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Calculating US police killings using methodologies from war-crimes trials
Cory Doctorow of Boing Boing writes about HRDAG director of research Patrick Ball’s article “Violence in Blue,” published March 4 in Granta. From the post: “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.”
Reflections: Minding the Gap
How might we learn what we don’t know? HRDAG associate Christine Grillo hits the wayback machine and recalls her first exposure to People Against Bad Things, ideas about bias and correlation versus causation, and truth.
Stephen Fienberg 1942-2016
We are saddened by the passing of Steve Fienberg yesterday in Pittsburgh, at the age of 74. He is perhaps best known around the world for bringing statistics to science and public policy and was a beloved professor at Carnegie Mellon University. At HRDAG we are in awe of and grateful for the work Steve did formalizing multiple systems estimation. His work on that front blazed a trail and essentially enabled all of our most important analytical work at the intersection of human rights and statistical science.
If we are to reduce the amount of human violence in the world, the first task is to determine the scope of the violence, to know how much of ...
Reflections: A Simple Plan
I got an email from my superheroic PhD adviser in June 2006: Would I be interested in relocating to Palo Alto for six months in order to work with Patrick Ball at the Human Rights Data Analysis Group? (She'd gotten a grant and would cover my stipend.) Since I'd spent the last several months in New Haven wrestling ineffectually with giant, brain-melting methodological problems, I said yes immediately.
The plan with my adviser was simple: I'd digitize the ancient, multiply-photocopied pages of data from the United Nations Truth Commission for El Salvador, combine them with two other datasets, match across all the records, and produce reliable ...
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.
Lessons at HRDAG: Holding Public Institutions Accountable
Principled Data Processing is a way to prove to someone, usually yourself, that what you did was right.
Reflections: The People Who Make the Data
HRDAG associate Miguel Cruz has an epiphany. All those data he’s drowning in? Each datapoint is a personal tragedy, a story both dark and urgent, and he’s privileged to have access.
HRDAG Retreat 2018
What follows is an elaborate criss-crossing of collaborations—retreat is a time to embrace the productivity that comes with being in the same room.
HRDAG To Join the Partnership on AI
HRDAG is joining Partnership on AI to Benefit People and Society (PAI).
Uncertainty in COVID Fatality Rates
In this Granta article, HRDAG explains that neither the infectiousness nor the deadliness of the disease is set in stone.
HRDAG Adds Three New Board Members
HRDAG's advisory board has added three new members.
One Better
The University of Michigan College of Literature, Science and the Arts profiled Patrick Ball in its fall 2016 issue of the alumni magazine. Here’s an excerpt:
Ball believes doing this laborious, difficult work makes the world a more just place because it leads to accountability.
“My part is a specific, narrow piece, which just happens to fit with the skills I have,” he says. “I don’t think that what we do is in any way the best or most important part of human rights activism. Sometimes, we are just a footnote—but we are a really good footnote.”
Training with HRDAG: Rules for Organizing Data and More
I had the pleasure of working with Patrick Ball at the HRDAG office in San Francisco for a week during summer 2016. I knew Patrick from two workshops he previously hosted at the University of Washington’s Centre for Human Rights (UWCHR). The workshops were indispensable to us at UWCHR as we worked to publish a number of datasets on human rights violations during the El Salvador Civil War.  The training was all the more helpful because the HRDAG team was so familiar with the data. As part of an impressive career which took him from Ethiopia and Kosovo to Haiti and El Salvador among others, Patrick himself had worked on gathering and analysing ...
How statistics lifts the fog of war in Syria
Megan Price, director of research, is quoted from her Strata talk, regarding how to handle multiple data sources in conflicts such as the one in Syria. From the blogpost:
"The true number of casualties in conflicts like the Syrian war seems unknowable, but the mission of the Human Rights Data Analysis Group (HRDAG) is to make sense of such information, clouded as it is by the fog of war. They do this not by nominating one source of information as the "best", but instead with statistical modeling of the differences between sources."
Revolution Analytics blog
David Smith
March 14, 2014
Link to story in Revolutions
Back to Press Room
How statistics lifts the fog of war in Syria
Megan Price, director of research, is quoted from her Strata talk, regarding how to handle multiple data sources in conflicts such as the one in Syria. From the blogpost:
“The true number of casualties in conflicts like the Syrian war seems unknowable, but the mission of the Human Rights Data Analysis Group (HRDAG) is to make sense of such information, clouded as it is by the fog of war. They do this not by nominating one source of information as the “best”, but instead with statistical modeling of the differences between sources.”
When Data Doesn’t Tell the Whole Story
This blog is a part of International Justice Monitor’s technology for truth series, which focuses on the use of technology for evidence and features views from key proponents in the field.
As highlighted by other posts in this series, emerging technology is increasing the amount and type of information available, in some contexts, to criminal and other investigations. Much of what is produced by these emerging technologies (Facebook posts, tweets, YouTube videos, text messages) falls in the category we refer to as “found” data. By “found” data we mean data not generated for a specific investigation, but instead, that is generated for ...
How many police homicides in the US? A reconsideration
(This post is co-authored by Patrick Ball and Kristian Lum.)
In early March, the Bureau of Justice Statistics published a report that estimated that in the period 2003-2009 and 2011, there were approximately 7427 homicides committed by police in the US. We responded that the method the analysts used, capture-recapture with two databases, is vulnerable to underestimation if the databases exhibit positive dependence. We conduct a thorough sensitivity analysis on the original independence model as applied to the police homicides databases. We used information from several other countries where our partners created multiple databases of homicides. We ...
Experts Greet Kosovo Memory Book
On Wednesday, February 4, in Pristina, international experts praised the Humanitarian Law Centre's database on victims of the Kosovo conflict, the Kosovo Memory Book. HRDAG executive director Patrick Ball is quoted in the article that appeared in Balkan Transitional Justice.
HLC’s work won praise from Patrick Ball, from Human Rights Data Analysis Group and from Michael Spagat, professor of economics at Royal Holloway, University of London, who have examined and analysed the database.
Ball, with 24 years of experience in databases and statistics of human rights, said that the HLC’s database had enormous quality and marked it out as among the ...
Revisiting the analysis of event size bias in the Iraq Body Count
(This post is co-authored by Patrick Ball and Megan Price)
In a recent article in the SAIS Review of International Affairs, we wrote about "event size bias," the problem that events of different sizes have different probabilities of being reported. In this case, the size of an event is defined by the number of reported victims. Our concern is that not all violent (in this case homicide) events are recorded, that is, some events will have zero sources. Our theory is that events with fewer victims will receive less coverage than events with more victims, and that a higher proportion of small events will have zero sources relative to large events.
The ...
Updated Casualty Count for Syria
Today the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) released an HRDAG-prepared report that describes and tallies documented killings in the Syrian Arab Republic from the beginning of the conflict in March 2011 through April 2014. (The report is here.) This is our third report for the UN on the Syrian conflict, and it is an update of work we published in January 2013 and June 2013.
The report, Updated Statistical Analysis of Documentation of Killings in the Syrian Arab Republic, concludes that approximately 191,000 identifiable victims have been reported in the period covered (March 2011 – April 2014). (more…)