Reply to Schimmack: Critique of Johnson et al. (2019)

Recently we published a paper showing that officer race did not relate to the race of a civilian shot and, additionally, a lack of anti-Black racial disparities among those fatally shot by police (Johnson, Tress, Burkel, Taylor, & Cesario, 2019). In response, Schimmack (2019) raised a number of criticisms, both on his blog and directly to us by email. In his view, these criticisms undermine the research so fundamentally that the paper should be retracted. In this reply, we address each of the points he raised. These include: (1) coding of variables; (2) interpretations of model intercepts; (3) whether we considered population proportions and crime rates in our analyses; (4) the nature of the age effect and whether this reveals racial bias; and (5) additional analyses by Schimmack claiming to show evidence of racial disparities. We show these criticisms are either inaccurate or do not change the substantive conclusions of the paper. In the one instance where the critique does change the size of our effects (but not their direction or significance), we are in contact with PNAS to determine how to add these additional analyses to the record of the paper.