Correction for Johnson et al., Officer characteristics and racial disparities in fatal officer-involved shootings

PSYCHOLOGICAL AND COGNITIVE SCIENCES Correction 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: “Recently, we published a report showing that, among civilians fatally shot, officer race did not predict civilian race and there was no evidence of anti-Black or anti-Hispanic disparities (1). Specifically, we estimated the probability that a civilian was Black, Hispanic, or White given that a person was fatally shot and some covariates. The dataset contains only information about individuals fatally shot by police, and the race of the individual is predicted by a set of variables. Thus, we compute Pr(race|shot, X) where X is a set of variables including officer race.

“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.

“We appreciate the feedback that led us to clarify this sentence (4). To be clear, this issue does not invalidate the findings with regards to Pr(race|shot, X) discussed in the report.”

1. D. J. Johnson, T. Tress, N. Burkel, C. Taylor, J. Cesario, Officer characteristics and racial disparities in fatal officer-involved shootings. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 116, 15877–15882 (2019).

2. D. J. Johnson, J. Cesario, Reply to Knox and Mummolo and Schimmack and Carlsson: Controlling for crime and population rates. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 117, 1264–1265 (2020).

3. D. J. Johnson, J. Cesario, Reply to Knox and Mummolo: Critique of Johnson et al. (2019). https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/dmhpu (16 August 2019).

4. D. Knox, J. Mummolo, Making inferences about racial disparities in police violence. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 117, 1261–1262 (2020).