View all Articles
Commentary By Heather Mac Donald

Mr. Cesario’s Account Constitutes Fake News

Public Safety, Education, Public Safety Policing, Crime Control, Higher Ed, Policing, Crime Control

Joseph Cesario claims that I mischaracterize the reason why he retracted his 2019 study on fatal police shootings.

Joseph Cesario claims that in “I Cited Their Study, So They Disavowed It” (op-ed, July 9) I mischaracterize the reason why he retracted his 2019 study on fatal police shootings (Letters, July 15). Mr. Cesario asserts that he sent me the 2019 paper upon its publication, and therefore would not have objected to my citing it. I have no record of receiving such a submission, nor does the Manhattan Institute. My first interaction with him and his co-author David Johnson was my reaching out to them after a witness at a House Judiciary Committee hearing said that they had admitted that their paper was “unsupported by the data and factually wrong.” Mr. Johnson then sent me his and Mr. Cesario’s defense of their 2019 paper, in which they stated that the paper’s original findings “largely stand unchanged.”

Mr. Cesario also claims that he sent me an email stating that the reason for the retraction was not my citation of his 2019 paper. That email (from Mr. Johnson, not from Mr. Cesario) references their published retraction, which twice cites my work as the sole piece of evidence for the alleged “misuse” of their article.

The remainder of Mr. Johnson’s email follows: “We are reaching out to you because we are aware that you recently published an article in The Wall Street Journal that quoted our article as evidence of a lack of racial bias in police-civilian relationships. As we noted in a correction released in April, our work cannot test this question. 

We request that you no longer cite our retracted paper. Suggesting that our paper indicates a lack of racial bias on the behalf of police is inaccurate and mischaracterizes our work. Thank you.”

This piece first appeared at The Wall Street Journal (paywall)

_____________________

Heather Mac Donald is the Thomas W. Smith fellow at the Manhattan Institute, contributing editor at City Journal, and the author of the bestselling War on Cops and The Diversity Delusion. Follow her on Twitter here.

This piece originally appeared in The Wall Street Journal