Police Use of Force: Notes on a Study

A new empirical analysis of police use of force by Harvard economist Roland Fryer is attracting national attention. The paper deals with both lethal and non-lethal force, using a variety of different data sets, some public and some painstakingly assembled by the author and his team. Given the harrowing events of the past week, it's likely that his results on shootings will attract the most attention, but it's worth carefully considering both sets of findings.

Fryer provides evidence of significant racial disparities in the experience of non-lethal force at the hands of police, even in data that relies on self-reports by officers. Using official statistics from New York City’s Stop, Question and Frisk program, he finds that blacks and Latinos are more likely to be held, pushed, cuffed, sprayed or struck than whites who are stopped. This remains the case even after controlling for a broad range of demographic, behavioral, and environmental characteristics. And using data from a nationally representative sample of civilians, which does not rely on officer accounts, he finds evidence of even larger disparities in treatment.

But Fryer also reports an absence of racial bias in police shootings for a select group of jurisdictions. He recognizes that a proper analysis of police bias in the use of lethal force requires data not only on those incidents in which shootings occurred, but also those in which suspects were successfully pacified and disarmed. Data of this kind is extremely hard to come by, but he has managed to obtain incident reports on arrests in Houston that can be used for this purpose.

The focus is on arrest categories that are more likely to involve incidents resulting in justified use of lethal force. It turns out that in this arrest data 58% of the population is black, while in the shooting data the corresponding share is 52%. This immediately implies that in the absence of controls for other features of the interaction, blacks in the arrest population are less likely to be shot than whites. He finds that controlling for other features of the interaction "does not significantly alter the raw racial differences." Here is how Fryer characterizes these findings:

Given the stream of video "evidence", which many take to be indicative of structural racism in police departments across America, the ensuing and understandable outrage in black communities across America, and the results from our previous analysis of non-lethal uses of force, the results displayed in Table 5 are startling... Blacks are 23.8 percent less likely to be shot by police, relative to whites.

He describes this as "the most surprising result of my career."

While it is entirely possible that the Houston Police Department doesn't exhibit systematic racial bias in the use of lethal force, I'm not sure such an emphatic conclusion is warranted. A close look at the arrest data (Table 1D) alongside the shooting data (Table 1C, column 2) reveals a number of puzzles that should be a cause for concern. In the arrest data only 5% of suspects were armed, and yet 56% of suspects "attacked or drew weapon." This would suggest that over half of suspects attacked without a weapon (firearms, knives and vehicles are all classified as weapons). Moreover, there are large differences across groups in behavior: two-thirds of whites and one-half of blacks attacked, a difference that is statistically significant (the reported p-value is 0.006).

What this means is that the pool of black arrestees and the pool of white arrestees are systematically different, at least as far as behavior is concerned. So the raw data comparison described as startling in the quote above is not really valid. (I made a similar point in response to a piece by Sendhil Mullainathan a few months ago). Still, Fryer controls for these differences in behavioral and contextual characteristics and finds that the basic picture doesn't change. This has to be taken seriously. The key question, to my mind, is whether these controls are adequate.

I personally would be more convinced if the arrestee pool looked more like the shooting victim pool. For instance, 18% of arrestees, but only 4% of shooting victims are female. I suspect that many of the interactions in the arrestee pool are not threatening, even from the subjective perspective of the officers involved. And others are so obviously threatening---for instance those involving suicide-by-cop---that no discretion or judgement is really necessary. Pruning these from the data might give us a clearer picture of bias in the use of discretionary lethal force.

Despite these concerns, I think that there is a case to be made that there is no systematic bias against blacks in the lethal use of force within the Houston Police Department. What one ought not to conclude, however, is that this applies nationally. The analysis of other jurisdictions considered in the paper is restricted to encounters in which shootings actually occurred, and cannot therefore be used to answer the same kinds of questions that the Houston data allows.

One last point about shootings: I'm not sure why there are quotation marks around the word "evidence" in the above quote. Video evidence, for all its flaws, is still very powerful evidence. It was video evidence that led to the indictment of Micheal Slager on murder charges, and the conviction of Sean Groubert for assault and battery. It is selective and cannot establish the presence of racial bias in individual cases, but surely it can't be dismissed out of hand.

Finally, consider Fryer's analysis of non-lethal force, which is consistent with earlier findings. Aside from being fundamentally unjust, disparities in the use of non-lethal force have some really important implications for crime rates. The harassment of entire groups based on racial or ethnic identity is a major obstacle to witness cooperation in serious cases, including homicide. In fact, given the importance of corroboration, a belief that other witnesses will not step forward can be self-fulfilling.

With witnesses routinely unwilling to come forward in some neighborhoods, people can be killed with near impunity. And this significantly increases the incentives to kill preemptively, in a climate of reciprocal fear. Low clearance rates for homicide are directly responsible for high rates of killing, and both of these are held in place by distrust of the criminal justice system by potential witnesses. The excessive and discriminatory use of non-lethal force by police thus ends up having indirect lethal effects.