[The Sabbaticus]

Authors of study on race and police killings ask for its retraction, citing “continued misuse” in the media

The authors of a controversial paper on race and police shootings say they are retracting the article, which became a flashpoint in the debate over killings by police, and now amid protests following the murder of George Floyd.

The 2019 article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), titled “Officer characteristics and racial disparities in fatal officer-involved shootings,” found “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.” It has been cited 14 times, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science, earning it a “hot paper” designation.

Joseph Cesario, a researcher at Michigan State University, told Retraction Watch that he and David Johnson, of the University of Maryland, College Park and a co-author, have submitted a request for retraction to PNAS. In the request, they write:

We were careless when describing the inferences that could be made from our data. This led to the misuse of our article to support the position that the probability of being shot by police did not differ between Black and White Americans (MacDonald, 2019). To be clear, our work does not speak to this issue and should not be used to support such statements. We accordingly issued a correction to rectify this statement (Johnson & Cesario, 2020).

Although our data and statistical approach were valid to estimate the question we actually tested (the race of civilians fatally shot by police), given continued misuse of the article (e.g., MacDonald, 2020) we felt the right decision was to retract the article rather than publish further corrections. We take full responsibility for not being careful enough with the inferences made in our original article, as this directly led to the misunderstanding of our research.

The MacDonald references are two pieces by Heather MacDonald of the Manhattan Institute, one in the City Journal and the other in the Wall Street Journal.

As Cesario and Johnson note, the article earned heavy criticism for its methodology. The article led to an exchange of letters in PNAS in January, and then in April, the journal issued a correction to the paper in which the authors acknowledged flaws in their analysis but stood by their central argument.

At the time, Jonathan Mummulo and Dean Knox, both of Princeton, called the correction an “opaque half-measure.” Today, Mummolo and Knox told Retraction Watch:

We appreciate the authors’ willingness to take this action. We hope readers and policymakers will now cease relying on this paper when considering the critical issue of racial bias in policing.

May Berenbaum, the editor in chief of PNAS, told Retraction Watch:

I can confirm that the authors contacted us early this morning to request a retraction and we’re working to publish the statement as quickly as possible.

A Wall Street Journal editorial claimed last month that a “Twitter mob” forced the demotion of a Michigan State faculty member, Stephen Hsu, from his post as senior vice president for research and innovation at the school, in part because of his perceived role in having “directed funding to research downplaying racism in bias in police shootings” by funding Cesario’s study.

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Retraction Watch

One of the better studies on race and police killings was retracted by the authors, citing 'misuse by the media'. The circumstances surrounding the retraction however paint an unusual picture. In this hotly politicized debate about police shootings and general fanaticism of BLM activists as seen in the recent riots and so-called 'cancel culture' online, the authors came under extreme pressure and criticism. One of their colleagues had apparently already suffered a demotion due to this activity.

[skinster]

Why are you obsessed with race? For somebody who cries about identity politics, you sure won't shut up about it.

What's going on in the Dutch land? We need to do something about cloggyville.

[ThirdTerm]

The paper was not retracted but corrected three times. In the most recent update, the authors corrected the sentence from the paper: ‘White officers are not more likely to shoot minority civilians than non-White officers,’ which seems to condone police brutality against minorities. This 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.’

“Although we were clear about the quantity we estimated and provide justification for calculating Pr(race|shot, X) in our report (see also 2, 3), we want to correct a sentence in our significance statement that has been quoted by others stating ‘White officers are not more likely to shoot minority civilians than non-White officers.’ This sentence refers to estimating Pr(shot|race, X). As we estimated Pr(race|shot, X), 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.
https://www.pnas.org/content/117/16/9127

Abstract
Despite extensive attention to racial disparities in police shootings, two problems have hindered progress on this issue. First, databases of fatal officer-involved shootings (FOIS) lack details about officers, making it difficult to test whether racial disparities vary by officer characteristics. Second, there are conflicting views on which benchmark should be used to determine racial disparities when the outcome is the rate at which members from racial groups are fatally shot. We address these issues by creating a database of FOIS that includes detailed officer information. We test racial disparities using an approach that sidesteps the benchmark debate by directly predicting the race of civilians fatally shot rather than comparing the rate at which racial groups are shot to some benchmark. We report three main findings: 1) As the proportion of Black or Hispanic officers in a FOIS increases, a person shot is more likely to be Black or Hispanic than White, a disparity explained by county demographics; 2) race-specific county-level violent crime strongly predicts the race of the civilian shot; and 3) although we find no overall evidence of anti-Black or anti-Hispanic disparities in fatal shootings, when focusing on different subtypes of shootings (e.g., unarmed shootings or “suicide by cop”), data are too uncertain to draw firm conclusions. We highlight the need to enforce federal policies that record both officer and civilian information in FOIS.
https://www.pnas.org/content/116/32/15877