“If the research was flawed, then just say so and retract it. But what they are saying is, “Our research is correct but people we hate are using it, so erase it.” I get the feeling they would deny 2+2=4 if the Wokestapo ordered them to.”
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.