Academics have powerful incentives to find the existence of racial discrimination in the criminal justice system, even in places where it is absent. If they conduct a study and find no discrimination in an area, the backlash can be intense. But if they twist the data to “find” discrimination, their career may benefit even when in reality, there was no systemic discrimination against blacks. A study that declares that racism is commonplace may be cited hundreds of times by other academics, and get its author tenure, even if its methods are shoddy or its data are cherry-picked or fraudulent. But a study that finds that racism is absent or isolated will be cited far less often, and may lead to retaliation against its author. Despite that, a substantial number of studies continue to reveal that many aspects of the criminal justice system are racially fair, such as judges’ sentencing of criminals for their crimes, and arrests by police for violent crimes.
Campus Reform provides a recent example of the incentive academics have to hide evidence of racial fairness in the criminal justice system. It describes the enraged reaction a black professor got when he published his finding that racism is usually absent in police shootings:
A Harvard University professor recently detailed the extreme backlash he allegedly faced for releasing findings that contradict popular left-wing narratives on policing.
Professor Roland Fryer, an economics professor at the Cambridge, Massachusetts Ivy League institution, recently had a conversation with Bari Weiss of The Free Press during which he discussed the violent reaction to a study he published in 2016.
Fryer stated that “all hell broke loose” immediately after he shared his findings.
During his conversation with Weiss, the professor said that the process of conducting the study was rigorous, involving the collection of “millions of observations” of non-lethal force and “thousands of observations” of lethal force. Fryer and his team analyzed the data over the course of “nearly a year.”
Fryer claimed that the findings showed that there was “some” bias in the use of non-lethal force….However, Fryer acknowledged during the discussion that there was not “any racial bias in police shootings.” As his study noted, “On the most extreme use of force – officer involved shootings – we find no racial differences in either the raw data or when contextual factors are taken into account.”
Fryer, who was previously the “Chief Equality Officer” at the New York City Department of Education, said that he found this result “surprising” because he “expected” to see racial bias in that area.
During the interview with Weiss, Fryer also recounted that he had colleagues “take [him] to the side” and say to him, “Don’t publish this. You’ll ruin your career.”
Fryer recounted that he asked his colleagues whether they believed the part of the study that found “some” racial bias in the use of non-lethal force, to which they responded, “Yes.” But, when he asked them about whether they believed the part of the study that found no racial bias in police shootings, his colleagues told him to “publish [it] another time.”
To ensure that his study results were robust, Fryer stated that he performed the analysis again. When the study returned the “same exact answer,” which he deemed statistically “robust,” he decided to publish it.
Fryer recounted, “It was a 104-page, dense, academic economics paper with a 150-page appendix.” However, just “four minutes” after sharing it, he received his first criticism: “This is full of shit. Doesn’t make any sense.”
After publishing the study, Fryer recalled that he was forced to live “under police protection for about 30 or 40 days,” including while going to the grocery store, due to the violent threats he says were made against him.
“It was crazy,” he said. “It was really, truly, crazy.”
There was little reason to doubt Fryer’s findings, given his sterling qualifications. One prominent black economist argues that “Roland Fryer is the most gifted economist of his generation. Not the most gifted black economist of his generation, the most gifted economist of his generation. Period. He was tenured at Harvard at the age of 30, he was awarded the American Economics Association’s John Bates Clark Medal, he received a MacArthur ‘Genius’ grant, his publications appeared in some of the most distinguished journals in the field, and his scholarship was regularly covered in the mainstream media.”
Another study finding that police shootings aren’t racist was withdrawn under pressure after it came out, not because of any flaws in the study, but because it was cited by a conservative, Heather MacDonald, in the Wall Street Journal. It was withdrawn under pressure even though a professor who is an expert on the admissibility of scientific evidence, found nothing wrong with the study’s methodology. As that professor observed, “It’s absurd to ask that a valid study be retracted [because] you think others are ‘misusing’ it. A study says what it says, and so long as it wasn’t actually flawed it shouldn’t be retracted for political reasons except perhaps under truly extreme circumstances, which this isn’t.” Critics objected to an “extrapolation” in the study, but it was a “perfectly reasonable one.” The study’s “retraction resulted from a sustained attempt to discredit politically unpopular research,” rather than anything being wrong with the research.”
Many studies that claim to find racism are based on junk science or outright falsification of data. A professor at Florida State University was recently fired for fraudulent studies finding widespread racism. He won considerable acclaim and praise for publishing those studies.
Many studies that claim to find racism based on statistical disparities omit major variables needed to test whether racial disparities are due to racism, or are instead the result of non-discriminatory causes. (The Supreme Court’s Croson decision warns that it is “completely unrealistic” to expect that minorities will be found in every field in “lockstep proportion to their representation in the local population” in the absence of racism. Yet academics commonly make just that unrealistic assumption).
If a researcher studies a field and claims to find widespread discrimination in it (such as in an industry, or in the criminal justice system), it is easy to get that finding of discrimination published in an academic journal, even if the researcher has omitted major variables needed to actually prove discrimination, or even if the researcher is unwilling to make his data available (many studies contain the claim that the authors’ data will be made available upon request, but this is often a lie — the authors usually decline to turn over the data when it is later requested. 93% of authors who indicated that data was available on request either did not respond or declined to share their data, according to a recent study in an academic journal).
By contrast, if a researcher finds that systemic discrimination is absent in a field or the criminal justice system, the researcher may be unable to get his research published. And if it is published, a finding of non-discrimination may trigger reprisals by left-wing academics, against the study’s author and those who publish or disseminate it (as The College Fix noted in the article “Scholar forced to resign over study that found police shootings not biased against blacks.”).
A truthful academic can lose his job over a single accurate study that angers progressives by finding that racism is not widespread. And such a study may well be retracted even if its methodology was reliable and the underlying data was accurate. For example, a study finding that police shootings were generally not racist was retracted because it was cited by a conservative in the Wall Street Journal. Heather Mac Donald, a conservative legal scholar, had discussed the study in a widely-read Wall Street Journal column, “The Myth of Systemic Police Racism.”
That publicity resulted in an enormous backlash against the academics who conducted and discussed the study, by progressive academics angry about its conclusions.
The first casualty of the backlash was Stephen Hsu, the Vice President for Research at Michigan State University. He was forced to resign because he publicly discussed the study, as The College Fix notes in the article “Scholar forced to resign over study that found police shootings not biased against blacks.”
As the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation notes, “Hsu’s crime was publicizing research done at his university, which is exactly what you would expect a VP of research to do. But the particular piece of research reached [an ideologically] Forbidden Conclusion.” The research was valid, but in today’s academia, “the truth shall get you fired.”
After witnessing what happened to Hsu, the researchers who conducted the study sought their own article’s retraction, citing its “misuse by the media” — that is, in the Wall Street Journal, where the study had been accurately described.
