An important result Ross reports is that, "There is no relationship between county-level racial bias in police shootings and crime rates." That result means "that the racial bias observed in police shootings in this data set is not explainable as a response to local-level crime rates." So that result is pivotal to Ross's conclusion of racial bias.

However, how were crime rates measured? In the "Crime Rate Data" section, Ross states:

"Race-specific assault- and weapons-related arrest data compiled by the United States Department of Justice were accessed from the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research [55]. Arrests were summed within counties.”

So only assault- and weapons-related arrests were counted to determine 'crime rates'. Why wouldn't homicides be included in determining crime rates? Variable rates of homicide across regions likely reflect variable risk police officers face for firearms incidents, and thus likely reflect variable risk of officer-shooting errors. So surely homicides need to be included, not excluded, from the measure of crime rates.

Unfortunately the crime-data source Ross use is restricted, saying: "data available only to ICPSR members." So I tried but cannot see if there might be some obvious reason why homicide data was excluded. However, even if the data are for some reason not amenable for inclusion, on its face it seems that exclusion of the most significant criminal acts in the study regions surely undermines the value of Ross's pivotal result of no association between police shooting and regional crime rates.