Authors of Study on Race and Police Killings Seek Retraction Because Conservatives Cite It

Legal Insurrection ^ | July 7, 2020 | Mike LaChance

[CheshireTheCat]

An academic paper from 2019 defies the current progressive narrative about police targeting minorities. The paper has been cited by right leaning scholars, such as Heather Mac Donald of the Manhattan Institute.

Now the authors of the paper are seeking to retract it.

We’re now politicizing inconvenient facts and data.

Retraction Watch reports:

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).'

[CheshireTheCat]

So they didn't discover that their findings were wrong, just the political implications of their work.

[Old Yeller]

Truth is tough to get around.

[2banana]

but....science!!!!

[yarddog]

They didn’t lie and now are apologizing for it.

You must lie now.

[ealgeone]

Facts are irrelevant. Only the narrative is important.

[SunkenCiv]

A) too late, B) retraction proves they are not scholars, C) if it's retracted, that makes the peer review process at PNAS worthless.

[Crucial]

Probably the author’s career was threatened.

[NativeSon]

What a bunch of PNASes.

[eyeamok]

Time to burn all the books yet?

[workerbee]

From the Univ of MD website:

David J. Johnson is a social-cognitive psychologist and postdoctoral researcher at the University of Maryland, College Park. He received his Ph.D. in Psychology from Michigan State University in 2016 and was a postdoctoral researcher there in 2017. His research employs computational models and secondary data analyses to study the psychological processes that underlie decisions. He has used this approach to understand decisions where law enforcement have shot unarmed civilians. His work in this area currently focuses on how several different factors—such as the race of the civilian, the context the shooting takes place in, and the dispatch information officers receive—influence the accuracy of these use of force decisions, as well as the basic cognitive processes that produce them.

[Crim]

Party of “science”

[neverevergiveup]

OK. In exchange for retracting the paper, make them pay back any grant funding they received during this period.

[aposiopetic]

In the old days, to get published in PNAS you had to "know somebody," meaning you had to have a connection to a member of the NAS, who could submit the paper.

Ergo, I'm not sure how good the PNAS review process ever was, though it's a shame this paper is being pulled if it's accurate.

[Sergio]

Our data is correct, however, you are using it in the wrong way. Remember that 2 + 2 equals whatever our social justice overlords tell us it equals.

[MadMax, the Grinning Reaper]

They should be fired for incompetence. Would serve them right for being such PC cowards.