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New Estimate Of Killings By Police Is Way Higher — And Still Too Low
Carl Bialik of 538 Politics interviews HRDAG executive director Patrick Ball in an article about the recently released Bureau of Justice Statistics report about the number of annual police killings, both reported and unreported. As Bialik writes, this is a math puzzle with real consequences.
That Higher Count Of Police Killings May Still Be 25 Percent Too Low.
Carl Bialik of 538 Politics reports on a new HRDAG study authored by Kristian Lum and Patrick Ball regarding the Bureau of Justice Statistics report about the number of annual police killings, which was issued a few weeks ago. As Bialik writes, the HRDAG scientists extrapolated from their work in five other countries (Colombia, Guatemala, Kosovo, Sierra Leone and Syria) to estimate that the BJS study missed approximately one quarter of the total number of killings by police.
Why It Took So Long To Update the U.N.-Sponsored Syria Death Count
In this story, Carl Bialik of FiveThirtyEight interviews HRDAG executive director Patrick Ball about the process of de-duplication, integration of databases, and machine-learning in the recent enumeration of reported casualties in Syria.
New reports of old deaths come in all the time, Ball said, making it tough to maintain a database. The duplicate-removal process means “it’s a lot like redoing the whole project each time,” he said.
A geeky deep-dive: database deduplication to identify victims of human rights violations
In our work, we merge many databases to figure out how many people have been killed in violent conflict. Merging is a lot harder than you might think.
Many of the database records refer to the same people--the records are duplicated. We want to identify and link all the records that refer to the same victims so that each victim is counted only once, and so that we can use the structure of overlapping records to do multiple systems estimation.
Merging records that refer to the same person is called entity resolution, database deduplication, or record linkage. For definitive overviews of the field, see Scheuren, Herzog, and Winkler, Data Quality ...
HRDAG Offers New R Package – dga
Much of the work we do at HRDAG involves estimating the number of undocumented deaths using a statistical technique called multiple systems estimation (MSE, described in more detail here). One of our goals is to make this class of methods more broadly available to human rights researchers. In particular, we are finding that Bayesian approaches are extremely valuable for MSE. Accordingly, we are pleased to offer a new R package called dga (“decomposable graphs approach”) that performs Bayesian model averaging for MSE.
The main function in this package implements a model created by David Madigan and Jeremy York. This model was designed to ...
Why It Took So Long To Update the U.N.-Sponsored Syria Death Count
In this story, Carl Bialik of FiveThirtyEight interviews HRDAG executive director Patrick Ball about the process of de-duplication, integration of databases, and machine-learning in the recent enumeration of reported casualties in Syria.
New reports of old deaths come in all the time, Ball said, making it tough to maintain a database. The duplicate-removal process means “it’s a lot like redoing the whole project each time,” he said.
FiveThirtyEight
Carl Bialik
August 23, 2014
Link to story on FiveThirtyEight
Related blogpost (Updated Casualty Count for Syria)
Back to Press Room
New Estimate Of Killings By Police Is Way Higher — And Still Too Low
Carl Bialik of 538 Politics interviews HRDAG executive director Patrick Ball in an article about the recently released Bureau of Justice Statistics report about the number of annual police killings, both reported and unreported. As Bialik writes, this is a math puzzle with real consequences. Here's an excerpt.
Patrick Ball, co-author of the critique and executive director of the Human Rights Data Analysis Group, said it’s not the BJS’s fault that it underestimated the number. That it estimated it at all was an important step, he said. Government agencies don’t all audit their own data or undertake the difficult task of matching records that ...
Civil War in Syria: The Internet as a Weapon of War
Suddeutsche Zeitung writer Hakan Tanriverdi interviews HRDAG affiliate Anita Gohdes and writes about her work on the Syrian casualty enumeration project for the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights. This article, "Bürgerkrieg in Syrien: Das Internet als Kriegswaffe," is in German.
Suddeutsche Zeitung
Hakan Tanriverdi
January 4, 2015
Link to story on SZ
Related blogpost (Updated Casualty Count for Syria)
Back to Press Room
FAQs on Predictive Policing and Bias
Last month Significance magazine published an article on the topic of predictive policing and police bias, which I co-authored with William Isaac. Since then, we've published a blogpost about it and fielded a few recurring questions. Here they are, along with our responses.
Do your findings still apply given that PredPol uses crime reports rather than arrests as training data?
Because this article was meant for an audience that is not necessarily well-versed in criminal justice data and we were under a strict word limit, we simplified language in describing the data. The data we used is a version of the Oakland Police Department’s crime report...
Learning Day by Day: Quantitative Research at the AHPN
Working at the Historic Archive of the National Police (AHPN) of Guatemala, there are many skills I learned on the job. My many years of work on the team that studies the recovered documents have been like a custom-made course in how to do quantitative research.
The Archive documents I study are the result of 36 years of creation during civil war (1960 to 1996). Many of these documents are simply administrative—but we are able to use them to understand patterns that occurred during the conflict, to get a sense of what mattered to the National Police and what didn’t. Our quantitative research shows us the Police behavior in broad strokes. ...
CIIDH Data – Variables List
Version date: 2000.01.29
Current version: ATV20.1
Patrick Ball & Herbert F. Spirer
Below are listed the 19 files that constitute the CIIDH database. We have noted those that include data that might be analytically useful in future versions of ATV. File names and brief definitions are in bold, and variable summaries are in bulleted points.
CXTOV2 (Context; links to VLCNV2)
Additional detail on geographic location of case
Narrative summary
CXTOV2ex (Context extension; links to CXTOV2)
Fine breakdown on the age category & sex of anonymous victims
CXTOV2lg (Context extension; links to CXTOV2)
Legal procedures taken on behalf of the ...
Controlled vocabulary
What is a controlled vocabulary?
A controlled vocabulary provides the ability to transform information that has been collected on violations, victims, and perpetrators into a countable set of data categories. It is important that this process be done without discarding relevant information and without misrepresenting the collected information.
Why is it necessary?
The data collected about human rights violations originates from a wide range of information sources – legal case files, newspaper articles, e-mails, faxes, letters, phone conversations, testimonies, interviews, radio and television programs, video clips, and photos. This wide range of ...
El Salvador
Some of the earliest large-scale human rights information projects happened in El Salvador. One was developed by Patrick Ball at the Salvadoran non-governmental Human Rights Commission, also known as Comision de Derechos Humanos de El Salvador (CDHES-ng). Between 1977 and 1990, more than 9,000 testimonies were taken in an effort to document the nature and scope of the bloody conflict between the army and the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN). Starting in 1991, Patrick worked with CDHES staff to organize the information in an early computer database. They linked reported human rights violations with the career structures of individual ...
Clustering and Solving the Right Problem
In our database deduplication work, we’re trying to figure out which records refer to the same person, and which other records refer to different people.
We write software that looks at tens of millions of pairs of records. We calculate a model that assigns each pair of records a probability that the pair of records refers to the same person. This step is called pairwise classification.
However, there may be more than just one pair of records that refer to the same person. Sometimes three, four, or more reports of the same death are recorded.
So once we have all the pairs classified, we need to decide which groups of records refer to the ...
HRDAG Retreat 2015
I look at the beach and then at the table surrounded by nerds, deep in thought and conversation about Dirichlet priors, matching algorithms, and armed conflicts. This peculiar (in the best way) environment catalyzes a moment of reflection: how did I get here?
Four years ago, as a second-year statistics PhD student, I watched "Guatemala: The Secret Files" on PBS Frontline World. I listened to stories of family members who disappeared without answers or justice. Then the story shifted to the work being done by archivists and data experts at Guatemala's Historic Archive of the National Police. The scientists' pursuit of the truth energized me. I ...
Reflections: Challenging Tasks and Meticulous Defenders
I have made it my personal objective to amplify HRDAG's message of being extra careful and scientifically rigorous with human rights data.
A Model to Estimate SARS-CoV-2-Positive Americans
We’ve built a model for estimating the true number of positives, using what we have determined to be the most reliable datasets—deaths.
Announcing New HRDAG Advisory Board Member
Cynthia Conti-Cook came on board in March, 2025.
Evaluating gunshot detection technology
Bailey’s analysis stemmed from data we had access to as part of our ongoing collaboration with the Invisible Institute.