An Empirical Analysis of Racial Differences in Police Use of Force: A Comment
By Steven N. Durlauf, James J. Heckman. Journal of Political Economy, 2020
162 citations recorded by the source corpus.
“An Empirical Analysis of Racial Differences in Police Use of Force” (Fryer 2019) addresses a fundamental aspect of racial inequality in America. The paper suggests that there is evidence of discrimination against African Americans in police use of force except for officer-involved shootings. Given the importance of the issues involved, clarity is needed in understanding how this or any other piece of research contributes to understanding the nature of contemporary racial inequality and injustice. In this comment, we focus on the paper’s failure to find empirical differences in police shootings by race. This finding has received the most publicity and is the one that the paper most strongly defends: “[T]he data do more to provide a more compelling case that there is no discrimination in officer-involved shootings than they do to illuminate the reasons behind racial differences in nonlethal uses of force” (Fryer 2019, 1216). In our judgment, this paper does not establish credible evidence on the presence or absence of discrimination against African Americans in police shootings. We applaud analyses of data about police use of force of any type. But it is important to state clearly what the available data do and do not prove. The evidence provided in this paper fails to give any reason to conclude that discrimination is absent.
Subfields: Health, Political Science and International Relations, Sociology and Political Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f221203531120678ee4bb85c0468c4201d309957
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Citations in the corpus
- The Effects of Police Violence on Inner-City Students* (2020, background): “…(Glover, Pallais, and Pariente 2017), and health care (Alsan and Wanamaker 2018).7 While empirical evidence of racial bias is mixed (Nix et al. 2017; Fryer 2019; Johnson et al. 2019; Knox, Lowe, and Mummolo 2020; Knox and Mummolo 2020), the vast majority of blacks and Hispanics in the United…”