Harvard Prof: ‘Defunding the Police Could Cost Thousands of Black Lives’
“proactive policing saves black lives”
The left is not going to like this at all.
The College Fix reports:
Harvard professor’s research: ‘Defunding the police could cost thousands of black lives’
Amid nationwide Black Lives Matter protests, riots, looting, and calls to defund the police, a Harvard economist has found that proactive policing saves black lives.
“Defunding the police is not a solution and could cost thousands of black lives,” Roland Fryer told The College Fix in an interview about his latest research.
“I think the streets are talking and we should listen. People are frustrated,” he continued in the email. He sympathizes with frustration at “big racial differences” in educational achievement, life expectancy and “almost every part of life.”
The youngest African-American professor to receive tenure in Harvard history, Fryer uses a data-driven approach on fraught social issues.
He made waves four years ago with his research on use-of-force incidents by race. It found that black suspects were less likely to be shot by police than white suspects.
His new research is similarly controversial in the media. In a Manhattan Institute video late last month, Fryer exclaimed that he encountered an “absolute refusal to grapple with the data” from the media and “insistence” that he should not publicize it.
Referring to a reporter whom he showed the research, Fryer told The Wall Street Journal’s Jason Riley: “I thought the person might sit with the numbers for a bit and go, ‘Damn, a thousand lives. That’s a lot.’”
It’s a repeat of the controversy over his 2016 paper on police use of force. Though that research “didn’t find racial bias in shootings,” he told Riley, it “did find very large racial differences in lower level uses of force.”
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Comments
How long before Harvard terminates this professor for the inexcusable crime of wandering off the plantation?
Together with Professor Jacobson, Roland Fryer is the bravest, most honest person on any campus.
Well DUH.
My youngest son is black, so yes, I do worry about a police boot on his neck. Know what worries a LOT more? The thousands of violent, hate filled black criminals out there who kill more black men in a day than the cops kill all damned year. BLM doesn’t give a frogs fat rear end about black men dying, if their killers also have black skin. Not a chirp of remorse from them when THAT happens
Agree. There are reasons for reform but it’s okay to look at people as individuals rather than a race.
Brooks (Atlanta) was a justified shooting.
Floyd was a lowlife of a lesser variety, but his death was unjustified and may have been due to his skin color (let the courts decide that IMO).
Both are individuals under completely different circumstances with zero connection other than race. Why must everything be reduced back to race?
Also, BLM does seem to care when black men kill black men but only when the survivor is wearing blue.
But why do you care about a police boot on his neck, or on any other part of him? What makes you think that is at all likely to happen? I assume he does not commit any crimes, and that like anyone he knows never to fight the police and never to resist arrest, even if he didn’t do anything to get arrested. So how would he be in a position to get hurt?
It’s not as if cops are out there looking for black people to hurt, just for the pleasure of it. At least cops are no more likely to be doing that than anyone else is.
In fact, police, especially white police, will be, and have been for decades, avoiding contact with Blacks as much as possible, at least those with any sense have.
Which needn’t be caused by racism. It’s more likely caused by black suspects being more likely than other suspects to resist arrest and fight the police, thus forcing the police to use force on them.
It must be done. You can’t make an omelet if you won’t break eggs.