“Why It’s So Hard to Measure Racial Bias in Police Shootings”: Ezekiel Kweku

“Why It’s So Hard to Measure Racial Bias in Police Shootings”: Ezekiel Kweku July 30, 2016

I feel v. old telling you to go to MTV for hard-hitting statistical and political analysis, but this is our world:

What if the core of the Black Lives Matter movement is based on a lie? What if there is no racism involved in police killings? Harvard economist Roland Fryer Jr. has come out with a headline-grabbing study about police shootings: a new National Bureau of Economic Research working paper that arrived with a write-up in the New York Times‘ data blog The Upshot. According to The Upshot, the upshot (!) is that “surprising new evidence shows that there’s racial bias in police use of force, but not in shootings.” Fryer tells the Times that it’s the most surprising result of his career — and if that were really what the evidence showed, it would be very important indeed. It would mean that the Black Lives Matter movement is, at least partially, animated by a myth.

But is that actually what the evidence shows?

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