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"This article has a Correction, but has also been retracted and Letters."

From that retraction:

> 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.

edit: It's also, IMO, misleading to claim "PNAS has also looked at the statistics" based on their publication of a submitted article. It passed peer-review and they saw fit to publish it; it doesn't mean the National Academy of Sciences feels it's the last or only word on the subject.




The error is pretty trivial:

>“Although we were clear about the quantity we estimated and provide justification for calculating Pr(race|shot, X) in our report (see also 2, 3), we want to correct a sentence in our significance statement that has been quoted by others stating ‘White officers are not more likely to shoot minority civilians than non-White officers.’ This sentence refers to estimating Pr(shot|race, X). As we estimated Pr(race|shot, X), this sentence should read: ‘As the proportion of White officers in a fatal officer-involved shooting increased, a person fatally shot was not more likely to be of a racial minority.’ This is consistent with our framing of the results in the abstract and main text.


The retraction comes after the correction, and again, states explicitly:

> our work does not speak to these issues and should not be used to support such statements


This sounds exactly like a common complaint about academic self-censorship, in which academics are terrified about saying anything that might contradict the politically correct consensus.

Barring any odd discrepancies with the data, it it seems clear to me here at least. White officers and non-white officers don't seem to shoot blacks and hispanics at different rates. Hiding behind "does not speak of these issues" seems like a cop out when the conclusion slaps you in the face.




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