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| Another Academic Found The Same Thing... |
Being the authors of a widely cited academic study ordinarily would be a good thing. But not for Joseph Cesario and David Johnson, apparently. They’ve asked for that widely cited paper to be retracted — not because of any errors in it, mind you, but because of who’s citing it.
You probably would be less surprised if I told you the study was called “Officer characteristics and racial disparities in fatal officer-involved shootings.” Cesario and Johnson — from Michigan State University and the University of Maryland, respectively — were among the authors of a study that looked at whether there were any distinct patterns of racial bias in fatal police shootings.
Their conclusion, as reported by Retraction Watch, was that originally there was “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.”
Well, whoops. That’s impolitic. The study was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2019 and been a political football once conservatives started using it to hit back on...
