Black Lives Matter: Beyond the Riots
by Malcolm A. Kline on July 18, 2016
david-o-brown-fullWhen the African-American police chief of Dallas, David Brown, revealed on July 8, 2016 that the sniper who killed five officers and injured another seven the night before was “upset about Black Lives Matter,” some observers began to realize that BLM did more than just arrange vigils where people could hold candles and sing, after police shot suspects of color in deadly confrontations, no matter what the ethnic background of the law enforcement officer was.
That same month, African-American Harvard economics professor Roland Fryer’s study for the National Bureau of Economic Research, An Empirical Analysis of Racial Differences in Police Use of Force, challenged the very foundations of BLM, concluding that “police were no more likely to shoot non-whites than whites after factoring in extenuating circumstances.” Prof. Fryer noted that “On the most extreme use of force – officer-involved shootings – we find no racial differences in either the raw data or when contextual factors are taken into account,” adding that these findings “were the most surprising result of my career.”
The results of this study not only challenged the widely promoted civil rights groups’ belief that racist cops are singling out blacks, “it is plausible that racial differences in lower level uses of force are simply a distraction, and movements such as Black Lives Matter should seek solutions within their own communities rather than changing the behaviors of police and other external forces,” said Prof. Fryer in the study’s conclusion.
http://www.aim.org/special-report/black-lives-matter-beyond-the-riots/
