IN 2016 economist Roland G. Fryer, Jr., the youngest African American ever to be awarded tenure at Harvard University, came upon what he would call the “most surprising result of my career.” In a study of racial differences in the use of force by police officers, Fryer found that Black and Hispanic civilians were no more likely than white civilians to be shot to death by police. “You know, protesting is not my thing,” Fryer told the New York Times. “But data is my thing. So I decided that I was going to collect a bunch of data and try to understand what really is going on when it comes to racial differences in police use of force.”
Three thousand hours later, after meticulous records collection and analysis, the data had spoken. Although Black people are significantly more likely to experience non-lethal force at the hands of police than white people in similar situations, Fryer concluded, there is no racial bias in fatal police shootings. The findings appeared to have direct implications for the growing protest movement that had swept across the United States following the police killings of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Freddie Gray, and Philando Castile, among so many others. “It is plausible that racial differences in lower-level uses of force,” Fryer wrote at the end of the paper, “are simply a distraction and movements such as Black Lives Matter should seek solutions within their own communities rather than changing the behaviors of police and other external forces.”