The authors of a study concluding there is no anti-black bias in police shootings withdrew their paper amid uproar over its citation by conservative scholar Heather Mac Donald.
Mac Donald, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, said in a Wall Street Journal column the researchers stand behind their paper’s conclusion and statistical approach but decry its “misuse,” referring to her op-eds and congressional testimony.
Further, an administrator at Michigan State, which employs one of the researchers, was fired for approving the funding of the research.
The eminent, peer-reviewed Proceedings of the National Academy published in 2019 the study by psychologists Joseph Cesario of Michigan State and David Johnson of the University of Maryland.
They found, after analyzing 917 fatal police shootings of civilians, that neither the race of the officer or the civilian predicted fatal police shootings, taking into account “race specific rates of violent crime.”
Mac Donald noted the findings “accord with decades of research showing that civilian behavior is the greatest influence on police behavior.”
In 2015, under President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder, a Justice Department analysis of the Philadelphia Police Department found white police officers were less likely than black or Hispanic officers to shoot unarmed black suspects. In 2016, the Washington Post reported a Washington State University study finding that police officers are three times less likely to shoot unarmed black suspects than unarmed white suspects.
Mac Donald cited the Proceedings of the National Academy study in congressional testimony in September 2019 and in an article for the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal.
In the City Journal article, she noted Cesario and Johnson had stood by their findings when they were challenged by two Princeton political scientists. The researchers wrote there is “no significant evidence of anti-black disparity in the likelihood of being fatally shot by the police.”
But last month, her quoting of that conclusion verbatim in an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal “set off a firestorm at Michigan State.”
The university’s Graduate Employees Union pressured the university’s press office to apologize for the “harm it caused” by mentioning her article in a newsletter. Michigan State then sacked Steve Hsu, who had approved funding for Cesario’s research.
Meanwhile, the Proceedings of the National Academy editorialized that Cesario and Johnson had “poorly framed” their article. But Mac Donald pointed out the article had gone through the journal’s three levels of editorial and peer review.
She reported that prior to the retraction, Cesario had admitted that Hsu’s dismissal could narrow the “kinds of topics people can talk about, or what kinds of conclusions people can come to.”
The researchers didn’t specify how Mac Donald had “misused” their work. Instead, she said, they attributed to her a position she has never taken, that the “probability of being shot by police did not differ between Black and White Americans.”
She argued she has emphasized that racial disparities in policing reflect differences in violent crime rates.
“The only thing wrong with their article, and my citation of it, is that its conclusion is unacceptable in our current political climate,” Mac Donald said.
She warned of consequences for scholarship in general and policing specifically.
“Researchers will suppress any results that contravene the narrative about endemic police racism,” she wrote. “That narrative is now producing a shocking rise in shootings in American cities.
“The victims, including toddlers, are almost exclusively black.”
‘Minneapolis Effect’
Mac Donald coined the term “Ferguson Effect” after documenting the spike in violent crime that followed the decrease in policing in response to protests of the death of Michael Brown in an altercation with a white police officer.
She said earlier this month a “Minneapolis Effect” already is evident following the demands to defund police in the wake of the death of George Floyd.
Mac Donald cited a Minneapolis Star Tribune analysis showing shootings in Minneapolis have more than doubled this year compared to last. Nearly half of those shootings have occurred since George Floyd’s death on Memorial Day, May 25.
“Today’s violent-crime increase – call it Ferguson Effect 2.0 or the Minneapolis Effect – has come on with a speed and magnitude that make Ferguson 1.0 seem tranquil,” she wrote.
