In a new paper using an interesting approach, Roland Fryer finds that police officers treat blacks and Hispanics more roughly than whites, but they don't shoot them any more frequently:

The results obtained using these data are informative and, in some cases, startling. Using data on NYC's Stop and Frisk program, we demonstrate that on non-lethal uses of force—putting hands on civilians (which includes slapping or grabbing) or pushing individuals into a wall or onto the ground, there are large racial differences. In the raw data, blacks and Hispanics are more than fifty percent more likely to have an interaction with police which involves any use of force.

In stark contrast to non-lethal uses of force, we find no racial differences in officer-involved shootings on either the extensive or intensive margins. Using data from Houston, Texas—where we have both officer-involved shootings and a randomly chosen set of potential interactions with police where lethal force may have been justified—we find, in the raw data, that blacks are 23.8 percent less likely to be shot at by police relative to whites. Hispanics are 8.5 percent less likely.

Analyzing data from cities in California, Texas, and Florida, Fryer found that lethal force was used more often against whites than blacks.

Garner and Sterling were, in fact, doing something that's now celebrated in very different forums by small-scale "entrepreneurs" who typically don't look like them. They were trying to earn income off what they had at hand in ways that are not strictly legal. The parallels to today's sharing economy aren't such a stretch, argued tech entrepreneur Anil Dash this week

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In cities where short-term rentals remain technically illegal, we don't typically think of Airbnb hosts as operating in a black market. Nor do we consider Uber drivers skirting the law — making, for instance, illegal airport runs — to be "hustling." But the kind of parallel activities Dash cites have been heavily criminalized, with the further help of anti-loitering laws. Black children selling candy bars come to be treated as criminals.

In this video that went viral last week, an older woman scolds a black child for selling candy outside of a California Target, a practice she describes as seeing "all around the country." She demands to see the child's license to be there (an intervening man defends the young vendor and offers to buy all of the candy). The child's voice, at the 40-second mark — "excuse me, sir" — sounds painfully young

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The larger cruelty is that, by excluding certain communities from the formal economy, society has pushed people who might prefer legal work into underground alternatives. Poor education, criminal records, discrimination and legal obstacles for immigrants have turned the shadow economy into a key means for how marginalized communities support themselves, whether driving gypsy cabs, selling street food or working restaurants under the table. This kind of activity is more often associated with developing countries, but it thrives in poor urban communities in the United States, too.