White cops are no likelier to shoot dead African-Americans than black ones are

By P.S.

IN 2016 Roland Fryer, an economist, published a controversial paper. Having analysed thousands of police reports from ten American cities he found that police showed racial bias in all forms of force against African-Americans, except one: the use of guns. While blacks were more likely to be tasered, hit with a baton and generally roughed up, when it came to being shot by police they were in no more danger than whites. When he did a more detailed analysis of one city, Houston in Texas, he found whites there were in more danger of being shot by a cop than blacks.

Unsurprisingly, a storm of publicity followed. In recent years, police shootings of unarmed black men have sparked furious protests. Critics of Mr Fryer’s research focused on the fact that African-Americans are stopped by police more, and therefore have more interactions with them, some of which go wrong. Mr Fryer’s data, moreover, was focused on only a handful of cities.