Several academics have challenged Cesario’s methodology, namely his decision to “sidestep the benchmark” of using population to calculate racial disparity. It has been questioned whether using population is an appropriate benchmark in these kinds of analyses: Critics of this technique believe that population-benchmarking is flawed because it assumes black and white people have an equal likelihood of encountering police.
[...]
The problem with this, as Princeton professor Jonathan Mummolo, explained on Twitter, is that it still rests on the assumption that black and white officers encounter black civilians in equal numbers, or in even temperaments—which they don’t.
The study claims its approach “sidesteps the benchmark debate”—the problem of picking a baseline to use to evaluate shooting rates across racial groups. We show this is not true. The study implicitly and wrong assumes black/white civilians encounter police in equal numbers.2/N
— Jonathan Mummolo (@jonmummolo) August 1, 2019