym7WkUWV26VI8

“A 2015 Justice Department analysis of the Philadelphia Police Department found that white police officers were less likely than black or Hispanic officers to shoot unarmed black suspects.”

Mac Donald also points out that there’s 375 million interactions between law enforcement and the public, showing that unjustified shootings are statistically a non-event.

#12 - Study from 1977! Researchers were indicating even then that white suspects were more likely to be shot by police. Mentioned in Quillette Sept 2020.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1559-1816.1977.tb02415.x

“Abstract: Shooting incidents involving patrol officers are examined for the effect of suspect race and degree of hazard in the number of shots fired and hits made on suspects. Additional tests examine frequencies of shooting incidents among Blacks and Whites with respect to city population and various measures of police‐citizen contact. Finally, fatalities are examined with respect to involvement in shooting and arrest rates. The results suggest an effect for degree of hazard; however, there was no evidence to suggest police bias against Blacks”.

Found here: “An early study provides some evidence of a racial disparity, but not in the expected direction—it found that police fire more bullets at white than black suspects.” https://quillette.com/2020/09/17/black-lives-matter-and-the-mechanics-of-conformity/?fbclid=IwAR2cbtwLGSyN_V7-7FaVm1OIK1r3sFMLP7mj6jFLAt-1-jm49BAiEN_SSI4#_edn1

BONUS 13th

Found here:
https://www.city-journal.org/do-data-on-police-shootings-show-racial-bias

Given what we know about the violent circumstances leading to fatal confrontations …with police, it makes sense that the racial/ethnic identities of those killed would bear a remarkable similarity to the identities of those involved in violent crime.

Sophisticated criminological studies deploying multiple regression analysis support this conclusion, though not unanimously. Still, at least a half-dozen analyses have found that “situational variables,” such as gun possession by the deceased or injury to a police officer, were significantly associated with an officer’s decision to shoot at citizens. More important, several studies, including a recent one of police shootings in Dallas, found that white police officers do not disproportionally target blacks or Hispanics.

No doubt we need a fuller accounting, as the official tallies are clearly incomplete. But before we accept racial bias as an explanation, we need to take account of the link between the behavior of the people killed and the police use of lethal force.

#13th study:
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0093854821997529

“The findings of this study indicate that police officers, White officers in particular, do not disproportionately target Black or Hispanic citizens.”

AND:

Using data from police agencies in Texas, Jennings et al. (2019) reported that a White citizen is significantly more likely to die during an OIS event. Thirty years of data from Denver found that the proportion of people killed during an OIS was significantly higher for White citizens compared with Black citizens (Durán & Loza, 2017). Jetelina and her colleagues (2020) also used 10 years of OIS shooting incidents from the Dallas OIS data and reported no significant racial patterns in the shooting cases.

In 2018, Fryer argued that if research designs are going to uncover why officers might fire their weapons, scholars must also know when an officer “would have been legally justified in using lethal force, but chose not to” (p. 3). To address this problem, Fryer (2019) utilized OIS and Taser deployment records from the Houston Police Department to explore any racial differences in the decision to use lethal or nonlethal force. He reported that Black citizens were about 30% less likely to be shot. He also found no racial differences in the use of Tasers. Other researchers used OIS data and “aimed but did not shoot” data from the Dallas Police Department. These studies (Wheeler et al., 2018; Worrall et al., 2018) found that Black citizens were no more likely, and in some cases less likely, to be shot at than White citizens.

Using “did not shoot” control cases is not only AND:

It is possible that when an officer draws their weapon, but does not shoot, that behavior itself is bias. Worrall et al. (2020) explored this using data from the Dallas Police. They reported that when analyzing cases in which an arrest was made, or the citizen was aggressive—cases where a gun might likely be drawn—Black citizens “were no more or less likely to have weapons drawn against them” (p. 15).

More Studies 2024

Justin Nix shows how more police ambushed and attacked in 2020

https://digitalcommons.unomaha.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1194&context=criminaljusticefacpub&fbclid=IwZnRzaAMlpIpleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHoAj_FVYtGk9Xi1qotRO0yeLuHj107GgRt1gnyXFP6EgZAoxslLVnJ2rDmKb_aem_c0XPhuXmM-09m0Sxf2WIZA

Joseph Cesario comes back after pulling one of his papers

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0191886913000470

This chapter provides a critical overview of experimental studies of racial bias in police shootings, with a focus on methodological and statistical quality. The most informative studies include police officers making decisions in shooting simulators; these are few in number but do not provide strong evidence of anti-Black bias. The least informative studies include undergraduates making decisions with computer tasks; these are plentiful and provide some evidence of anti-Black bias in response times. One consistent finding using shooting simulators is the importance of suspect behavior and situational information, features which are absent in computer tasks. Although process analyses have been attempted, progress has been inhibited by a narrow conceptualization of the decision to shoot. Strengths and weaknesses of all experimental approaches are discussed, with the overarching theme that researchers have missed opportunities to generate a strong and useful body of knowledge on this important topic.

Two white men who died exactly like George Floyd but didn’t cause mass protest, and would otherwise show “Some of these deaths happen to white people, too.”

Tony Timpa. Police exonerated.

From Wikipedia, showing how BBC didn’t report this 2016 killing until 2021

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Tony_Timpa

“Reactions

Timpa's death came to prominence in 2020 after the murder of George Floyd, who was killed in a similar way.[12] When Derek Chauvin was convicted of murdering Floyd, a number of commentators drew comparisons between Floyd and Timpa. Ryan Mills, writing in the National Review, noted that, "There was no national uproar after Timpa's death. No national cries for justice and reform. The city of Dallas paid no settlement to Timpa's family."[9] For example, the very first reference to Tony Timpa ever made on the BBC's website was on the sixth of June 2021, after the outcome of the Derek Chauvin trial and long after Tony Timpa's death.”

Links to this BBC source:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-57081007

“Officers arrived to find him agitated and handcuffed by security guards. Body camera footage - released after a three-year legal fight - shows that the officers pinned him face down on the ground for more than 13 minutes.

Timpa pleaded with the officers - Kevin Mansell, Danny Vasquez and Dustin Dillard - to let him go, saying at one point "you're going to kill me". The video shows police mocking Timpa even after he stops moving or making any noise.

Paramedics arrived but were unable to revive him.”

Video shows officers on a white man's back for several minutes before he died in the Marshall County Jail. Jailers exonerated.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b1dj518KXSY&feature=share

A CUT-AND-DRY NUMERICAL BREAKDOWN OF HOW LACK OF ANTI-BLACK RACIAL BIAS CAN BE UNDERSTOOD (AND DOESN’T REQUIRE A PhD TO UNDERSTAND)

Fact 1: 40 out of 100 people lethally attacking or killing cops are black.

Fact 2: 25 out of 100 people killed by cops are black.

Opinion/Conclusion: People who believe systemic racial bias in police use of force are after reading this are being willfully ignorant, ideological, or just plain dumb.

SOURCES:

37% of cops are killed by black suspects (2010-2019, 199 out of 537 were black; “white” includes Hispanic).
https://ucr.fbi.gov/leoka/2019/tables/table-42.xls

39% of cops assaulted and injured by knife or firearm were by black offenders (2012-2016).
https://ucr.fbi.gov/leoka/2016/officers-assaulted/tables/table-120.xls

In 2015, The Washington Post actually reported 43% of police killers are black (from an earlier period). This is a rate 5 times higher than whites per capita.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2015/01/09/are-black-or-white-offenders-more-likely-to-kill-police/

25% killed by police are black; 50% white; 20% hispanic; 5% other (approx)

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/investigations/police-shootings-database/

From 2007-2016 an average of 2,150 firearm assaults on police per year (10% injury rate) https://ucr.fbi.gov/leoka/2016/officers-assaulted/tables/table-75.xls

DETAILED LIST OF 10 STUDIES INDICATING NO SYSTEMIC RACISM IN POLICING & LETHAL USE OF FORCE:

New July 2019 study titled “Officer characteristics and racial disparities in fatal officer-involved shootings” in collaboration with Joseph Cesario of “Cesario’s Lab” again shows it’s a myth that white police officers are more likely to shoot black suspects, or that there’s anti-black or anti-Hispanic disparities across shootings (lead author David J. Johnson with Trevor Tress, Nicole Burkel, Carley Taylor, and Joseph Cesario). This is the 9th study in the past 3 years to show this. [At least, as Cesario and Johnson are involved in 4 total published studies 2017-2019]

“Significance: There is widespread concern about racial disparities in fatal officer-involved shootings and that these disparities reflect discrimination by White officers. Existing databases of fatal shootings lack information about officers, and past analytic approaches have made it difficult to assess the contributions of factors like crime. We create a comprehensive database of officers involved in fatal shootings during 2015 and predict victim race from civilian, officer, and county characteristics. We find no evidence of anti-Black or anti-Hispanic disparities across shootings, and White officers are not more likely to shoot minority civilians than non-White officers. Instead, race-specific crime strongly predicts civilian race. This suggests that increasing diversity among officers by itself is unlikely to reduce racial disparity in police shootings.” (NOTE: The line “White officers are not more likely to shoot minority civilians than non-White officers” has been updated to say: ‘As the proportion of White officers in a fatal officer-involved shooting increased, a person fatally shot was not more likely to be of a racial minority.’ A bit of splitting hairs among academics, some may say.)

From the write-up on the study in The Conversation:

Policy implications

Our results have important implications for reducing racial disparities in fatal officer-involved shootings, by suggesting what will and what will not be an effective solution.

Since officer race did not relate to racial disparities in civilians fatally shot by the police, we believe that policies that promote hiring more diverse officers are unlikely to reduce racial disparities in fatal shootings.

However, they may still have merit by increasing public trust in law enforcement.

The best predictor of the race of a person fatally shot was the amount of violent crime committed by members of that racial group. This suggests that reducing fatal shootings of racial minorities by police will require policymakers, civic leaders and ordinary citizens to address factors that lead to racial differences in violent crime, such as racial disparities in wealth, employment, education and family structure.

SOURCE: https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2019/07/16/1903856116

RELATED STORY: https://theconversation.com/our-database-of-police-officers-who-shoot-citizens-reveals-whos-most-likely-to-shoot-119623
AUTHORS DEFENSE TO CRITICS: https://psyarxiv.com/dmhpu
REBUTTAL BY HEATHER MAC DONALD TO CONTROVERSY (The gist: Critics like Phillip Atiba Goff are lying and/or being very misleading; showing truly how any argument that says “no racial bias” will be fought tooth and nail in the academy, even to the point of lying in front of Congress because the authors did NOT refute their won findings):
https://www.city-journal.org/police-shootings-racial-bias

RETRACTION UPDATE: Note the retraction, which obviously shows the post-Floyd political moment was too “heated” for the authors to keep the study alive. So it was killed.

https://www.pnas.org/content/117/30/18130
See response on 3rd bullet in this article:
https://agent-orange-chicago.medium.com/kamala-harris-bidens-vp-pick-your-next-candidate-to-libel-police-criminal-justice-1c797d705d05

The left-leaning Mother Jones magazine directly quotes a June 2018 study (“Do White Law Enforcement Officers Target Minority Suspects?” authored by Charles E. Menifield, Geiguen Shin, and Logan Strother) when rebutting Senate candidate Beto O’Roarke trying to unseat Ted Cruz in Aug 2018 (O’Roarke said, “Black men, unarmed, black teenagers, unarmed, and black children, unarmed, are being killed at a frightening level right now, including by members of law enforcement without accountability and without justice.”):

“Another component of the national debate is that police are wantonly killing unarmed suspects, especially if they are black. We find no support for this claim in our data….Less than 1 percent of the victims of police killing in our data were unarmed. In other words, police killings of unarmed suspects—especially unarmed black men—garner massive media coverage (and not without reason), but they are far less common than the prevailing narrative suggests. … Next, we turn to the important question of whether there are racial disparities in officer killings of unarmed or less threatening suspects. However, as noted earlier, the extremely low number of killings of unarmed suspects undercuts this claim from the start. Indeed, there are so few killings of unarmed suspects that those killings (n = 4) cannot be statistically scrutinized.”

SOURCE: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/puar.12956
RELATED ARTICLE: https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2018/08/unarmed-black-children-are-not-being-gunned-down-by-cops/

A 2018 study titled “Is There Evidence of Racial Disparity in Police Use of Deadly Force? Analyses of Officer-Involved Fatal Shootings in 2015–2016” (by Joseph Cesario, David Johnson, and William Terrill) concluded was the following: “We find little evidence within these data for systematic anti-Black disparity in fatal police deadly force decisions.” And also: "Conclusion: At the national level, we find little evidence within these data for systematic anti-Black disparity in fatal police deadly force decisions. We do not discount the role race may play in individual police shootings; yet to draw on bias as the sole reason for population-level disparities is unfounded when considering the benchmarks presented here. We hope this research demonstrates the importance of unpacking the underlying assumptions inherent to using benchmarks to test for outcome disparities."

Additionally, the authors analyzed unarmed and not aggressing person shot by police, and concluded no proven racial bias: “Overall, the data provide little evidence of systematic anti-Black disparity in officers’ decisions to shoot unarmed, nonaggressing citizens. Officers either showed no meaningful disparity in either direction or, if anything, an overall pattern of anti-White disparity.” [Total in 2016: 23 black nonaggressing and 34 white nonaggressing out of around 1,000 people killed by police annually]

SOURCE: http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1948550618775108
FULL PAPER: https://docs.wixstatic.com/ugd/b44013_a5fc6189326849fab031bc3fedae7c3d.pdf
ALSO: Author’s earlier analysis: https://www.cesariolab.com/race-bias-in-shooting
RELATED: “Supplemental Material #2: Why Biased Policing Does Not Account for the Results” which says, “Blacks are arrested at about their reported rate of crime, or the odds benchmarked on arrests show greater anti-White bias, suggesting that Blacks are under-arrested given their rate of reported crimes. In any case, the pattern of data is inconsistent with the claim that police over-arrest Blacks and that this undermines our findings of no anti-Black bias in the odds of being fatally shot.”
https://docs.wixstatic.com/ugd/b44013_23920f7547cc4b019b3aa915cf7e18de.pdf

3RD & 4TH PAPER by CESARIO & JOHNSON: https://www.cesariolab.com/publications
Cesario, J., & Johnson, D.J. (2018). Power Poseur: Bodily Expansiveness Does Not Matter in Dyadic Interactions. SPPS.

[.pdf of article]

Pleskac, T.J., Cesario, J., & Johnson, D.J. (2018). How Race Affects Evidence Accumulation During the Decision to Shoot. Psych. Bull. & Rev.

[.pdf of article] [.pdf of Supplemental Material]

A working paper by a renowned Harvard economist Roland Fryer analyzed more than 1300 police shootings and found police are around less likely to shoot blacks than whites under similar circumstances. Exactly 23.8% less likely using Houston data, which the recipient of the MacArthur “Genius Grant” Fellowship and his team thoroughly categorized. Excerpt: “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.”

SOURCE: http://www.nber.org/papers/w22399

Fryer’s 2018 follow-up to the same study: "I find, after controlling for suspect demographics, officer demographics, encounter characteristics, suspect weapon and year fixed effects, that blacks are 27.4 percent less likely to be shot at by police relative to non-black, non-Hispanics."

SOURCE: https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/fryer/files/fryer_police_aer.pdf

Published after three years as a Working Paper (finally) in Apr 2019 in the Journal of Political Economy (JPE): https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/701423

A 2017 study called “A Bird’s Eye View of Civilians Killed by Police in 2015” by Justin Nix, et al, that actually dealt with The Washington Post data indicates there could be some implicit bias in the handful of unarmed shootings nationwide, or when the offender is not attacking. But they make larger point that these incidents are rare, and unarmed individuals are 10% of the total killed. And they advise NOT to benchmark to the population, which is what nearly every media outlet and activist organization does when arguing their point. "Mainstream media and advocacy groups, most notably Black Lives Matter and Campaign Zero, have alleged that police disproportionately use force and deadly force against minorities. The Post data showed that police killed almost twice as many Whites as Blacks; nevertheless, this is expected as Whites far outnumber Blacks in the U.S. population. In an effort to standardize these numbers, The Guardian divides the number of White and Black civilians killed by their respective population count. Presenting the number in this manner suggests that Blacks were killed at more than twice the rate of Whites in 2015 (7.2 per million to 2.9 per million, respectively). Similarly, The Washington Post recently stated, “When adjusted by population, [unarmed Black men] were seven times as likely as unarmed White men to die from police gunﬁre” (Lowery, 2016). We caution against using population as a benchmark because it does not account for each groups’ representation in a variety of more relevant measures, including police–civilian interactions and crime."

SOURCE: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/1745-9133.12269

A study published in the journal Injury Prevention that Time reported about in July 2016 (“Perils of police action: a cautionary tale from US data sets”) clearly shows no racial disparity in outcomes of injury or death by police per capita:

"Results: US police killed or injured an estimated 55 400 people in 2012 (95% CI 47 050 to 63 740 for cases coded as police involved). Blacks, Native Americans and Hispanics had higher stop/arrest rates per 10 000 population than white non-Hispanics and Asians. On average, an estimated 1 in 291 stops/arrests resulted in hospital-treated injury or death of a suspect or bystander. Ratios of admitted and fatal injury due to legal police intervention per 10 000 stops/arrests did not differ significantly between racial/ethnic groups. Ratios rose with age, and were higher for men than women."

SOURCE: http://injuryprevention.bmj.com/content/early/2016/07/27/injuryprev-2016-042023

Research at Washington State University focused on how police reaction times in shootings may be disadvantageous to white people even if the officer have implicit bias against black people (“The Reverse Racism Effect”), and was reported about by The Washington Post. Excerpt: “Policy Implications: This article reports the results of our most recent experiment, which tested 80 police patrol officers by applying this leading edge method. We found that, despite clear evidence of implicit bias against Black suspects, officers were slower to shoot armed Black suspects than armed White suspects, and they were less likely to shoot unarmed Black suspects than unarmed White suspects. These findings challenge the assumption that implicit racial bias affects police behavior in deadly encounters with Black suspects.”

SOURCE: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1745-9133.12187/abstract

A November 2016 hard data-driven study by the College of William and Mary Department of Economics and the Crime Prevention Research Center — largely ignored by the media — concluded there is no racial bias in police shootings. They also concluded body cameras don’t reduce killings. “When either the violent crime rate or the demographics of a city are accounted for, we find that white police officers are not significantly more likely to kill a black suspect … Our estimates examining the killings of white and Hispanic suspects found no differences with respect to the races of police officers. If the police are engaged in discrimination, such discriminatory behavior should also be more difficult when body or other cameras are recording their actions. We find no evidence that body cameras affect either the number of police killings or the racial composition of those killings.”

SOURCE: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2870189

Here’s an 8th study that I just added in early 2019 that I strangely missed, as I refer often to David Klinger and Richard Rosenfeld in my writing. (See my analysis of Roland Fryer’s work for Klinger, and Rosenfeld I mention many times in my 30,000+ word manifesto on how police aren’t really racially biased. )

David Klinger, PhD, a Professor of Criminology & Criminal Justice at University of Missouri–St. Louis, is a former police officer who’s actually shot and killed a man while in uniform. He now does work on how often police shoot citizens and under which circumstances. He put sociology professor Michael Eric Dyson in his place with his police-are-racist broken record pronouncements by countering with facts and reason when he told him on CNN with host Anderson Cooper rebutting sociologist Michael Eric Dyson, “There’s absolutely no empirical evidence from the field that indicates that police are quicker on the trigger when it’s a black suspect versus a white suspect.” Klinger also said on a PBS News Hour interview in June 2017:

“And I would argue that the race issue is one that gets overplayed. And what I mean by that is this. If we look at shootings that could have been prevented, and it goes back the training and tactics, we can pretty much eliminate, in my opinion, the race piece. So, for example, here in Saint Louis, myself and Rick Rosenfeld and two other colleagues were able to look at the spatial patterns of officer-involved shootings in the city of Saint Louis. And at first, it clearly looks as if race plays a role, but once you control for the levels of crime across neighborhoods, that drops out. And so that’s one example of why I’m not going to get on to the issue of race being the key. I really think it has to deal with the tactical performance of police officers across the board dealing with whites, blacks, Hispanics, males, females, where they don’t use sound tactics that then lead to the shootings that we scratch our heads over.”

That research paper that Klinger referred to working with criminologist Richard “Rick” Rosenfeld as a co-author is titled, “Race, Crime, and the Micro‐Ecology of Deadly Force.”

Research Summary: “Limitations in data and research on the use of firearms by police officers in the United States preclude sound understanding of the determinants of deadly force in police work. The current study addresses these limitations with detailed case attributes and a microspatial analysis of police shootings in St. Louis, MO, between 2003 and 2012. The results indicate that neither the racial composition of neighborhoods nor their level of economic disadvantage directly increase the frequency of police shootings, whereas levels of violent crime do—but only to a point. Police shootings are less frequent in areas with the highest levels of criminal violence than in those with midlevels of violence. We offer a provisional interpretation of these results and call for replications in other settings.”

SOURCE: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/1745-9133.12174

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SVH1EqVupTA&feature=youtu.be
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/may/13/ferguson-effect-real-researcher-richard-rosenfield-second-thoughts

From Heather Mac Donald, who while mentioning the PNAS paper from 2019 by Cesario/Johnson, also mentions Fryer and one 2007 paper that I had not run across.
https://www.city-journal.org/police-shootings-racial-bias
“I said that the PNAS study was hardly an outlier; previous analyses had reached the same no-bias conclusion, including a 2017 paper by Harvard economist Roland Fryer that found no evidence of racial discrimination in shootings; a lab study of police shoot-don’t-shoot decisions in the state of Washington that found that officers in a realistic video simulator were three times less likely to shoot unarmed black suspects than unarmed white suspects; and shoot-don’t-shoot experiments by the University of Chicago’s Josh Correll that also found that police don’t shoot unarmed black civilians at any higher rate than unarmed white civilians. (Correll is now at the University of Colorado, Boulder.)”

The last link is a 2007 paper by University of Chicago’s Josh Correll is the 10th paper listed here:

“In terms of bias, the SDT results suggest that officers may show less bias than civilians in their final decisions. Among the community sample, these data revealed a clear tendency to set a lower (i.e., more lenient or “trigger-happy”) criterion for Black, rather than White, targets. But this bias was weaker, or even nonexistent, for the officers. The reduction in bias seemed to reflect the fact that, compared with the community members, officers set a higher, more stringent threshold for the decision to shoot Black targets. Placement of the criterion for White targets varied minimally across the three samples.

The response-time data show clear evidence of racial bias for all samples in this study, the 237 police officers and the community members alike. Like college students in previous studies, these individuals seemed to have greater difficulty (indexed by longer latencies) responding to stereotype-incongruent targets (unarmed Black targets and armed White targets), rather than to stereotypecongruent targets. The magnitude of this bias did not differ across the three samples. It is interesting to note that this equivalence emerged in spite of the fact that the civilian sample contained many more ethnic minority members than did the predominantly White police samples. Although any evidence of racial bias among police may be cause for concern, there is certainly nothing in the present data to suggest that officers show greater bias than the people who live in the communities they serve.”

SOURCE: P. 10: https://faculty.chicagobooth.edu/bernd.wittenbrink/research/pdf/cpjwsk07.pdf

BONUS 2018 STUDY: FORCE USED IN LESS THAN 1 IN 1100 CALLS FOR SERVICE AND 1 IN 120 CRIMINAL ARRESTS (OR: 1 IN 1167 CALLS FOR SERVICE + 1 IN 128 CRIMINAL ARRESTS, WHICH STUDY SHOWS)

STUDY: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29283961

Abstract

METHODS:

A prospective multicenter observational study of all UOF incidents was conducted via mandatory UOF investigations at three mid-sized police agencies over a two year period. Expert physicians reviewed police and medical records to determine injury severity using a priori injury severity stratification criteria.

RESULTS:

There were 893 UOF incidents, representing a UOF rate of 0.086% of 1,041,737 calls for service (1 in 1167) and 0.78% of 114,064 criminal arrests (1 in 128).

CONCLUSIONS: Police UOF [Use of Force] is rare. When force is used officers most commonly rely on unarmed physical force and CEWs [Conducted Energy Weapon]. Significant injuries are rare. Transport for medical evaluation is a poor surrogate for significant injury due to UOF.

The suspects were primarily male (89 percent) with a mean age of 31. No data on race or ethnicity was available to the researchers.

“A remarkable finding in the study is how infrequently police use force at all – less than 1 in 1100 calls for service and less than 1 in 120 criminal arrests is surprisingly low, and contrary to many perceptions that police commonly use violence in their interactions with the public,” Bozeman said.

The research was funded by National Institute of Justice award numbers 2009-MU-BX-K248 and 2009-SQ-B9-K0126.

Co-authors are Jason P. Stopyra, M.D., of Wake Forest Baptist; David A. Klinger, Ph.D., of the University of Missouri-St. Louis; Brian P. Martin, M.D., and Derrel D. Graham, M.D., of Louisiana State University Shreveport; James C. Johnson III, M.P.A.S., of High Point University; Katherine Mahoney-Tesoriero, M.D., of St. Luke’s University Health Network, Bethlehem, Pa., and Sydney J. Vail, M.D., of Maricopa Medical Center, Phoenix.

ALSO HERE:

https://www.policeone.com/use-of-force/articles/471604006-Study-Police-use-of-force-significant-injuries-to-suspects-rare/

—

2020 Study - Code of the Street is Predictor in Crime

“Even after accounting for competing theoretical and established correlates of offending, modest effects of street code beliefs on offending remained. These findings indicate that overall, the street code is a more general theory than Anderson originally predicted. Directions for future research on the code are discussed.”

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1541204020927737

Saw in this Tweet by University of Cincinatti Professor: https://twitter.com/traviscpratt/status/1268930266854076422?s=21

—

More graphics here, but this is from a left-leaning source that distorts its findings, but I use their data anyways. Another way of showing this is:

* 95.4% of black arrests receive NO force

* 96.4% of white arrests receive NO force
* Whites are slightly more likely to be shot per arrest

https://medium.com/@agent.orange.chicago/my-open-letter-to-chicago-stripping-context-from-reporting-on-police-abuse-a-likely-cause-of-more-225feacb9301

SOURCE:

http://web.archive.org/web/20190331093610/http://policingequity.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/CPE_SoJ_Race-Arrests-UoF_2016-07-08-1130.pdf

CLICK HERE FOR COUNTERPOINT STUDIES & LEGACY DATA

SHORT LIST TO COPY & PASTE:

Here are 13 studies indicating blacks are NOT likely to be injured or shot more often than whites or other racial groups by police:

#1 - Roland Fryer, economist at Harvard: “Blacks are 27.4% less likely to be shot at by police relative to non-black, non-Hispanics”

https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/fryer/files/fryer_police_aer.pdf
http://www.nber.org/papers/w22399
Published Apr 2019 in the Journal of Political Economy (JPE): https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/701423

#2 - June 2018 paper: “Do White Law Enforcement Officers Target Minority Suspects?” (Answer: No.) And also: “Less than 1 percent of the victims of police killing in our data were unarmed.”

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/puar.12956

#3 - June 2018: “Exposure to police given crime rate differences likely accounts for the higher per capita rate of fatal police shootings for Blacks, at least when analyzing all shootings.”

http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1948550618775108
Full paper (says 2019 for print): https://docs.wixstatic.com/ugd/b44013_a5fc6189326849fab031bc3fedae7c3d.pdf
RELATED: “Supplemental Material #2: Why Biased Policing Does Not Account for the Results” https://docs.wixstatic.com/ugd/b44013_23920f7547cc4b019b3aa915cf7e18de.pdf

#4 - July 2019 study later pulled due to post-George Floyd politics: “We find no evidence of anti-Black or anti-Hispanic disparities across shootings.” And: “As the proportion of White officers in a fatal officer-involved shooting increased, a person fatally shot was not more likely to be of a racial minority.”

https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2019/07/16/1903856116

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/1745-9133.12269

http://injuryprevention.bmj.com/content/early/2016/07/27/injuryprev-2016-042023

#7 -“When either the violent crime rate or the demographics of a city are accounted for, we find that white police officers are not significantly more likely to kill a black suspect … We find no evidence that body cameras affect either the number of police killings or the racial composition of those killings.”

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2870189
#8 - Washington State‪ University‬ shooting study showing police shoot unarmed whites more in training than unarmed blacks despite showing greater implicit bias against blacks: “The Reverse Racism Effect” http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1745-9133.12187/abstract

#9 - “There’s absolutely no empirical evidence from the field that indicates that police are quicker on the trigger when it’s a black suspect versus a white suspect.”

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/1745-9133.12174

#10- 10th study from University of Chicago. ”The reduction in bias seemed to reflect the fact that, compared with the community members, officers set a higher, more stringent threshold for the decision to shoot Black targets.” https://faculty.chicagobooth.edu/bernd.wittenbrink/research/pdf/cpjwsk07.pdf
NOTE: Taken down after 2020 George Floyd protests from the University of Chicago. But it’s still here in the archives. Snapshot from 2020:
https://web.archive.org/web/20200603014337/https://faculty.chicagobooth.edu/bernd.wittenbrink/research/pdf/cpjwsk07.pdf

#11 - DOJ Analysis, mentioned in Heather Mac Donald’s reporting on June 2, 2020. “A 2015 Justice Department analysis of the Philadelphia Police Department found that white police officers were less likely than black or Hispanic officers to shoot unarmed black suspects.”

https://www.phillypolice.com/assets/directives/cops-w0753-pub.pdf

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-myth-of-systemic-police-racism-11591119883?fbclid=IwAR0QXw5Rq0WVD6ga9yjHn2dLDZiK9mgrRQdI6tyxjV7A5Lym7WkUWV26VI8

#12 - Study from 1977! “There was no evidence to suggest police bias against Blacks.”

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1559-1816.1977.tb02415.x

Mentioned in Quillette Sept 2020: “An early study provides some evidence of a racial disparity, but not in the expected direction—it found that police fire more bullets at white than black suspects.” https://quillette.com/2020/09/17/black-lives-matter-and-the-mechanics-of-conformity/?fbclid=IwAR2cbtwLGSyN_V7-7FaVm1OIK1r3sFMLP7mj6jFLAt-1-jm49BAiEN_SSI4#_edn1

#13 - Yes, the 13th study! Yet we still have the narrative that’s the opposite of these findings. Published March 2021 in the journal “Criminal Justice and Behavior” - “The findings of this study indicate that police officers, White officers in particular, do not disproportionately target Black or Hispanic citizens.”
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0093854821997529
Found here:
https://www.city-journal.org/do-data-on-police-shootings-show-racial-bias

#1 - Roland Fryer, economist at Harvard: “Blacks are 27.4% less likely to be shot at by police relative to non-black, non-Hispanics”