The Patriot Post® · Are Police Less Respectful to Blacks?

A recently released study touted by the New York Times makes the claim that “police officers speak significantly less respectfully to black than to white community members in everyday traffic stops.” At face value, that’s a concerning finding that would seem to support the leftist charge of a police culture rife with institutional racism. But we seem to recall a saying about lies and statistics…

The authors of the study arrived at their conclusion by analyzing written transcripts of traffic stops captured by police body cameras in Oakland, California. The study used an algorithm that rated nearly 37,000 different statements made in the course of about 1,000 police-civilian interactions where “the race of the officer, the severity of the infraction, the location of the stop, and the outcome of the stop” were statistically controlled. In other words, there is little reason to be critical of accuracy of the data collected.

However, there is one glaringly major problem with the study — the data not collected. In all their effort to collect and analyze the data on how the police officers spoke to those individuals they had pulled over, researchers collected and analyzed no data on how those civilians, of whatever race, spoke to the police officers. Nor was there any data collected that captured the manner of body language or any other response police officers were confronted with by those they had stopped. To put it bluntly, the study based its conclusion on only half the data.

When a study sets out to determine why a higher percentage of blacks than whites report negative experiences in their interactions with the police, it would be remiss to ignore the subject of those complaints and whether or not those complaints are based upon legitimate information. A one-sided study will most often confirm the bias of the side conducting the research. And here we thought leftists were on the side of Science™.