A recent PNAS study, Johnson et al. (1), investigates the role of race in fatal police shootings. Unlike previous studies which focused on victim race alone, the paper features original data about the race of officers who use deadly force and offers a rare accounting of other shooting attributes that contextualize fatal encounters. Johnson et al. (1) discuss possible “discrimination by White officers” (ref. 1, p. 15877), but conclude racial diversity in police agencies brings limited benefits—a claim cited by major news outlets and in US Congressional testimony, inflaming an already contentious policy debate. Despite the value of this much-needed research, its approach is mathematically incapable of supporting its central claims. In this letter, we clarify the gap between what Johnson et al.’s study asserts and what it actually estimates, as well as the implications of that difference for policymaking and future scholarship on race and policing. Johnson et al.'s study asks “the degree to which Black civilians are more likely to be fatally shot than White civilians” (ref. 1, p. 15877) and prominently asserts “White officers are not more likely to shoot minority civilians than non-White officers” (ref. 1, p. 15877). In the language of probability, Johnson et al.’s study (1) concludes ...
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", language="en", issn="0027-8424", doi="10.1073/pnas.1919418117", url="http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1919418117" }