By Joe Broadmeadow — Retired Captain, East Providence Police Department
I spent more than two decades in law enforcement, much of it working drug investigations, including time on FBI and DEA task forces.
I’ve seen what violence does to families and to neighborhoods.
I’ve also watched, with increasing frustration, how the public conversation about policing and race has drifted further from the data the longer the cameras stay on.
If we want fewer people killed in this country, Black, white, Hispanic, or otherwise, we need to start with what the numbers actually tell us. And on that score, one of the most important pieces of research of the last decade is a study almost no one outside academia has read.
The Fryer Study Nobody Wants to Talk About
In 2016, Harvard economist Roland G. Fryer Jr., at the time the youngest African American ever granted tenure at Harvard, published An Empirical Analysis of Racial Differences in Police Use of Force through the National Bureau of Economic Research. Fryer is not a sympathetic voice for police unions. He went into the project, by his own account, expecting to find systematic racial bias in officer-involved shootings.
He didn’t.
After roughly 3,000 hours of data collection across multiple jurisdictions, Fryer reached two findings that should have reframed the entire debate:
- On non-lethal force, Black and Hispanic civilians were more than 50 percent more likely than whites to experience some level of physical force during interactions with police. Even after controlling for civilian behavior and context, the disparity narrowed but did not disappear.
- On lethal force—officer-involved shootings—Fryer found no statistically significant racial bias, in either the raw data or after adjusting for context. He called it the most surprising result of his career.
The study has critics, and Fryer himself has acknowledged real limitations in the data. But the central finding has held up: when researchers move past population-based comparisons and look at who police actually encounter under what circumstances, the racial gap in lethal force largely disappears. The non-lethal disparity is real and worth fixing. The narrative of police hunting Black men in the street is not what the numbers show.
The Police-Shooting Numbers in Context
The Washington Post’s Fatal Force database—the most thorough independent count we have—shows that U.S. police shoot and kill roughly 1,000 to 1,200 civilians a year. In 2024, the totals were approximately 445 white, 277 Black, and 201 Hispanic decedents.
Yes, Black Americans are overrepresented relative to their share of the population. The rate is about 6.2 fatal police shootings per million for Black Americans, 2.8 per million for Hispanic Americans, and 2.4 per million for white Americans. Those numbers deserve serious attention—and Fryer’s non-lethal findings tell us there is real work to be done on how force gets used short of a gun.
But here is the part that almost never makes it into the conversation: those police-shooting totals exist alongside a vastly larger body count.
Where the Killing Actually Happens
According to CDC mortality data compiled by the Violence Policy Center, there were 12,276 Black homicide victims in the United States in 2023. The Black homicide victimization rate stood at 26.6 per 100,000, compared with 3.9 per 100,000 for white Americans—a ratio of roughly seven to one. The Bureau of Justice Statistics, using a different methodology, reports a similar gap (21.3 per 100,000 for Black persons; 3.2 for white). For Black males specifically, the rate climbs to roughly 46 per 100,000—more than eight times the rate for white males.
Now hold those figures next to the police-shooting numbers. In 2024, fewer than 280 Black Americans were killed by police. In the same general window, more than 12,000 were killed by other civilians. Police shootings account for roughly two percent of Black homicide deaths in any given year. The other 98 percent are not happening at traffic stops.
And they are not, by and large, happening across racial lines.
The Intraracial Reality
The FBI’s expanded homicide data and decades of subsequent research have consistently found that homicide in America is overwhelmingly intraracial. In single-victim, single-offender cases where both races are known, roughly 91 percent of Black homicide victims are killed by Black offenders, and roughly 81 percent of white homicide victims are killed by white offenders. Hispanic victimization patterns follow the same intraracial logic. The “white-on-Black” and “Black-on-white” homicide categories that drive so much political shouting are statistically minor compared to violence within communities.
This is not a moral indictment of any community. It is a function of geography, segregation, and the simple fact that most people are killed by someone they know or someone in their neighborhood. Criminologists have understood this for half a century. It is uncomfortable, but it is not in dispute.
What the Numbers Demand of Us
If we genuinely want to save Black lives, and we should, the math is unforgiving. Eliminating every police shooting of a Black American tomorrow would prevent fewer than 300 deaths a year. Reducing the Black homicide victimization rate to the white rate would prevent roughly 10,000 deaths a year. That is more than thirty lives saved for every one saved by perfect policing.
That doesn’t mean we ignore the non-lethal disparities Fryer documented, or the cases of misconduct that absolutely do occur. Departments need accountability, training, and culture change. I’ve said so for years, and I’d say so again to any commander who would listen. But the disproportionate weight given to a relatively rare event, while the engine of mass Black mortality runs unaddressed in the same neighborhoods, is not just bad policy. It is a betrayal of the people most likely to be buried.
The Fryer study told us something inconvenient: the cops are not the principal threat to Black life in America. The data since then has only confirmed it. We can keep arguing about the headlines, or we can follow the numbers to where the bodies actually are.
The families burying their kids in Chicago, Baltimore, St. Louis, and Memphis don’t have the luxury of pretending otherwise.
Joe Broadmeadow is a retired captain of the East Providence, Rhode Island, Police Department and a former member of FBI organized crime task forces. He is the author of the Josh Williams crime fiction series and several true-crime works published through JEBWizard Publishing.
Sources (because I know you won’t take my word for it, nor should you.)
- Roland G. Fryer Jr., An Empirical Analysis of Racial Differences in Police Use of Force, NBER Working Paper No. 22399 (2016); Journal of Political Economy 127, no. 3 (2019).
- Washington Post Fatal Force Database, 2015–2024.
- Violence Policy Center, Black Homicide Victimization in the United States (July 2025), drawing on CDC mortality data for 2023.
- U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, Homicide Victimization in the United States, 2023 (May 2025).
- FBI Uniform Crime Reporting Program, Expanded Homicide Data (most recent available).
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