Researchers who published a widely cited paper on fatal police shootings in 2019 said they’ve requested a retraction because the paper is being used improperly.
Two of the researchers, David Johnson and Joseph Cesario, submitted a request this week to PNAS for a retraction of the paper.
The psychology professors said they were careless when describing inferences that could be made from the data in the paper, which looked at fatal police-involved shootings in 2015.
“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,” they wrote. “To be clear, our work does not speak to this issue and should not be used to support such statements.”
The 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,” Cesario and Johnson said in the retraction request.
Mac Donald
An earlier version (pdf) of the retraction request named only one person who the researchers said was misusing the paper: Heather Mac Donald, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute.“The authors don’t say how I misused their work. Instead, they attribute to me a position I have never taken: that the ‘probability of being shot by police did not differ between Black and White Americans.’ To the contrary, I have, like them, stressed that racial disparities in policing reflect differences in violent crime rates,” she wrote.
“The only thing wrong with their article, and my citation of it, is that its conclusion is unacceptable in our current political climate.”
In an email to The Epoch Times, Cesario said lots of people were citing the work incorrectly, including Mac Donald.
“We were sloppy and careless with the inferences we made and that is why people were misusing the work. Hence the responsibility was ours to retract and rewrite the paper in a more careful manner,” he said.
Johnson told The Epoch Times via email that the new statement “clarifies why my coauthors and I decided to retract the paper.”
A spokesperson for PNAS said that it received the request for retraction.
“We are working to publish the statement as quickly as possible,” the spokesperson said in an emailed statement. As of July 9, the statement has not yet been published on the journal’s website.
The authors have not been told when their retraction statement will be published by PNAS.
The peer-reviewed paper was published on June 24, 2019. It was received for review on March 5, 2019.
A “glaring mistake” was missed during peer review, the editorial, which appears to be from two people who peer reviewed the article, states. A statement about the article from the officers “erroneously asserted that ‘white officers are not more likely to shoot minority civilians than nonwhite officers,’” Douglas Massey of Princeton University and Mary Waters of Harvard University wrote.
“Unfortunately, their article did not contain the data to address this question, and their analyses did not allow them to conclude this.”