A senior police officer in Oklahoma said cops shoot Black people 'less than we probably ought to'

• Tulsa Police Department Maj. Travis Yates said officers are shooting Black people "less than we probably ought to" during an interview with talk radio host Pat Campbell on his podcast on Monday.
• He also argued that systemic racism in policing "just doesn't exist."
• Yates has a history of making controversial comments about the Black Lives Matter movement, and once said that police were "at war" with activists.

A senior police officer in Tulsa, Oklahoma, said that systemic racism in policing "just doesn't exist," and suggested that officers are shooting Black people "less than we probably ought to."

Tulsa Police Department Maj. Travis Yates was speaking with talk radio host Pat Campbell on his podcast when he made the comments on Monday.

"If a certain group is committing more crimes, more violent crimes, and law enforcement's having to come into more contact with them, that number is going to be higher. Who in the world in their right mind would think that our shootings should be right along the US Census lines? That's insanity," he said in the podcast, first reported on by Public Radio Tulsa. "All of the research says we're shooting African-Americans about 24% less than we probably ought to be, based on the crimes being committed. This isn't Travis talking — the research is sound, but nobody's watching it, they're just looking at memes and losing their minds."

In a statement to KTUL, Yates called Public Radio Tulsa's article on his interview misleading and said he was citing research from Roland Fryer, Heather Mac Donald, and the National Academy of Sciences.

Fryer wrote a controversial study in 2016 in which he argued police were more likely to shoot white people than black people. Critics called Fryer's research flawed. Scholar Mac Donald, too, has been criticized for her pro-police research. A study published by the National Academy of Sciences said last year that white police officers weren't more likely to shoot minority suspects, but critics argued that the study did not address racial disparities created by police.

Based on data from a 2016 Washington Post report, Black Americans are 2.5 times more likely to be shot and killed by police than white Americans. Their research says that much research that suggests the opposite does not take population differences into account.

In a statement to Insider, Yates said he was disappointed that Public Radio Tulsa did not include the research he referenced when they initially published their article on his interview.

"You may not agree with everything I said in the 40-minute interview. But disagreements and dialogue are an important aspect of our society. So is truth in journalism," he said. "More importantly, attacking me personally does nothing to change the probability statistics and research that others have written about — the very ones I referenced, and the very ones that were left out of the article."

Yates has a history of making controversial comments about the Black Lives Matter movement — he said police were "at war" with activists in 2016, and once tried to blame police violence on victims.

In his interview on Monday, Yates again criticized the Black Lives Matter protests that erupted in the days following the May 25 death of George Floyd, who died after a Minneapolis police officer knelt on his neck for nearly nine minutes.

He argued "justice" has been done in Floyd's case, as the officers involved in his death were fired, arrested, and charged.

"This is what they're trying to say that all these changes need to come from: this is why we're protesting, this is why we're rioting. Because of systematic abuse of power and racism. That just doesn't exist," he said on the show.

TPD Capt. Richard Meulenberg told Public Radio Tulsa that he had not listened to Yates' comments.

"Everybody's got a right to their opinion. Obviously, he being a major with the Tulsa Police Department, it carries some weight that he has his opinion, and we'll have to just kind of go through this. I mean, I can't speak upon the thing that he talked about here because I don't have the data. I can't refute or substantiate what it is that he said here," Meulenberg said.

This article has been updated to include a statement from Yates.

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