Transcription
I'm going to go get some data. I'm going to go show that the police are biased. But we didn't find any racial bias in police shootings. Now, that was really surprising to me because I expected to see it.
The little-known fact is I had eight full-time RAs that it took to do this over nearly a year. When I found the surprising result, I hired eight fresh ones and redid it to make sure they came up with the same exact answer. And I thought it was robust. And I went to go give it, and my God, all hell broke loose.
It was posted for minutes when I got my first email. This is full. And I wrote back, "How'd you read it that fast?"
What's going on, everybody? Welcome back to the channel. Hope all is good wherever you are. In this video, we're going to watch an interview with Roland Fry. He is one of the most celebrated economists in the world. The man is brilliant. He's the author of more than 50 papers, including the one he's going to be talking about in this clip here, "The Racial Difference Between Police Shootings." This is a great clip of him talking about how he wanted to write this paper on police abuse towards the black community, and his data and his findings and his research showed the complete opposite. Let's get into the video.
When you came on my radar, it was for a paper that you wrote in 2016. Here was the title of it: "An Empirical Analysis of Racial Differences in Police Use of Force." Maybe there's been a more controversial paper since then. I would argue it's probably the most controversial of your career so far. Tell us about that study, and you, you've called the results the most surprising of your career. Why is that?
Can we change the language of controversy? I mean, do you mean interesting? People are always like, "You're so controversial." I don't want to be right. Like, I'm just showing you the data. The data are telling you a weird story. That's not my fault. I'd like some nice, popular data. It just didn't work out that way.
Um, look, I saw what was going on with Michael Brown and, um, some of the early, um, viral videos of police violence. I want to do something, but protesting is just not my jam. I'm not saying that people shouldn't protest, go for it, but it seemed hot outside. I just didn't want to do it. And so, um, I thought, I want to do something. Um, and the only thing I know how to do is, I'm one of the world's biggest data nerds. So I said, "This is going to be the easiest paper I ever write. I'm going to go get some data. I'm going to go show that the police are biased. Finally, people are going to like me." And my grandmother's going to go, "You showed that the police don't like black people? Really? What are you doing up there?" Right? Like, this was, this was, I had it all laid out.
And then I had dinner with a, a colleague of mine, and I was telling him about my plan. And he says, "You know, Roland, um, when you work on schools and other stuff like that, you really just are in the schools. And so it's weird for me, strange, that you would just download police data and not understand more about the police." He says, "I wonder what the police are maximizing." A very econ kind of thing to ask. "I wonder what the police are maximizing." And it dawned on me in that moment, I didn't know, nor did I think I cared. So I said, "Okay, fine." I didn't give him credit in the moment, but I laughed and said, "You know what I'm going to do? I'm going to go figure out what police maximize."
So I set up ride-alongs in Camden, Philadelphia, Houston, some places in Massachusetts to ride along with the police. Now, back to 1991, I don't like the police very much. I don't. What had been your experience with the police? I had been roughed up by the police. I've had guns pulled on me. Mind you, they pulled me over, and I decided it would be a good idea to get out of the car and walk away. The details are important, probably. [Laughter] But in any event, they, I didn't like their customer service. And so, um, I just didn't like police. They came, they took half my family away. Granted, they were selling a lot of drugs, but again, not the greatest customer service. So I was biased against the police. I'm not, that's obvious.
I went and, um, I don't think I've received a better education since my grandmother taught me to read. It's a hard job. And I know that sounds obvious sitting on the stage. It's a really hard job. Uh, I am a terrible police officer. Uh, after four hours, everyone looked like a criminal to me. I don't know if I, I don't know if I was hangry. I don't know what it was, but I'm telling you, I am serious. They were like, "You could never be a cop." Because I was like, "Hey, let's pull over that kid. He's got a basketball. I don't like it."
I, I participated in, in these weapons training things, not real weapons, relax, but like, um, these weapons trainings where there's simulations. And some guy, like, I'm in a building, the guy walks out, he's got a baby. I shoot the guy right in the head. And they're like, "What about the baby?" I said, "Sorry, I didn't see the baby." I was a bad police officer. But what I really did, serious, I, I, um, I realized the job is really hard. It was the end of a 12-hour shift in Camden, and we get a call for a potential overdose in a row house. It's an abandoned building. We bust in. Uh, a person dies within six feet of me. And it shook me up a little bit. And so I looked at the guys I was with and I said, "Yo, how about beers on me?" And they said, "What do you mean, beers are on you?" I said, "I don't know. I don't know how to say it. Do you want me to speak in Greek? I mean, I don't know. It's, uh, beers are on me. We should leave here. Let the paramedics take over. We should go." And they said, "We got to go back to work." And I said, "But we just saw somebody die."
And the police chief overheard me. And he, he was incredulous. He says, "Roland, if I gave everybody a break every time someone died, I wouldn't, no one would cover the shifts." And I was like, "Wow. It is a hard job." And so through these experiences, long story short, I collected a lot of data. And those experiences helped me understand what types of data to collect. Um, we collected millions of observations on, uh, everyday use of force that wasn't lethal. We collected thousands of observations on lethal force. And the key question, I alluded to it earlier in a bit of a joke, but the key question is not just, um, this arbitrary, silly snapshots that some journalist, not named Barry, do a lot, which is, "Black people are 13.3% of the population, and they are 50% of the police shootings." I'm, I'm sorry about that, but I don't know what that has to do with the question. Right?
And, and it was in this moment in 2016 that I realized people lose their minds when they don't like the result. Right? And so what my paper showed, you'll see tomorrow, uh, like some of you, was that yes, we saw some bias in the low-level uses of force, every day pushing up against cars and things like that. People seemed to like that result. But we didn't find any, um, uh, racial bias and police shootings. Now, that was really surprising to me because I expected to see it. The little-known fact is I had eight full-time RAs that it took to do this over nearly a year. When I found the surprising result, I hired eight fresh ones and redid it to make sure they came up with the same exact answer. And I thought it was robust. And I went to go give it, and my God, all hell broke loose.
Tell, tell us about that. What was the re- I mean, well, your former paper published the thing, published a report about it. And it was a 104-page dense academic economics paper with a 150-page appendix. Okay. It was posted for four minutes when I got my first email. "This is full of, doesn't make any sense." And I wrote back, "How'd you read it that fast? That's amazing. You are a genius." People lost their minds. I mean, it was like colleagues of mine were going, "Well, I don't believe these results. He's using regressions." I'm like, "Well, what the hell else we been using? I mean, we've been using them forever. That's what you use."
And I had colleagues take me into to the side and say, "Don't publish this. You'll ruin your career." I said, "What are you talking about? I said, "What's wrong with it?" "Do you believe the first part?" "Yes." "Do you believe the second part?" "Well, it's the issue is they just don't fit together. We like the first one, but you should publish the second one another time." I said, "Let me ask this. If the second part about the police shootings, this is a literal conversation." I said to them, "If the second part, uh, showed bias, do you think I should publish it then?" And they say, "Yeah, then it would make sense." And I said, "I guarantee you, I'll publish it. We'll see what happens."
So it was, it was, you know, I, I lived under, under, um, police protection for about 30 or 40 days. I had a 7-day-old daughter at the time. I remember going and shopping for, because, you know, when you have a newborn, you think you have enough diapers, you don't. So I, I was going to the grocery store to get diapers with the armed guard. It was crazy. It was really truly crazy. Um, and, uh, yeah, it was, it was a really phenomenal experience. There are a lot of people, many people, and this has been a realization for me over the past few years of my own life, who, faced with that exact decision point, would make the opposite choice. I think the majority of people actually would make the opposite choice. They would think, "I'm going to preserve my career, my professional status, my prestige." You were the golden, I mean, you were a golden boy at that point. I'm going to preserve my popularity, my ability to get along with my colleagues, someone nice to sit next to me in the cafeteria. Like, every incentive, to use an economics term, would be pushing you to make that choice.
What is it inside of you? What can everyone here learn about what allowed you to make the opposite choice? To make the choice that would force you to suffer all of the consequences you would come to suffer, some a direct result and some adjacent to it?
I don't covet what they covet. And I tell my undergraduates every year in the final lecture of my undergraduate classes, each one of them, "The key to Harvard is get a great education without letting this place change you. It's really important. It can be corrupting." So not every incentive was pushing in that direction because every day I have to look myself in the mirror and say, "What are you here for? What did you leave behind?" I did not grow up wanting to go to Harvard. I didn't. I really didn't. Um, I wanted to do something. And I, like many others in here, want to acknowledge that have suffered a lot of losses in my life. My grandmother's no longer here. My father is dead. I don't know where my mother is. I have, they're all gone. Every single cousin is gone. My favorite cousin, when he, the day he got released out of prison after 25 years, someone walked up behind him and shot him directly in the head. So I have to make this journey worth it. I am here because I want to solve problems. I am here because I have seen so much talent in these neighborhoods. And I know they know when they see it. So I'm not going to lie to them. I wouldn't be able to show my face in these places if I told lies to them. Like, "Oh, I, he, this result from you."
The thing about it is, if you do a result, what has happened with the actual police departments is that because they actually believe the results, and they're willing to reform on the lower-level uses of force, because someone told the truth about the others. And you know, it's the importance of being thought of, someone of being an actual truth-teller is so, so very important. Maybe not in the moment. Um, but I don't, I didn't go to Harvard to have Chardonnay at 10:30 in the morning. I just don't want to. It's not my thing. And it's okay if it's someone else's thing, it's just not my thing. Um, I came here, came there, I went there to make a difference, truly. I know that sounds naive to many of you. But I, as I tell my students, remember when you came to Harvard, you had lofty dreams of change in the world. It wasn't downside risk protection, right? Everybody, everybody I know who I've seen walk through those Ivy doors, rocks the boat until they get in the boat. And then they say, "Steady now." I rocked the boat until I got in the boat, and I said, "Let's see how fast we can go." And I've fallen out the boat, got run over by the boat. It is what it is. But you got to be for something, right? And so I, I, I mean, I actually don't understand those other people. I don't know what they're maximizing.
This is the man that should have been the president at Harvard, not that whack job woke lady that they ended up with. If the media covered the shootings of white people the same way they cover the shootings of black people, you would think that there was a crisis of police attacking whites, like a war on whites. But right now, what we have is a war on cops because of the media and the way they portray them and this false racial narrative. Roland talks about the Michael Brown, uh, Ferguson shooting and the false "hands up, don't shoot" narrative that happened that triggered riots. This was in what, 2014? Across the country, and in 2015 and 2016, we saw the largest two-year increase in homicides in 50 years. That was because cops were not getting out of their cars. They were becoming passive and merely reacting to crime after the fact, rather rather than trying to intervene in, they see suspicious behavior or something of the sorts. And so you had a situation where crime in the inner city and inner-city neighborhoods took another 2,000 black lives in 2015 and again in 2016.
Following the deaths of George Floyd, what was, what was George Floyd's death? 2020. That caused even more brutal, even more archaic destruction, riots across the country, attacks on law enforcement officers, destruction of police property, destruction of the very symbol of law and order that we have in the country, the courthouses, police precincts, police cars. Businesses were torched to the ground. 2020 saw the largest percentage increase in homicides in a nation's history. And in 2021 was even worse than 2020. We learned all over again, and still learning today, that when you emasculate law enforcement, when you tell them that they're racist, they're going to get the message that policing is political. When cops are in high-crime neighborhoods trying to save lives, that, and then you're going to accuse them of racism, when they are the government institution, they are dedicated to Black Lives Mattering, they're the ones that save black lives, police officers. But they're doing less because of this. And who pays the price? Law-abiding residents of high-crime communities who are overwhelmingly black themselves. The lesson learned from what a lot of people call the Ferguson effect, and policing matters.
The left doesn't like talking about the real data on crime. And we know this. And if you talk about the real cause of crime, I'm saying that, listen, cops are not out there killing black people. Black people are out there killing black people. More black people are killed through these insane drive-by shootings than anything else. But if you mention that, you're accused of being a white supremacist. This phantom police racism that they like to talk about. When there's two dozen blacks being killed in drive-by shootings every single day, again, not by cops, being killed by other blacks. You have kids spraying with bullets neighborhoods in retaliation for some imaginary gang gripe or imaginary this that. They would have had to the leftist media, this doesn't matter because it is disproportionately committed by blacks. If it was committed by a white person, you would for sure hear about it. The same way you don't hear about if you know a young boy is beaten up by, uh, a black gang or something of the sort, and the boy happens to be white, you will not hear about this.
Blacks die of homicides 13 times the rate of white and Hispanics combined. Combined, 80% of all murders by guns in the US are gang-related crime. But you can't talk about this because you're labeled a racist. If you talk about the black social breakdown or the black family breakdown, again, you're labeled a racist. I think we've forgotten that if families fall apart, or when they fall apart, police are the ones that are there keeping communities together and keeping safety on the streets. Policing matters. Law enforcement matters. Law enforcement deters criminal behavior. But the left will not acknowledge that, which is baffling. Something I find hilarious. And it's to the extent that like the New York Times, the Washington Post will never acknowledge really that there's an increase in homicides in the black community. They just won't mention it. 50-plus small little children, black children, little ones, are killed almost every year accidentally by these drive-by shootings. The only explanation in the last few years that the leftist media has come up with, the Washington Post and CNN, MSNBC, and I remember this, they said that the increase in homicides was due to the pandemic. That somehow the lockdowns had led to the increase in homicide, which is completely phony. With the rest of the industrialized world, like Great Britain, Italy, Canada, France, Japan, pick a country, you name it, everything went down dramatically during the pandemic. But the leftist media tried to make people believe that, you know, the lockdowns were somehow making people kill each other more. Absurd. Totally absurd.
Anyways, I hope you all enjoyed this video. If you did, smash that thumbs up button. Consider subscribing to the channel. Help it grow. Catch you all in the next video. Peace out, everybody.