“It’s just a completely indefensible conclusion to draw from the data that’s available,” says Dean Knox, a political scientist at Princeton University who published a critique of the study this month. To begin to justify such a claim, he says, researchers would need to know how often black and white civilians encounter police officers—something the authors of the original study did not consider in the paper.
Another criticism: The study did not investigate the possibility that all police—white and nonwhite—could be biased in shooting black men, says psychologist Phillip Atiba Goff at the Center for Policing Equity and John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City. “It’s not a serious framing of bias to think that white people have bias and other people don’t,” he says.
Read the full article by Juanita Bawagan of Sciencemag.org