I Cited Their Study, So They Disavowed It
Save yourself a click - the author (Heather MacDonald) appears to be trying to create controversy by playing dumb.<p>To summarize - MacDonald cited, in speech and writing, a 2019 study on fatal police shootings by two academic psychologists. Apparently, a backlash to the study&#x27;s findings then developed at one of the researchers&#x27; institutions (Michigan State University) and the study was ultimately retracted by its authors. You can read the statement they issued at that time here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;retractionwatch.com&#x2F;wp-content&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;2020&#x2F;07&#x2F;PNAS_STATEMENT.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;retractionwatch.com&#x2F;wp-content&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;2020&#x2F;07&#x2F;PNAS_...</a> (MacDonald&#x27;s &#x27;misuse&#x27; of their research is explicitly mentioned as contributing to the retraction). MacDonald goes on to imply that the administrator responsible for approving funding for the study was fired as a result of this, but this claim is not corroborated by 
local news coverage (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.lansingstatejournal.com&#x2F;story&#x2F;news&#x2F;2020&#x2F;06&#x2F;15&#x2F;michigan-state-msu-stephen-hsu-research-removal-petition-graduate-employees-union&#x2F;5345120002&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.lansingstatejournal.com&#x2F;story&#x2F;news&#x2F;2020&#x2F;06&#x2F;15&#x2F;mi...</a>), which pointed to a history of pro-eugenics, racist, and sexist comments as the cause of his dismissal and didn&#x27;t mention MacDonald or the study she cited.<p>The supposedly controversial finding MacDonald cited in her writing (presumably without the sort of context that would likely have accompanied it in an academic setting, since that&#x27;s how it appears in the above WSJ op-ed) is that race didn&#x27;t serve as a factor in predicting fatal police shootings within a sample of 917 shootings from 2015 <i>after accounting for &quot;race-specific rates of violent crime&quot;</i> (emphasis mine). Downplaying the fact that black Americans are disproportionately subject to police violence, with regard to population, MacDonald&#x27;s op-ed repeatedly makes variations of what she seems to think (or at least insists) are identical claims, namely <i>&quot;that racial disparities in policing reflect differences in violent crime rates,&quot;</i> and <i>&quot;that civilian behavior is the greatest influence on police behavior.&quot;</i><p>While it might seem like she&#x27;s saying that <i>your</i> behavior will influence how police officers might treat <i>you</i>, what she&#x27;s actually saying is that the behavior of <i>people who look like you</i> will influence how you&#x27;re treated by police. Put another way, it&#x27;s OK for police to shoot unarmed black men with no history of violence if they seem threatening because of their superficial resemblance to violent criminals (i.e. race). The incredulity she expresses at the prospect that this viewpoint might provoke controversy seems to belie her lack of perspective (or, if I&#x27;m being cynical, her willingness to engage in rhetorical manipulation of her audience).<p>As if that&#x27;s not disgusting enough, this op-ed&#x27;s undercurrent seems to be that black Americans are disproportionately engaged in violent crime, and that media figures are simply too afraid of appearing politically incorrect to acknowledge the &quot;truth.&quot; What seems apparent from her writing is that MacDonald is actually afraid to openly state her views, which - fairly construed - seem to represent the basic idea that, just a couple of generations removed from legal segregation, black America has already reached the point where it&#x27;s unburdened by any racially-derived disadvantage and, thus, deserves what it gets. Since &quot;what it gets,&quot; as of 2020, is a heap of disadvantages, as portrayed by available socioeconomic data, the only logical conclusion one can reach is that inferior performance must reflect inferior potential. Luckily for the world, MacDonald&#x27;s ridiculous perspective is the product of a bevy of equally ridiculous assumptions - she&#x27;s just not a very astute social scientist (assuming she actually believes what she writes).<p>Before the odds of anyone getting to the end of this approach zero, I&#x27;ll close by briefly revisiting some of the nuances MacDonald completely glosses over when discussing crime rates. As a result of decades of policies like broken windows policing, whereby some neighborhoods receive disproportionate levels of police attention and minor offenses are heavily enforced, the reliability of crime rates, as an objective research measure, can be called into question. In short, we now know that the efficacy of broken windows policies is inconclusive, that there <i>is</i> a relationship between poverty and crime that can be strong enough to obfuscate the influence of other factors (and it can run both ways), and that increasing the amount of police presence in a neighborhood can produce more &quot;criminals&quot; (i.e. more arrests, people with criminal records, etc.) without improving the safety of that neighborhood (in some cases, it can actually reduce public perception of safety). We also know that the likelihood of being arrested for committing a given offense differs among races (ex. black and white Americans consume marijuana at similar rates, yet black Americans are 3-4x as likely to be arrested for marijuana possession). Together, these various conclusions (or lack thereof) paint a muddled, complex portrait that completely contradicts the tidy (and completely wrong) landscape that presumably hangs above the desk in MacDonald&#x27;s home office - what determines how police treat you is not your own behavior, but a complex web of factors, some of which began to exist well before you did.