Academics Try To Get Own Study Canned After It Finds Inconvenient Truth About Race & Police Shootings
By C. Douglas Golden
Published July 11, 2020 at 12:35pm
Being the authors of a widely cited academic study ordinarily would be a good thing. But not for Joseph Cesario and David Johnson, apparently. They’ve asked for that widely cited paper to be retracted — not because of any errors in it, mind you, but because of who’s citing it.
You probably would be less surprised if I told you the study was called “Officer characteristics and racial disparities in fatal officer-involved shootings.” Cesario and Johnson — from Michigan State University and the University of Maryland, respectively — were among the authors of a study that looked at whether there were any distinct patterns of racial bias in fatal police shootings.
Their conclusion, as reported by Retraction Watch, was that originally there was “no evidence of anti-Black or anti-Hispanic disparities across shootings, and White officers are not more likely to shoot minority civilians than non-White officers.”
Well, whoops. That’s impolitic. The study was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2019 and been a political football once conservatives started using it to hit back on anti-police rhetoric.
The authors already had issued a correction in April dealing with that sentence. Based on their calculations, they said “this sentence should read: ‘As the proportion of White officers in a fatal officer-involved shooting increased, a person fatally shot was not more likely to be of a racial minority.’ This is consistent with our framing of the results in the abstract and main text.”
Then came a new wave of attention when the study was cited in a controversial June Wall Street Journal Op-Ed written by Heather Mac Donald of the right-leaning Manhattan Institute. Titled “The Myth of Systemic Police Racism,” Mac Donald argued that “[c]rime and suspect behavior, not race, determine most police actions.”
The paragraph that cited the study read thusly: “The latest in a series of studies undercutting the claim of systemic police bias was published in August 2019 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The researchers found that the more frequently officers encounter violent suspects from any given racial group, the greater the chance that a member of that group will be fatally shot by a police officer. There is ‘no significant evidence of antiblack disparity in the likelihood of being fatally shot by police,’ they concluded.”
Earlier this week, Cesario and Johnson requ ested a retraction on the article. The reason wasn’t based on errors in their research, however. Instead, it was partially because they were unhappy with who was using it and partially because they felt people were extrapolating their data to all police shootings, not just fatal ones, or to “policing in general.”
“Our article estimated the role of officer characteristics in predicting the race of civilians fatally shot by police. A critique pointed out we had erroneously made statements about racial differences in the probability of being shot (1), and we issued a correction to rectify the statement (2),” the retraction read.
“Despite this correction, our work has continued to be cited as providing support for the idea that there are no racial biases in fatal shootings, or policing in general. To be clear, our work does not speak to these issues and should not be used to support such statements. We take full responsibility for not being careful enough with the inferences made in our original report, as this directly led to the misunderstanding of our research.”
“While our data and statistical approach were appropriate for investigating whether officer characteristics are related to the race of civilians fatally shot by police, they are inadequate to address racial disparities in the probability of being shot.”
It’s impossible to overstate the pusillanimity of retracting a paper where the data is sound because you think people are misusing that data or that it doesn’t cover a wide enough spectrum. As George Mason University Law School professor David Bernstein pointed out, this isn’t actually a reason for retraction: