Roland Fryer Refuses to Lie to Black America - Freakonomics
"FRYER: I have been on an absolute quest for the last 25 years to catch up. Because I spent the first 20 goofing off and being angry at the world... Andrei Schleifer, who is a dear friend of mine, he said to me, “I don’t know, Roland. Do you even know what police do?” And it was like a gut punch. Man, I didn’t know, right? The truth is, I was biased. I don’t like police. I don’t like them now... I decided maybe I should go embed myself in police departments. And so I did just that. I went to Camden and did a couple double shifts in Camden riding around, went to Houston and did that and even did some simulation and de-escalation training with another police department. The truth is, I didn’t like who I became riding around in a police car after three to four hours. If you ride around looking for bad guys, lo and behold, you see bad guys, right? I was the worst police officer you can imagine. They kept saying, “Roland, it’s not illegal to dribble a basketball.” I was like, “I’m not sure.” But what was interesting, though, in all seriousness, was in Camden, I met police officers who walked the beat. What happens there is that when you see someone who might look dangerous or at least uncertain or random to me, because they know the person, they’re just like, “He’s like that on Thursdays.” It was really interesting for me to see them say that. Because most police officers see you at your worst. But if you’re hanging out in the communities, it gives you a denominator for which to understand the other behavior...
What were we missing in the videos? You know, we’d only seen 12. We had all made these huge conclusions because we had seen 12 horrific videos. But police stops happen thousands of times a day. Look, 80 percent of the police shootings in our data came from a 911 call — not someone pulling someone over and it escalating, which is how we typically see it on T.V. — but a 911 call where the police show up, the person has a weapon, there are multiple witnesses, and a shooting happens. And if that’s 80 percent of the data, it’s not that surprising that there are no racial differences, right? Whenever we talked about lethal uses of force, they would become very earnest and say things like, “discharging your weapon is a life-changing event.” I heard that in city after city. “Discharging your weapon, sir, is a life-changing event.” Not one police officer told me, “Roughing up a Black kid in an alley is a life-changing event.”...
I had colleagues pull me to the side and say, “You’re crazy. Don’t publish this. You’re going to ruin your career.”... they came to me and said, “Look,” after a seminar, “Here’s what you do. You take the lower-level uses of force. Publish that, don’t publish the other.” And I said to this person, “If the results were that there were racial differences in lethal use of force that looked like discrimination, do you think I should publish them then?” And they said, “Yeah, because then it would fit with the first part.” And I said, “Well, then you just ensured I’m going to publish it all because I’m not going to hide a result because you don’t like it.”
DUBNER: I have heard you refer to other researchers who analyze police bias and police behavior as “cowards.” Is this what you’re talking about, that scholars are withholding either evidence or emphasis, at least, on the lack of racial bias in police shootings?
FRYER: Yes, that’s exactly what I mean. Because you can look at the papers and people have similar findings, but it’s in appendix table 157. And they bury it...
My life’s work is about making those communities better. And I refuse to lie to them. I just refuse. Because the folks in those communities they know when they’re being lied to. And we think we’re making all this progress because we, you know, now capitalize the letter ‘B’ in Black. No one in that neighborhood gives a crap about that. They don’t. These are real issues. And I’m not going to bury the truth that can actually help folks just because people are going to be upset about it. The thing about lower-level uses of force is that actually for me provides some optimism because that’s a place that, with the police, we can dig in and try to actually make real progress together. If folks would just stay true to the data instead of trying to make it be what they want it to be, we’d all be in a better place...
A hospital network reached out to us and said, “We have a 33 percent difference in wages, so women earn 33 percent less in our hospital. We’ve done all the training we can do, implicit bias, we’ve done everything. And so what can we do?” We got their data. And that 33 percent was true on average. But, it’s a hospital network. You can’t compare doctors’ salaries with nurses’ salaries, and things like that. And so once you actually accounted for some basic demographics to compare apples with apples, that 33 percent went down to 8.9 percent... once you accounted for overtime hours, that’s what explained the 8.9 percent... many of the female employees who were working those shifts told the administration, “It’s really hard to find childcare in the morning, but if I can get my kids to school and come to work, it’s easier to find in the evenings. And so therefore if you shift the schedule back, we can work as many hours because we want to work hours.” They were demanding more. The c-suite of this hospital network had put themselves in pretzels trying to understand why these big 33 percent disparities were going on. It turns out it was actually 8.9 percent. Turns out, if you made a scheduling change, even that was dramatically reduced. And so by using data, in a matter of a few weeks, it completely transformed how they thought about the disparities in their organization...
FRYER: There are many [school] incentive programs going on across the country. They’re just not well publicized because they’re still controversial, oddly enough.
DUBNER: Controversial because of the idea that learning should be driven intrinsically, right, by the love of learning versus rewards?
FRYER: Yes. Absolutely. Yes.
DUBNER: What do you think of that idea?
FRYER: I agree with that. I also think there should be peace in the Middle East. And I think global warming should stop. Anything else? But no, seriously, I took it the opposite direction. They thought, you’re going to destroy the love of learning. I thought this is a way to cultivate it.
DUBNER: Do you think you were mostly right then, or no?
FRYER: I think both of us were wrong. I think it had no effect because we measured — lo and behold, there’s that data again. We measured using their measures pre- and post-, love of learning and the coefficient was positive, but it wasn’t statistically significant. So we had no real effect or big effect on love of learning either way. What we did have an effect on is test scores went up.
DUBNER: And is that not enough?
FRYER: To me, that’s fantastic. And so if you can get test-score gains and you don’t change the love of learning, that to me is a policy worth doing. Nevermind it’s really inexpensive relative to other reforms. This isn’t changing the number of kids in a classroom, which is really expensive, but this is something where you can actually increase student achievement at a relatively low price."
Too bad he didn't know that he was a victim of structural racism
We know we can Trust The Science because whatever perpetuates White Supremacy does not get published
Too bad everyone will continue to obsess about the student-teacher ratio rather than try incentive programs. Maybe because teachers love lowering the ratio, since more of them get hired
