Greg Ridgeway is a statistician at the University of Pennsylvania and he has worked with police departments and oversight organizations on ways to measure racial bias in police stops, gauge police-community relations, and reduce gun violence. His recent study focusing on which NYPD police officers are more likely shoot has, for the most part, been buried by the media.
While we won’t presume why, one particular result was never mentioned in any press releases on the study:
“black officers were 3.3 times more likely to shoot than other officers.”
Ridgeway left it out because he didn’t want that to dominate the headline and it also mirrored a similar study from 30 years ago that said the same thing and that took on a lot of criticism.
Ridgeway remarked, “I don’t have the luxury of sort of explaining away that finding.”
Well we don’t either but we maintain what we often say about the myriad of studies that are done in an effort to prove racism in law enforcement.
If you do 100 studies, you could twist them 100 ways. We have read them all and our authors have a collective experience in law enforcement that exceeds 1000 years and we do not see systematic racism in the profession regardless of the race of the officer.
You can read Ridgeway’s study here.
