A recently released working paper that analyzes the racial differences in police use of force has received some criticism. The paper found that while racial disparity exists in non-lethal police uses of force, that is not the case for fatal shootings by police.

“An Empirical Analysis of Racial Differences in Police Use of Force” was posted in July on the website of the National Bureau of Economic Research, a private non-profit organization. It was written by Roland G. Fryer, Jr., a Harvard University professor of economics.

As a working paper, it has not gone through a peer-review process yet.

Fryer examined four datasets to measure racial disparity with regard to police use of force: New York’s stop-and-frisk program, in which police could stop, question and frisk pedestrians; the Police-Public Contact Survey, a nationally representative, triennial survey of civilians who have had interactions with police; event summaries from all incidents in which officers discharge weapons from 10 locations in the USA; and random samples of police-civilian interactions from the Houston Police Department, taken from arrest codes in which lethal force is more likely to be justified.