/sci/ - Science & Math

I know what you're thinking, but no, this isn't a /pol/ thread. I actually want to talk about the science of racism, and to be specific, the following study:

http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/asset?id=10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0141854.PDF

If you're too lazy to read it, I'll highlight some relevant sections from the abstract:
>A geographically-resolved, multi-level Bayesian model is used to analyze the data presented in the U.S. Police-Shooting Database (USPSD) in order to investigate the extent of racial bias in the shooting of American civilians by police officers in recent years.
> The results provide evidence of a significant bias in the killing of unarmed black Americans relative to unarmed white Americans, in that the probability of being {black, unarmed, and shot by police} is about 3.49 times the probability of being {white, unarmed, and shot by police} on average
> Furthermore, the results of multi-level modeling show that there exists significant heterogeneity across counties in the extent of racial bias in police shootings, with some counties showing relative risk ratios of 20 to 1 or more.
> There is no relationship between county-level racial bias in police shootings and crime rates (even race-specific crime rates), meaning that the racial bias observed in police shootings in this data set is not explainable as a response to local-level crime rates

In my opinion, this is a study that shows quantitatively and rigorously that racism does exist- and likely underlies the higher mortality rate of blacks vs whites in police actions.

Thoughts?