borislvin

Июль 2019 года

David J. Johnson, Trevor Tress, Nicole Burkel, Carley Taylor, and Joseph Cesario

"Officer Characteristics and Racial Disparities in Fatal Officer-Involved Shootings"

There is widespread concern about racial disparities in fatal officer-involved shootings and that these disparities reflect discrimination by White officers. Existing databases of fatal shootings lack information about officers, and past analytic approaches have made it difficult to assess the contributions of factors like crime. We create a comprehensive database of officers involved in fatal shootings during 2015 and predict victim race from civilian, officer, and county characteristics. We find 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. Instead, race-specific crime strongly predicts civilian race. This suggests that increasing diversity among officers by itself is unlikely to reduce racial disparity in police shootings.
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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.

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1903856116

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Апрель 2020 года

CORRECTION

Although we were clear about the quantity we estimated and provide justification for calculating Pr(racejshot,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(shotjrace,X). As we estimated Pr(racejshot,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/doi/epdf/10.1073/pnas.2004734117

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Июль 2020 года

RETRACTION

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.

Given these issues and the continued use of our work in the public debate on this topic, we have decided to retract the article.

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2014148117