PSYCHOLOGICAL AND COGNITIVE SCIENCES Retraction for “Officer characteristics and racial disparities in fatal officer-involved shootings,” by David J. Johnson, Trevor Tress, Nicole Burkel, Carley Taylor, and Joseph Cesario, which was first published July 22, 2019; 10.1073/pnas.1903856116 (Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 116, 15877–15882).
The authors wish to note the following: “Our article estimated the role of officer characteristics in predicting the race of civilians fatally shot by police. A critique pointed out we had erroneously made statements about racial differences in the probability of being shot (1), and we issued a correction to rectify the statement (2).
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.”
1. D. Knox, J. Mummolo, Making inferences about racial disparities in police violence. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 117, 1261–1262 (2020).
2. D. J. Johnson, T. Tress, N. Burkel, C. Taylor, J. Cesario, Correction for Johnson et al., Officer characteristics and racial disparities in fatal officer-involved shootings. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 117, 9127 (2020).