The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences is a peer-reviewed journal that claims to publish “only the highest quality scientific research.” Now, the authors of a 2019 PNAS article are disowning their research simply because I cited it.Retracting the article was probably part of the price they paid for keeping their jobs or their research funding, if in fact they are able to do so. The per capita crime rates of Blacks and Hispanics are substantially higher than those for whites and Asians. Noting this is a good way to lose one's career and reputation. As a retiree I have neither to lose, so I mention it.
Psychologists Joseph Cesario of Michigan State and David Johnson of the University of Maryland analyzed 917 fatal police shootings of civilians from 2015 to test whether the race of the officer or the civilian predicted fatal police shootings. Neither did. Once “race specific rates of violent crime” are taken into account, the authors found, there are no disparities among those fatally shot by the police. These findings accord with decades of research showing that civilian behavior is the greatest influence on police behavior.
In September 2019, I cited the article’s finding in congressional testimony. I also referred to it in a City Journal article, in which I noted that two Princeton political scientists, Dean Knox and Jonathan Mummolo, had challenged the study design. Messrs. Cesario and Johnson stood by their findings. Even under the study design proposed by Messrs. Knox and Mummolo, they wrote, there is again “no significant evidence of anti-black disparity in the likelihood of being fatally shot by the police.”
On Monday they retracted their paper. They say they stand behind its conclusion and statistical approach but complain about its “misuse,” specifically mentioning my op-eds. 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. The only thing wrong with their article, and my citation of it, is that its conclusion is unacceptable in our current political climate.
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A quick story from my distant past. An undergraduate roommate, now dead, did a doctorate in research psychology at Berkeley. As a grad assistant he helped with a study that examined non-verbal measures of intelligence in pre-schoolers.
The intent was to show there were no differences across racial groups. When the data was crunched, they found politically incorrect significant differences: Asians were smarter than whites who were smarter than Hispanics who were smarter than Blacks.
This was exactly what the "awful racist" Shockley had claimed. My friend ruefully reported the research was never published.
The "wrong" results would have harmed the researchers' careers even more than the resulting two year publishing "dry spell." My friend's career was also damaged as he was unable to coauthor follow-on articles with the researchers, since none were written.
