Study Casts Doubt on Racial Bias in Police Shootings:  A study published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences adds to the list of academic papers which provide evidence against the widely accepted claim that police shootings of black and Hispanic males are driven by racial bias.  The study "Officer characteristics and racial disparities in fatal officer-involved shootings," performed by five Psychology professors from Michigan State University and the University of Maryland, created a detailed database on fatal officer involved shootings which included the race and sex of the officers as well as the victims and accounted for the level of violent crime in the community where the shootings occurred.  The study found that the widely used benchmark of comparing the percentage of a given race in the population to the percentage of that race who are shot by police, is misleading because the exposure of members of different races to situations where police shootings are the most frequent vary widely.  "We find no evidence of anti-Black or anti-Hispanic disparities across shootings, and White officers are not more likely to shoot minority civilians than non-White officers.  Instead, race-specific crime strongly predicts civilian race."