After he published his study, people ‘lost their minds,’ he said.
Harvard professor Roland Fryer, who at age 30 became the youngest African-American to ever be awarded tenure at the Ivy League school, has revealed he faced threats and had to get armed security after publishing a study showing no racial bias in police-involved shootings.
Mr. Fryer, who has received numerous awards for his academic research, in 2016 published a study that turned on its head the prevailing leftist narrative that police-involved shootings are tinged by racism.
His study found that, while black people were more likely to be the target of non-lethal police force, such as being thrown against a wall, they were no more likely to be shot than whites.
In fact, after controlling for a variety of different circumstances, Mr. Fryer’s research actually found that officers were less likely to shoot at black people than at white people in similar situations, although the difference was not statistically significant.
His findings contradict the claim made by groups like Black Lives Matter that police readily resort to lethal force when dealing with black suspects.
“I let the data talk, and I don’t care what it says,” Mr. Fryer said during a 2022 video conference discussing his work. “I’m willing to tell the truth. I don’t care about the personal cost.”
“I believe the literal truth will set us free,” he added.
More recently, in a Feb. 13 interview with Bari Weiss of The Free Press, Mr. Fryer discussed the price he had to pay for telling the truth.
He said that, after he published his study (against the advice of his Harvard colleagues), people “lost their minds” and he faced a torrent of complaints and threats.
‘All Hell Broke Loose’
Mr. Fryer told Ms. Weiss that he expected his research to show different conclusions, given the prevailing narratives that police are driven by racial animus to shoot blacks at disproportionately higher rates.
He said that, when his research showed no racial bias in police-involved shootings, he hired a new team of assistants and repeated the study, but the results were the same.
By Tom Ozimek
