Reply to McCrain, Adams, Nix, and Del Pozo (2024), "Reconsidering a prominent finding on the spillover effects of police killings of unarmed Black Americans"

Abstract

Our previously published work (Bor, Venkataramani, Williams, and Tsai, 2018) showed that officer-involved killings of unarmed Black people have adverse mental health spillover effects on Black people in the general U.S. population. In a recent preprint, McCrain, Adams, Nix, and Del Pozo (2024) raised concerns about our methods, findings, and the interpretation of our findings. In this reply, we interrogate and address each of their concerns, showing that their replication introduced bias not present in the original. We also use the opportunity to conduct additional robustness checks. We find nothing to reduce confidence in our findings. Further buttressing our confidence are the multiple additional out-of-sample replications of our findings that have accrued in the literature over the past 5 years.