https://tinyurl.

com/9-studies-no-racist-police
Also: https://tinyurl.com/http-blm-sayhername-myths

On this doc:
● 10 studies with no excerpts (copy & paste)
● 10 studies with detailed excerpts indicating no racial bias in police use of lethal
force or negligible force differences
● Bonus 2018 study: Use of force is rare, used in less than 1 in 1100 calls for service
● Counterpoint studies (easily debunked, but available - click here)
● How “implicit bias training” doesn’t really work

Here are 10 studies (updated in 2019 from 7, with a 10th added in 2020) published since
2016 that prove that overall police shooting outcomes today aren’t racially biased against
African Americans. Some say, in fact, police shootings are biased against white
Americans. Others say black-white use of force disparities are either non-existent or
negligible. Listed in chronological order of most recently published to least:

10 STUDIES WITH NO EXCERPTS (feel free to share or copy & paste)

Here are 10 studies indicating blacks are NOT likely to be injured or shot more often than
whites or other racial groups by police:

#1
NEW July 2019 study:
https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2019/07/16/1903856116 (“Officer characteristics and racial
disparities in fatal officer-involved shootings”)
RELATED STORY: https://theconversation.com/our-database-of-police-officers-who-shoot-
citizens-reveals-whos-most-likely-to-shoot-119623

#2
NEW June 2018:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/puar.12956 (“Do White Law Enforcement Officers
Target Minority Suspects?”)

#3
NEW June 2018:
http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1948550618775108 (“Is There Evidence of Racial
Disparity in Police Use of Deadly Force? Analyses of Officer-Involved Fatal Shootings in 2015–
2016”) - Full paper (says 2019 for print):
https://docs.wixstatic.com/ugd/b44013_a5fc6189326849fab031bc3fedae7c3d.pdf
ALSO: Author’s earlier analysis: https://www.cesariolab.com/race-bias-in-shooting
RELATED: “Supplemental Material #2: Why Biased Policing Does Not Account for the Results”
https://docs.wixstatic.com/ugd/b44013_23920f7547cc4b019b3aa915cf7e18de.pdf

#4
http://www.nber.org/papers/w22399 (Roland Fryer at Harvard: “An Empirical Analysis of Racial
Differences in Police Use of Force”; See also Fryer’s 2018 follow-up article to the same study
titled “Reconciling Results on Racial Differences in Police Shootings” where he reiterates that
“blacks are 27.4% less likely to be shot at by police relative to non-black, non-Hispanics”
https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/fryer/files/fryer_police_aer.pdf)

#5
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/1745-9133.12269 (“A Bird’s Eye View of
Civilians Killed by Police in 2015” Criminology and Public Policy)

#6
http://injuryprevention.bmj.com/content/early/2016/07/27/injuryprev-2016-042023 (Injury and
Prevention: “Perils of police action: a cautionary tale from US data sets”)

#7
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2870189 (College of William and Mary
Department of Economics and the Crime Prevention Research Center: “Do White Police
Officers Unfairly Target Black Suspects?”)

#8
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1745-9133.12187/abstract (Washington State
University shooting study showing police shoot unarmed whites more in training than unarmed
blacks DESPITE showing greater implicit bias against blacks: “The Reverse Racism Effect”)

#9
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/1745-9133.12174 (“Race, Crime, and the Micro‐
Ecology of Deadly Force.”) says, “The results indicate that neither the racial composition of
neighborhoods nor their level of economic disadvantage directly increase the frequency of police
shootings.” Study co-author David Klinger, PhD, a Professor of Criminology & Criminal Justice at
the University of Missouri–St. Louis said on CNN with host Anderson Cooper rebutting sociologist
Michael Eric Dyson, “There’s absolutely no empirical evidence from the field that indicates that
police are quicker on the trigger when it’s a black suspect versus a white suspect.”

#10
BONUS: 10th study from University of Chicago:
https://faculty.chicagobooth.edu/bernd.wittenbrink/research/pdf/cpjwsk07.pdf
“In terms of bias, the SDT results suggest that officers may show less bias than civilians in
their final decisions. Among the community sample, these data revealed a clear tendency to
set a lower (i.e., more lenient or “trigger-happy”) criterion for Black, rather than White, targets.
But this bias was weaker, or even nonexistent, for the officers. The reduction in bias seemed
to reflect the fact that, compared with the community members, officers set a higher,
more stringent threshold for the decision to shoot Black targets. Placement of the
criterion for White targets varied minimally across the three samples.”

#11 - from Heather Mac Donald’s reporting on June 2, 2020

https://www.phillypolice.com/assets/directives/cops-w0753-pub.pdf
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-myth-of-systemic-police-racism-11591119883?
fbclid=IwAR0QXw5Rq0WVD6ga9yjHn2dLDZiK9mgrRQdI6tyxjV7A5Lym7WkUWV26VI8
“A 2015 Justice Department analysis of the Philadelphia Police Department found that white police
officers were less likely than black or Hispanic officers to shoot unarmed black suspects.”

DETAILED LIST OF 10 STUDIES INDICATING NO SYSTEMIC RACISM

IN POLICING & LETHAL USE OF FORCE:

New July 2019 study titled “Officer characteristics and

racial disparities in fatal officer-involved shootings” in
collaboration with Joseph Cesario of “Cesario’s Lab” again
shows it’s a myth that white police officers are more likely to
shoot black suspects, or that there’s anti-black or anti-
Hispanic disparities across shootings (lead author David J.
Johnson with Trevor Tress, Nicole Burkel, Carley Taylor, and
Joseph Cesario). This is the 9th study in the past 3 years to
show this. [At least, as Cesario and Johnson are involved in 4
total published studies 2017-2019]

“Significance: There is widespread concern about racial

disparities in fatal officer-involved shootings and that these
disparities reflect discrimination by White officers. Existing
databases of fatal shootings lack information about officers,
and past analytic approaches have made it difficult to assess the contributions of factors like
crime. We create a comprehensive database of officers involved in fatal shootings during 2015
and predict victim race from civilian, officer, and county characteristics. We find no evidence of
anti-Black or anti-Hispanic disparities across shootings, and White officers are not more likely to
shoot minority civilians than non-White officers. Instead, race-specific crime strongly predicts
civilian race. This suggests that increasing diversity among officers by itself is unlikely to reduce
racial disparity in police shootings.” (NOTE: The line “White officers are not more likely to shoot
minority civilians than non-White officers” has been updated to say: ‘As the proportion of White
officers in a fatal officer-involved shooting increased, a person fatally shot was not more likely to
be of a racial minority.’ A bit of splitting hairs among academics, some may say.)

From the write-up on the study in The Conversation:

Policy implications
Our results have important implications for reducing racial disparities in fatal officer-involved
shootings, by suggesting what will and what will not be an effective solution.

Since officer race did not relate to racial disparities in civilians fatally shot by the police, we
believe that policies that promote hiring more diverse officers are unlikely to reduce racial
disparities in fatal shootings.

However, they may still have merit by increasing public trust in law enforcement.

The best predictor of the race of a person fatally shot was the amount of violent crime
committed by members of that racial group. This suggests that reducing fatal shootings of racial
minorities by police will require policymakers, civic leaders and ordinary citizens to address
factors that lead to racial differences in violent crime, such as racial disparities in wealth,
employment, education and family structure.

SOURCE: https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2019/07/16/1903856116
RELATED STORY: https://theconversation.com/our-database-of-police-officers-who-shoot-
citizens-reveals-whos-most-likely-to-shoot-119623
AUTHORS DEFENSE TO CRITICS: https://psyarxiv.com/dmhpu
REBUTTAL BY HEATHER MAC DONALD TO CONTROVERSY (The gist: Critics like Phillip
Atiba Goff are lying and/or being very misleading; showing truly how any argument that says “no
racial bias” will be fought tooth and nail in the academy, even to the point of lying in front of
Congress because the authors did NOT refute their won findings):
https://www.city-journal.org/police-shootings-racial-bias

The left-leaning Mother Jones magazine directly quotes a June 2018 study (“Do White Law
Enforcement Officers Target Minority Suspects?” authored by Charles E. Menifield, Geiguen
Shin, and Logan Strother) when rebutting Senate candidate Beto O’Roarke trying to unseat Ted
Cruz in Aug 2018 (O’Roarke said, “Black men, unarmed, black teenagers, unarmed, and black
children, unarmed, are being killed at a frightening level right now, including by members of law
enforcement without accountability and without justice.”):

“Another component of the national debate is that police are wantonly killing unarmed
suspects, especially if they are black. We find no support for this claim in our
data….Less than 1 percent of the victims of police killing in our data were unarmed. In
other words, police killings of unarmed suspects—especially unarmed black men—
garner massive media coverage (and not without reason), but they are far less common
than the prevailing narrative suggests. … Next, we turn to the important question of whether
there are racial disparities in officer killings of unarmed or less threatening suspects. However,
as noted earlier, the extremely low number of killings of unarmed suspects undercuts this claim
from the start. Indeed, there are so few killings of unarmed suspects that those killings (n = 4)
cannot be statistically scrutinized.”

SOURCE: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/puar.12956
RELATED ARTICLE: https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2018/08/unarmed-black-
children-are-not-being-gunned-down-by-cops/

A 2018 study titled “Is There Evidence of Racial Disparity in Police Use of Deadly Force?
Analyses of Officer-Involved Fatal Shootings in 2015–2016” (by Joseph Cesario, David
Johnson, and William Terrill) concluded was the following: “We find little evidence within
these data for systematic anti-Black disparity in fatal police deadly force decisions.” And
also: "Conclusion: At the national level, we find little evidence within these data for systematic
anti-Black disparity in fatal police deadly force decisions. We do not discount the role race may
play in individual police shootings; yet to draw on bias as the sole reason for population-level
disparities is unfounded when considering the benchmarks presented here. We hope this
research demonstrates the importance of unpacking the underlying assumptions inherent to
using benchmarks to test for outcome disparities."
Additionally, the authors analyzed unarmed and not aggressing person shot by police, and
concluded no proven racial bias: “Overall, the data provide little evidence of systematic
anti-Black disparity in officers’ decisions to shoot unarmed, nonaggressing citizens.
Officers either showed no meaningful disparity in either direction or, if anything, an
overall pattern of anti-White disparity.”

SOURCE: http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1948550618775108
FULL PAPER:
https://docs.wixstatic.com/ugd/b44013_a5fc6189326849fab031bc3fedae7c3d.pdf
ALSO: Author’s earlier analysis: https://www.cesariolab.com/race-bias-in-shooting
RELATED: “Supplemental Material #2: Why Biased Policing Does Not Account for the Results”
which says, “Blacks are arrested at about their reported rate of crime, or the odds benchmarked
on arrests show greater anti-White bias, suggesting that Blacks are under-arrested given
their rate of reported crimes. In any case, the pattern of data is inconsistent with the claim that
police over-arrest Blacks and that this undermines our findings of no anti-Black bias in the odds
of being fatally shot.”
https://docs.wixstatic.com/ugd/b44013_23920f7547cc4b019b3aa915cf7e18de.pdf

3RD & 4TH PAPER by CESARIO & JOHNSON: https://www.cesariolab.com/publications

Cesario, J., & Johnson, D.J. (2018). Power Poseur: Bodily Expansiveness Does Not Matter in
Dyadic Interactions. SPPS.
○ [.pdf of article]

● Pleskac, T.J., Cesario, J., & Johnson, D.J. (2018). How Race Affects Evidence
Accumulation During the Decision to Shoot. Psych. Bull. & Rev.
○ [.pdf of article] [.pdf of Supplemental Material]

A working paper by a renowned Harvard economist Roland Fryer analyzed more than 1300
police shootings and found police are around less likely to shoot blacks than whites under
similar circumstances. Exactly 23.8% less likely using Houston data, which the recipient of the
MacArthur “Genius Grant” Fellowship and his team thoroughly categorized. Excerpt: “Using data
from Houston, Texas — where we have both officer-involved shootings and a randomly chosen
set of potential interactions with police where lethal force may have been justified — we find, in
the raw data, that blacks are 23.8 percent less likely to be shot at by police relative to
whites. Hispanics are 8.5 percent less likely.”

SOURCE: http://www.nber.org/papers/w22399
Fryer’s 2018 follow-up to the same study: "I find, after controlling for suspect
demographics, officer demographics, encounter characteristics, suspect weapon and
year fixed effects, that blacks are 27.4 percent less likely to be shot at by police relative
to non-black, non-Hispanics."

SOURCE: https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/fryer/files/fryer_police_aer.pdf

A 2017 study called “A Bird’s Eye View of Civilians Killed by Police in 2015” that actually dealt
with The Washington Post data indicates there could be some implicit bias in the handful of
unarmed shootings nationwide, or when the offender is not attacking. But they make larger point
that these incidents are rare, and unarmed individuals are 10% of total killed. "Mainstream
media and advocacy groups, most notably Black Lives Matter and Campaign Zero, have alleged
that police disproportionately use force and deadly force against minorities. The Post data
showed that police killed almost twice as many Whites as Blacks; nevertheless, this is expected
as Whites far outnumber Blacks in the U.S. population. In an effort to standardize these
numbers, The Guardian divides the number of White and Black civilians killed by their
respective population count. Presenting the number in this manner suggests that Blacks were
killed at more than twice the rate of Whites in 2015 (7.2 per million to 2.9 per million,
respectively). Similarly, The Washington Post recently stated, “When adjusted by population,
[unarmed Black men] were seven times as likely as unarmed White men to die from police
gunfire” (Lowery, 2016). We caution against using population as a benchmark because it
does not account for each groups’ representation in a variety of more relevant measures,
including police–civilian interactions and crime."

SOURCE: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/1745-9133.12269

A study published in the journal Injury Prevention that Time reported about in July 2016 (“Perils
of police action: a cautionary tale from US data sets”) clearly shows no racial disparity in
outcomes of injury or death by police per capita:

"Results: US police killed or injured an estimated 55 400 people in 2012 (95% CI 47 050 to 63
740 for cases coded as police involved). Blacks, Native Americans and Hispanics had higher
stop/arrest rates per 10 000 population than white non-Hispanics and Asians. On average, an
estimated 1 in 291 stops/arrests resulted in hospital-treated injury or death of a suspect or
bystander. Ratios of admitted and fatal injury due to legal police intervention per 10 000
stops/arrests did not differ significantly between racial/ethnic groups. Ratios rose with age,
and were higher for men than women."
SOURCE: http://injuryprevention.bmj.com/content/early/2016/07/27/injuryprev-2016-042023

Research at Washington State University focused on how police reaction times in shootings
may be disadvantageous to white people even if the officer have implicit bias against black
people (“The Reverse Racism Effect”), and was reported about by The Washington Post.
Excerpt: “Policy Implications: This article reports the results of our most recent experiment,
which tested 80 police patrol officers by applying this leading edge method. We found that,
despite clear evidence of implicit bias against Black suspects, officers were slower to shoot
armed Black suspects than armed White suspects, and they were less likely to shoot
unarmed Black suspects than unarmed White suspects. These findings challenge the
assumption that implicit racial bias affects police behavior in deadly encounters with Black
suspects.”

SOURCE: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1745-9133.12187/abstract
RELATED ARTICLE: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/true-crime/wp/2016/04/27/this-
study-found-race-matters-in-police-shootings-but-the-results-may-surprise-you/?
utm_term=.6ebea1703572

A November 2016 hard data-driven study by the College of William and Mary Department of
Economics and the Crime Prevention Research Center — largely ignored by the media —
concluded there is no racial bias in police shootings. They also concluded body cameras don’t
reduce killings. “When either the violent crime rate or the demographics of a city are
accounted for, we find that white police officers are not significantly more likely to kill a
black suspect … Our estimates examining the killings of white and Hispanic suspects
found no differences with respect to the races of police officers. If the police are engaged
in discrimination, such discriminatory behavior should also be more difficult when body
or other cameras are recording their actions. We find no evidence that body cameras
affect either the number of police killings or the racial composition of those killings.”

SOURCE: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2870189

Here’s an 8th study that I just added in early 2019 that I strangely missed, as I refer often to
David Klinger and Richard Rosenfeld in my writing. (See my analysis of Roland Fryer’s work for
Klinger, and Rosenfeld I mention many times in my 30,000+ word manifesto on how police
aren’t really racially biased. )

David Klinger, PhD, a Professor of Criminology & Criminal Justice at University of Missouri–St.
Louis, is a former police officer who’s actually shot and killed a man while in uniform. He now
does work on how often police shoot citizens and under which circumstances. He put sociology
professor Michael Eric Dyson in his place with his police-are-racist broken record
pronouncements by countering with facts and reason when he told him on CNN with host
Anderson Cooper rebutting sociologist Michael Eric Dyson, “There’s absolutely no empirical
evidence from the field that indicates that police are quicker on the trigger when it’s a
black suspect versus a white suspect.” Klinger also said on a PBS News Hour interview in
June 2017:

“And I would argue that the race issue is one that gets overplayed. And what I mean by that is
this. If we look at shootings that could have been prevented, and it goes back the training and
tactics, we can pretty much eliminate, in my opinion, the race piece. So, for example, here in
Saint Louis, myself and Rick Rosenfeld and two other colleagues were able to look at the spatial
patterns of officer-involved shootings in the city of Saint Louis. And at first, it clearly looks as
if race plays a role, but once you control for the levels of crime across neighborhoods,
that drops out. And so that’s one example of why I’m not going to get on to the issue of race
being the key. I really think it has to deal with the tactical performance of police officers across
the board dealing with whites, blacks, Hispanics, males, females, where they don’t use sound
tactics that then lead to the shootings that we scratch our heads over.”

That research paper that Klinger referred to working with criminologist Richard “Rick” Rosenfeld
as a co-author is titled, “Race, Crime, and the Micro‐Ecology of Deadly Force.”

Research Summary: “Limitations in data and research on the use of firearms by police officers
in the United States preclude sound understanding of the determinants of deadly force in police
work. The current study addresses these limitations with detailed case attributes and a
microspatial analysis of police shootings in St. Louis, MO, between 2003 and 2012. The results
indicate that neither the racial composition of neighborhoods nor their level of economic
disadvantage directly increase the frequency of police shootings, whereas levels of
violent crime do—but only to a point. Police shootings are less frequent in areas with the
highest levels of criminal violence than in those with midlevels of violence. We offer a
provisional interpretation of these results and call for replications in other settings.”

SOURCE: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/1745-9133.12174
RELATED ARTICLE: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/deadly-police-shootings-end-police-
convictions
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SVH1EqVupTA&feature=youtu.be
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/may/13/ferguson-effect-real-researcher-richard-
rosenfield-second-thoughts

From Heather Mac Donald, who while mentioning the PNAS paper from 2019 by
Cesario/Johnson, also mentions Fryer and one 2007 paper that I had not run across.
https://www.city-journal.org/police-shootings-racial-bias
“I said that the PNAS study was hardly an outlier; previous analyses had reached the same no-
bias conclusion, including a 2017 paper by Harvard economist Roland Fryer that found no
evidence of racial discrimination in shootings; a lab study of police shoot-don’t-shoot decisions
in the state of Washington that found that officers in a realistic video simulator were three times
less likely to shoot unarmed black suspects than unarmed white suspects; and shoot-don’t-
shoot experiments by the University of Chicago’s Josh Correll that also found that police don’t
shoot unarmed black civilians at any higher rate than unarmed white civilians. (Correll is now at
the University of Colorado, Boulder.)”

The last link is a 2007 paper by University of Chicago’s Josh Correll is the 10th paper listed
here:

“In terms of bias, the SDT results suggest that officers may show less bias than civilians in
their final decisions. Among the community sample, these data revealed a clear tendency to
set a lower (i.e., more lenient or “trigger-happy”) criterion for Black, rather than White, targets.
But this bias was weaker, or even nonexistent, for the officers. The reduction in bias seemed
to reflect the fact that, compared with the community members, officers set a higher,
more stringent threshold for the decision to shoot Black targets. Placement of the
criterion for White targets varied minimally across the three samples.

The response-time data show clear evidence of racial bias for all samples in this study, the 237
police officers and the community members alike. Like college students in previous studies,
these individuals seemed to have greater difficulty (indexed by longer latencies) responding to
stereotype-incongruent targets (unarmed Black targets and armed White targets), rather than to
stereotypecongruent targets. The magnitude of this bias did not differ across the three samples.
It is interesting to note that this equivalence emerged in spite of the fact that the civilian sample
contained many more ethnic minority members than did the predominantly White police
samples. Although any evidence of racial bias among police may be cause for concern,
there is certainly nothing in the present data to suggest that officers show greater bias
than the people who live in the communities they serve.”

SOURCE: P. 10: https://faculty.chicagobooth.edu/bernd.wittenbrink/research/pdf/cpjwsk07.pdf

--

BONUS 2018 STUDY: FORCE USED IN LESS THAN 1 IN 1100 CALLS FOR SERVICE AND
1 IN 120 CRIMINAL ARREST

STUDY: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29283961

Abstract
METHODS:
A prospective multicenter observational study of all UOF incidents was conducted via
mandatory UOF investigations at three mid-sized police agencies over a two year period.
Expert physicians reviewed police and medical records to determine injury severity using a
priori injury severity stratification criteria.
RESULTS:
There were 893 UOF incidents, representing a UOF rate of 0.086% of 1,041,737 calls for
service (1 in 1167) and 0.78% of 114,064 criminal arrests(1 in 128).
CONCLUSIONS: Police UOF [Use of Force] is rare. When force is used officers most
commonly rely on unarmed physical force and CEWs [Conducted Energy Weapon].
Significant injuries are rare. Transport for medical evaluation is a poor surrogate for
significant injury due to UOF.

RELATED ARTICLE:
https://newsroom.wakehealth.edu/News-Releases/2018/02/Study-Police-Use-of-Force-is-Rare-
as-are-Significant-Injuries-to-Suspects

The suspects were primarily male (89 percent) with a mean age of 31. No data on race or
ethnicity was available to the researchers.

“A remarkable finding in the study is how infrequently police use force at all – less than 1 in
1100 calls for service and less than 1 in 120 criminal arrests is surprisingly low, and contrary to
many perceptions that police commonly use violence in their interactions with the public,”
Bozeman said.

The research was funded by National Institute of Justice award numbers 2009-MU-BX-K248
and 2009-SQ-B9-K0126.

Co-authors are Jason P. Stopyra, M.D., of Wake Forest Baptist; David A. Klinger, Ph.D., of the
University of Missouri-St. Louis; Brian P. Martin, M.D., and Derrel D. Graham, M.D., of
Louisiana State University Shreveport; James C. Johnson III, M.P.A.S., of High Point University;
Katherine Mahoney-Tesoriero, M.D., of St. Luke’s University Health Network, Bethlehem, Pa.,
and Sydney J. Vail, M.D., of Maricopa Medical Center, Phoenix.

ALSO HERE:
https://www.policeone.com/use-of-force/articles/471604006-Study-Police-use-of-force-
significant-injuries-to-suspects-rare/

—
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