A report by Harvard’s Roland Fryer shows that when the cops pull back, homicides increase.
How do you root out bad cops without changing the behavior of good cops?
That’s a question explored in a forthcoming academic paper on policing the police by Harvard economist Roland Fryer and co-author Tanaya Devi. Given the current nationwide protests and mob violence ignited by the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, it’s a subject on the minds of many.
In 2016 Mr. Fryer released a study of racial differences in police use of deadly force. To the surprise of the author, as well as many in the media and on the left who take racist law enforcement as a given, he found no evidence of bias in police shootings. His conclusions have been echoed by researchers at the University of Maryland and Michigan State University, who in a paper released last year wrote: “We didn’t find evidence for anti-Black or anti-Hispanic disparity in police use of force across all shootings, and, if anything, found anti-White disparities when controlling for race-specific crime.”
Mr. Fryer stated in an interview that the brand new paper is an extension of his earlier analysis. Though it appeared clear to him that racial disparities in police shootings stemmed primarily from racial disparities in prison conduct, police departments continued to be investigated, and he suspected these investigations weren’t having the meant impact. In actual fact, he observed what he suspected was a sample that warranted additional research. After surveying greater than two dozen federal and state probes of police departments throughout the nation, the sample turned clear. When police had been investigated following incidents of lethal drive that had gone viral, police exercise declined and violent crime spiked. It occurred in Ferguson, Mo., after Michael Brown was shot by an officer. It occurred in Chicago after a cop gunned down Laquan McDonald. And it occurred in Baltimore after Freddie Grey died in police custody.
