What Would Better Data On Police Shootings Actually Change Or Accomplish?

Ideology has entered the chat.

My ex-wife and some of her friends were real nerds on random policy things, so I remember hearing about Roland Fryer about 12–15 years ago. He was a young Harvard professor getting McArthur Genius Grants and doing a lot of stuff on poverty. Seemed cool. He was black, “bootstrappped,” and in his early 30s. This was, of course, overlapping with the rise of Obama. Whole thing seemed noble and interesting. I cannot say I have since read a lot of Fryer’s poverty work, but somehow my YouTube algorithm did serve me up a conversation between him and Patrick Bet-David the other day:

A word of caution about that conversation: like virtually every Patrick Bet-David clip you will see, it is very self-aggrandizing, and there is a lot of talk about sales and the Army and various things that have nothing to do with the primary topic. Still, if you can get through 22 minutes, it’s interesting.

This conversation was relatively recent, but in it, they talk about a 2017 paper…