Kerby Anderson

News stories have been filled with statistics about police shootings. Although many of these statistics seem contradictory, they are remarkably consistent when you dig deeper. Let’s start with facts that everyone can agree on: there is a statistical disparity. African-Americans represent 13 percent of the American population, but 26 percent of the people killed by police are black. Many political candidates and even members of Black Lives Matter often just stop with that statistic and don’t consider a more relevant baseline. Heather MacDonald in her new book, The War on Cops, reminded my radio audience that according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, blacks were charged with 57 percent of murders and 45 percent of assaults (in the largest U.S. counties). Another group we should consider is cop-killers. These are men who present a lethal threat to police. According to FBI data, about 43 percent are black. In fact, law enforcement officers are killed by blacks at a rate 2.5 times higher than the rate at which blacks are killed by police. Consider the study done by Dr. Roland Fryer (Harvard professor of economics). As an African-American, he said he was angry after the deaths of Michael Brown and Freddie Gray and decided to collect data to understand what was happening in the streets of America. He and his research team examined 1,332 shootings. He found no evidence of racial bias when it came to lethal force. If anything, he found that blacks were slightly less likely to be killed. Roland Fryer admitted that this conclusion “is the most surprising result of my career.” For example, when looking at the issue of “shoot or don’t shoot,” he found that officers in Houston were about 20 percent less likely to shoot suspects if the suspect were black. It is worth noting that he did find evidence of bias when it came to nonlethal force. These latest statistics illustrate that many of the slogans used in protests simply are not true.