The Influence of Black Mayors on Police Officers Killed: A Comment on Kaminski and Stucky

Abstract

In a recent publication Kaminsky and Stucky (2009) claim our finding that the presence of a black mayor reduces killings of police officers (see Jacobs & Carmichael 2002) does not hold after they correct an error I made in the 2002 publication. Kaminsky and Stucky, however, ignore our most comprehensive models, which included a nonlinear specification with considerable explanatory power. They instead confine their reanalysis to a simplified and initial less exhaustive model in our paper that did not include the nonlinear specification without mentioning this and other omissions. After I correct my error, and retain the nonlinear specification that was in our definitive models, multiple versions of this model continue to support our hypothesis that the presence of a black mayor reduces killings of police officers. This comment concludes by outsome problems in Kaminski and Stucky’s analysis of later data.

Keywords

Officers Killed Reanalysis Misspecification by ignoring nonlinearities.

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