Source: Pacific Press / Getty
New research from Drexel University released Tuesday acknowledged that racial bias plays a role in police shootings, reports The Huffington Post.
Dr. James Buehler, the study’s author and sole researcher, concluded that Black people are 2.8 and 1.7 times more likely to lose their lives during encounters with police than White people and Hispanics, respectively.
Buehler’s findings refuted the ideas of Harvard economist Roland Fryer, who said that African Americans are less likely to be shot and killed than Whites despite police being more apt to use force against Blacks in a research study published in July, writes the news outlet:
“A different conclusion is apparent when a population-level perspective is taken,” Buehler says in his study, referring to Fryer’s study. “That approach aims to identify all such deaths in a population and reflects not only the outcomes of police encounters, the focus of Fryer’s investigation, but also the likelihood of police encounters. That difference matters.”
Buehler examined 2,285 death certificates classified as a “legal intervention death” from 2010 to 2014. Ninety-six percent of these deaths were caused by a firearm, 96 percent were male and only five of those deceased were under the age of 10.
“As the United States seeks solutions to the problems underlying highly publicized instances of deaths among Black men during police encounters, being clear about the numbers from different studies and what they mean, or do not mean, is essential,” Buehler writes.
Buehler hopes that his and other population-level studies bring awareness to the disparities in legal intervention deaths, reported Drexel University publication DrexelNow.
SOURCE: The Huffington Post, DrexelNow
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