![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dragonlady7via http://ift.tt/2mZcYkO:
mostlysignssomeportents:
Statistician Patrick Ball runs an NGO called the Human Rights Data Analysis Group, which uses extremely rigorous, well-documented statistical techniques to provide evidence of war crimes and genocides; HRDAG’s work has been used in the official investigations of atrocities in Kosovo, Guatemala, Peru, Colombia, Syria and elsewhere.
HRDAG is called upon to estimate the full scope of killings by soldiers and police in situations where no records have been kept, or when the records have systematically excluded the worst offenses, and where witnesses and survivors fear reprisals and will not come forward. Through their decades of experience, Ball and HRDAG have developed methodologies for producing good estimates even where the data is in such disarray.
One place where this disarray exists is in the USA, where no comprehensive records are kept of police killings, where some jurisdictions openly refuse to supply any statistics on such killings, and where fear of reprisals and an unjust system prevent many incidents from being reported at all.
In a must-read article in Granta>, Ball explains the fundamentals of statistical estimation, and then applies these techniques to US police killings, merging data-sets from the police and the press to arrive at an estimate of the knowable US police homicides (about 1,250/year) and the true total (about 1,500/year).
That means that of all the killings by strangers in the USA, one third are committed by the police.
This is data-driven journalism at its finest: uncovering socially vital data that has been suppressed at the highest levels, while providing an education in how to estimate numbers like these from fragmentary data-sources.
http://ift.tt/1psThQ8
mostlysignssomeportents:
Statistician Patrick Ball runs an NGO called the Human Rights Data Analysis Group, which uses extremely rigorous, well-documented statistical techniques to provide evidence of war crimes and genocides; HRDAG’s work has been used in the official investigations of atrocities in Kosovo, Guatemala, Peru, Colombia, Syria and elsewhere.
HRDAG is called upon to estimate the full scope of killings by soldiers and police in situations where no records have been kept, or when the records have systematically excluded the worst offenses, and where witnesses and survivors fear reprisals and will not come forward. Through their decades of experience, Ball and HRDAG have developed methodologies for producing good estimates even where the data is in such disarray.
One place where this disarray exists is in the USA, where no comprehensive records are kept of police killings, where some jurisdictions openly refuse to supply any statistics on such killings, and where fear of reprisals and an unjust system prevent many incidents from being reported at all.
In a must-read article in Granta>, Ball explains the fundamentals of statistical estimation, and then applies these techniques to US police killings, merging data-sets from the police and the press to arrive at an estimate of the knowable US police homicides (about 1,250/year) and the true total (about 1,500/year).
That means that of all the killings by strangers in the USA, one third are committed by the police.
This is data-driven journalism at its finest: uncovering socially vital data that has been suppressed at the highest levels, while providing an education in how to estimate numbers like these from fragmentary data-sources.
http://ift.tt/1psThQ8
