Error report for: Hehman et al. (2018).

DECISION AND RECOMMENDATION Hehman et al. (2018) “Disproportionate Use of Lethal Force in Policing Is Associated With Regional Racial Biases” was determined to contain a Major Error that affects a core conclusion. Specifically, the conclusion in the Abstract – “Results indicate that only the implicit racial prejudices and stereotypes of White residents, beyond major demographic covariates, are associated with disproportionally more use of lethal force with Blacks relative to regional base rates of Blacks in the population.“ — is unsupported upon reexamination of the assumptions behind the applied model. An intuitive reading would lead the reader to think that the relationship between White people’s scores on the Black/White Racial Prejudice IAT and police killings of Black people cannot be explained through demographic covariates. However, the use of a difference of proportions variable as the regression outcome did not effectively adjust for the Black population base rate. A reformulated regression model that accounts for base rates more effectively finds no significant relationship between Black/White Racial Prejudice IAT scores and police killings of Black people. Therefore, the results for racial prejudice did not, in fact, hold “beyond major demographic covariates”. However, the result that scores on the Black/White Weapons Stereotype IAT predict police killings of Black people was still significant after effectively accounting for the base rate of Black people in the population.As such, the detected errors rise to the level where I recommend that the authors seek a correction notice. Following the ERROR project’s emergent guidelines, the recommendations associated with this decision are as follows: - The report, author response, and recommendation have been posted on the ERROR website (https://error.reviews/reviews/hehman-et-al-2018/) and as a preprint on PsyArXiv. Their associated materials have been posted to OSF (see https://osf.io/abyqs/).- The authors are asked to recognize these errors in future discussions of the article. - The authors are recommended to pursue a correction with the journal.