Harvard professor Roland Fryer on disrupting the false narrative around policing

The Invisible Men

Join Ian and Nique this week for the second half of their two-part discussion with Harvard professor, MacArthur Genius Grant recipient, and early-stage investor Roland Fryer. In this episode, Roland shares how, following the murder of Walter Scott, he was inspired to build the best dataset possible to assess how race shapes police interactions in America today. Roland assembled a team to partner with police departments across the U.S. and build a state-of-the-art dataset on policing. His findings shocked many. While large racial gaps persisted on lower-level uses of force during police interactions, even after accounting for potential causal factors apart from race, Roland’s team also found no racial differences in rates of police shootings across race. Roland shares how, in the wake of this research, he encountered resistance within academia as he sought to give an accurate telling of full the story painted by his data analysis, being encouraged by elite economists top exclude unpopular findings from his published papers. Watch the full episode to hear about Roland’s groundbreaking research on the determinates of successful charter schools and how he used that research to launch a new curriculum, “Reconstruction,” which seeks to teach kids a proper understanding of their place and potential in this world.