Roughly 2 years ago I started building a database of fatal officer-involved shootings (OIS) at the agency-year level, going back in time as far as possible. If you’re not familiar with the OIS data landscape, here’s the gist:
Official data compiled by the FBI and NVSS have long been recognized as woefully incomplete and thus inadequate.
Unofficial data compiled by current/former journalists, activists, and researchers have become available over the last decade or so.
BOTTOM LINE: Yes, there was a merge error in our research note, “When Police Pull Back”. However, correcting it did not render all our key findings nonsignificant as Jacob Kang-Brown claimed. In his replication, Jacob calculated our spatial lag variable differently, thereby reintroducing the endogeneity problem we designed our analysis to avoid. We are correcting, not retracting, the research note.
What happened? We made an honest mistake. We own that.