It's astounding how many problems are immediately apparent in this article.

> Reports of racially motivated, fatal shootings by police officers have garnered extensive public attention and sparked activism across the nation. New research from Michigan State University and University of Maryland reveals findings that flip many of these reports on their heads – white police officers are not more likely to have shot minority citizens than non-white officers.

> “Until now, there’s never been a systematic, nationwide study to determine the characteristics of police involved in fatal officer-involved shootings,” said Joseph Cesario, co-author and professor of psychology at MSU. “There are so many examples of people saying that when black citizens are shot by police, it’s white officers shooting them. In fact, our findings show no support that black citizens are more likely to be shot by white officers."

First of all, none of this research purports to "flip [any] of these reports on their heads". The preceding disclaimer makes that explicit.

Second of all, the charge of racial bias in policing (and racial bias in police violence as a consequence) is not and has never been about the race of the police officer. So far as I'm aware, the race of the police officers is a focus mostly of white people, sometimes from a misguided assumption that black police won't produce similar results, but usually from a perspective intended to discredit the charge of racial bias. This article beginning from that assumption is a really bad sign.

The charge of racial bias in policing is institutional, structural, and historical. Policing in the US was created to reinforce racist social structures. People who are nominally targets of racism are capable of participating in and reinforcing the racist institutions and social structures which would target them, and there's a long history of that. The fact that people of color as cops reproduce the same outcome in no way discredits the claim that policing is racially biased.

> “Many people ask whether black or white citizens are more likely to be shot and why. We found that violent crime rates are the driving force behind fatal shootings,” Cesario said. “Our data show that the rate of crime by each racial group correlates with the likelihood of citizens from that racial group being shot. If you live in a county that has a lot of white people committing crimes, white people are more likely to be shot. If you live in a county that has a lot of black people committing crimes, black people are more likely to be shot. It is the best predictor we have of fatal police shootings.”

This cannot be supported by the data sources they attribute. The police are the subject of scrutiny and can't be relied on to accurately represent the "rate of crime" of their victims. Nearly 90% of entries in the Washington Post's database has no body camera data. The Guardian's database doesn't provide filtering by accused criminal activity, but a quick glance at a few entries shows descriptions straight out of police reports. The "rate of crime" claim is directly attributable to police, and to levels of policing.

This is obviously unreliable when scrutinizing the police. It bears mentioning, since the murder of George Floyd was a catalyst for recent protests and scrutiny, that the original police report was drastically different from what was actually filmed, and that an independent autopsy reached a drastically different conclusion from the official autopsy.