Retraction of paper on police killings and race not due to “‘mob’ pressure” or “distaste for the political views of people citing the work approvingly,” say authors

via Tony Webster/Flickr

The researchers who earlier this week called for the retraction of their hotly debated paper on police shootings and race say the reasons for their decision to pull the article have been misinterpreted. 

Crime researchers David Johnson, of the University of Maryland, and Joe Cesario, of Michigan State University, initially referred in a retraction statement to citations to the work of Heather Mac Donald, of the right-leaning Manhattan Institute, who wrote about the PNAS article for the City Journal and the Wall Street Journal.

Those pieces, Cesario and Johnson said, had unfairly co-opted the paper, ““Officer characteristics and racial disparities in fatal officer-involved shootings,” to argue against the existence of racial bias in police shootings. 

In an amended statement, the authors noticeably omit references to Mac Donald. On Wednesday, Cesario told Retraction Watch: 

The [first statement] was an earlier version and we slightly amended it because people were incorrectly concluding that we retracted due to either political pressure or the political views of those citing the paper. Neither is correct and so this version makes the reason more clear.  

Our post earlier this week on the retraction request drew attention from politically conservative news outlets, such as the National Review, The Blaze and others who lamented the decision as a capitulation to an intellectually intolerant left. 

Using the preprint server PsyArXiv, Johnson and Cesario posted their new statement, which makes clear that that wasn’t the case. According to the new version of what the authors call “the short answer” in the document, which includes a new paragraph: 

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. 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 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. 

This was the sole reason for our decision to retract the article; this decision had nothing to do with political considerations, “mob” pressure, threats to the authors, or distaste for the political views of people citing the work approvingly. 

The explanation concludes, as did the previous version: 

Readers might wonder why we chose to examine only police encounters that resulted in fatal shootings of civilians versus encounters that did not, as the latter is necessary to estimate racial disparities in the probability of being shot. The reason is that current analyses on police use of force are limited by the lack of comprehensive and complete national databases on police interactions with the public, where force is used and where force is not used.

Without more data on police-civilian encounters, it is difficult to estimate racial bias in police use of force. This lack of data is why we collected information about all officers who fatally shot civilians in 2015, an undertaking that took more than 1800 hours over three years. The lack of detailed, publicly available information on police-civilian encounters is unacceptable and necessary for a more complete understanding of where bias exists in police-civilian interactions. 

Cesario also told us that at least part of the conservative narrative about the fallout from the article was misguided. Although the Wall Street Journal alleged that Stephen Hsu, an MSU administrator, lost his post in part because he supported the shooting study, Cesario said that’s not the case: 

Hsu funded the development of a laboratory shooting simulator and his money was not used in any way to fund the retracted research. As you can see in the Acknowledgements section of the PNAS paper, we did not thank Hsu’s office (or any of the other offices who funded the simulator research) for funding us on that paper.

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14 thoughts on “Retraction of paper on police killings and race not due to “‘mob’ pressure” or “distaste for the political views of people citing the work approvingly,” say authors”

  1. Hahaha! seems right from Moscow Trials.
    The authors seem to have forgotten science and making it even more ridicule. They absurdly retire a paper because it is “misused”?

    Will they support to hide inconvenient data too?

  2. “Those pieces, Cesario and Johnson said, had unfairly co-opted the paper, “Officer characteristics and racial disparities in fatal officer-involved shootings,” to argue against the existence of racial bias in police shootings. ”

    From the paper: “We did not find evidence for anti-Black or anti-Hispanic disparity in police use of force across all shootings, and, if anything, found anti-White disparities when controlling for race-specific crime. While racial disparity did vary by type of shooting, no one type of shooting showed significant anti-Black or -Hispanic disparity.”

    Nice try, guys.

  3. The authors’ excuse for retracting a factually accurate paper does not pass the straight-face test, as observers have noted. They cite the supposed “misuse of our article to support the position that the probability of being shot by police did not differ between Black and White Americans.”

    But no one cited it for that position. Instead, those who cited it recognized that blacks have a higher probability of being shot, but said that is not because of racism, but rather due to the higher black crime rate and other factors that lead blacks to have higher rates of deadly encounters with the police. They cited the study only for the proposition that police shootings are not generally racist — a proposition consistent with studies by the black Harvard economist Roland Fryer and others, who also have found no systemic racial bias in police shootings against African-Americans. There was no misuse of the study by those who cited it, such as Heather Mac Donald.

    As The College Fix noted today, “What Mac Donald actually wrote” was that “black civilians are shot less, compared with whites, than their rates of violent crime would predict.” But McDonald still emphasizes that due to the higher black crime rate, blacks have a higher probability of being shot.

    Regardless, as GMU law professor David Bernstein notes, “It’s absurd to ask that a valid study be retracted b/c you think others are ‘misusing’ it.”

    Most writings about this agree that the study was not “misused,” nor were its findings distorted. See, e.g., “Academics seek to retract scientific study because conservative cited it,” July 8, 2020 (commentary by lawyer who handled discrimination cases for a living).

    It was a useful study that should not be retracted.

    1. I don’t know how accurate is this paper is, but that is for others to came up with better data and better work if possible.
      What the authors have done here is shameful not only for science but specially for future scientists.

    2. My best friend is white and I am black. The irony of stereotypes is I’m the goody goody and she has always been the bad girl. It works because she is poor and that levels the playing field right? Wrong. After being constantly followed by store clerks with my Tongan friend we found that’s while my white friend stole quite literally in front of clerks they were SO BUSY watching me and my Tongan friends she was NEVER caught. She fenced maybe 10,000 in goods. She never went to college and earned just average grades. She and her husband both own 2 homes each without credit. Just people liking them was all it took. I have a Bachelors in Biology making less than 100, 000 a year. She landed a Google position at 150,000. These things are not researched because they require honesty which people like yourself are incapable of producing. Face the facts. Whites have social welfare which is unearned and you do not ever want to work like all of us. My mom and many like me were raised to conduct ourselves 2 times and well as white people for half as much credit. You look for behavior that’s backs up your biased opinion about black people. My son has consistently down 3.5 or better when home school. In class he can’t get at 3.0 . Teachers do not like him. He can feel their disgust and he performs badly. This leads to dropping out of school. My geometry teacher made fun of my questions and that humiliated me and I have hated math ever since. Racism is deeper than not liking a person. It predetermined my ranking at the bottom of society. My son is lucky to be alive on a day to day basis. Why is that fair. Why would you want to live in a coin that treats other this way. You don’t care. Why? Racism.

  4. It’s obvious why they retracted their original retraction. The only person guilty of misrepresenting the others’ views here is in fact Cesario. He baldly lies about the content of MacDonalds article in the original retraction. Who got to these guys? Retracting a paper you stand by because someone (accurately) quoted it to make a point you disagree with? Free thinking is truly dead. Lowery wins and truth, facts, and honest discourse are now subservient to The Narrative. It’s Marc Edwards all over again. Trust science, they tell us – unless it hurts The Narrative.

  5. Wow! That’s exactly why it was removed. The data spoke for itself. Science killed by the mob once again.

  6. Is this precedented? A reviewed and affirmed study withdrawn because laymen were allegedly misinterpreting it?

    Seems to me that would keep Retraction Watch awfully busy….

  7. Thus, according to this logic, published works by Einstein, Freud, or Fisher, should all be retracted. After all, they have all been widely misrepresented by the lay public (and sometimes even by professionals) over many decades, right?

    Let’s retract them all! This should also teach a lesson to all those who dare question The Narrative!

  8. To be a bit more fair, Johnson and Cesario made a serious analytic error that renders the paper nearly useless.

    They used “crime rate/arrest/conviction” as a proxy for the rate of actual crime carried out by Black Americans. However, the crime rate is absolutely suffused with unequal treatment and racism. We know that the rate of marijuana use among Whites and Blacks is roughly comparable, but Blacks are arrested four times as much as Whites.

    Although the disparity in enforcement is likely to be a bit smaller, there’s little question that using “crime rate” as a benchmark substantially overestimates the actual rate of Black crime.

    What the authors did was, by using crime rate as a benchmark, was to put in a proxy for racism, remove it statistically, and then proclaim “no racism!” It was a bit of sleight of hand where they pulled it out statistically, and then pretended it didn’t exist.

    That’s why the paper needed to be corrected and retracted, and deserved its fate. All the rest is silly political yammering–the kind we find in all the posts above.

    1. “To be clear, there is a population-level racial disparity in fatal police shootings. But our work suggests this disparity is explained by differences in rates of exposure to the police, rather than racial bias by officers making deadly force decisions.”

      “Given the number of police-citizen encounters each day, the likelihood that any one citizen will be shot by the police is extremely low; the likelihood that someone not engaged in criminal activity will be shot by the police is almost zero.”

      Joseph Cesario
      Associate Professor of Psychology, Michigan State University

      https://theconversation.com/a-new-look-at-racial-disparities-in-police-use-of-deadly-force-98681

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