Study linking police violence and black infants’ health is retracted

Dec. 16, 2019

A provocative study that linked police killings of unarmed black people with health problems in black infants has been retracted due to problems with the data used in the analysis.

A preliminary effort to repeat the analysis with corrected data found no significant link between police violence and infants’ chances of being born early or having a lower birth weight, said author Joscha Legewie, a sociologist at Harvard University.

Legewie said he was alerted to the problem by a reader who noticed mistakes in the way some of the killings had been classified.

“Seeing that is basically the nightmare of every scientist, so I immediately started digging into that,” he said.

https://www.latimes.com/science/story/2019-12-16/police-shootings-black-babies-health-retraction