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How Data Extraction Illuminates Racial Disparities in Boston SWAT Raids
Boston Police deployed SWAT teams disproportionately to Black neighborhoods, sometimes raiding homes with young children. HRDAG extracted data revealing just how disproportionate.
How Data Scraping Provides Insights into Immigrant Arrests
In Washington State, some law enforcement officers illegally tip off ICE and CBP for civil immigration arrests. HRDAG helped identify where the problematic practices occurred.
How Machine Learning Makes Visible Gender-Based Violence by Police
Sexual misconduct by police sometimes gets buried through official coding procedures. In Chicago, HRDAG processed police misconduct documents to give visibility to allegations that would otherwise be lost.
How Causal Analysis Confirmed Impact of Cash Bail on Verdicts
Causal inference methods show that for indigent clients, money bail increases their likelihood of a guilty conviction.
The Forensic Humanitarian
International human rights work attracts activists and lawyers, diplomats and retired politicians. One of the most admired figures in the field, however, is a ponytailed statistics guru from Silicon Valley named Patrick Ball, who has spent nearly two decades fashioning a career for himself at the intersection of mathematics and murder. You could call him a forensic humanitarian.
Casanare, Colombia
Estimates of Killings and Disappearances in Casanare
Casanare is a large, rural department or state in Colombia that includes 19 municipalities and a population of almost 300,000 inhabitants. Located in the foothills of the Andes and on the eastern plains, Casanare has a history of violence. Multiple armed groups have operated in Casanare including paramilitaries, guerillas and the Colombian military. Many Casanare citizens have suffered violent deaths and disappearances.
But how many people have been killed or disappeared? For reasons of policy, accountability and historical clarification, this question deserves a valid answer. In February ...
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 ...
Frequently Asked Questions
Multiple Systems Estimation
What is MSE?
What do you mean by statistical inference?
What is an overlap, and how do we know when lists overlap?
How does MSE find the total number of violations?
How was MSE originally developed?
How does the Benetech Human Rights Program use MSE?
1. What is MSE?
A: Multiple Systems Estimation, or MSE, is a family of techniques for statistical inference. MSE uses the overlaps between several incomplete lists of human rights violations to determine the total number of violations.
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2. What do you mean by statistical inference?
A: ...
South America
Colombia
Perú
Casanare, Colombia
Text in English
[popup citation="Tamy Guberek, Daniel Guzmán, Megan Price, Kristian Lum and Patrick Ball. (2010). Benetech/Human Rights Data Analysis Group database of lethal violence in Casanare."]
Estimaciones de Homicidios y Desapariciones en Casanare
Casanare es un departamento extenso y rural de Colombia con 19 municipios y una población de casi 300.000 habitantes. Ubicado entre las faldas de los Andes y las planicies orientales, Casanare tiene una larga historia de violencia. Diversos grupos armados han hecho presencia en Casanare, entre ellos paramilitares, guerrillas y el ejército colombiano. Muchos habitantes del Casanare han sido vícti...
Chad
Hissène Habré's rule over the former French colony of Chad, from 1982 to 1990, was marked by numerous and credible allegations of systematic torture and crimes against humanity. Habré claims that he was not aware of violations committed by the Documentation and Security Directorate (DDS), the state security force that pursued political opponents and operated notorious prisons during his regime.
In January 2010, the Human Rights Data Analysis Group (HRDAG) released a new study showing that Habré was well informed of the hundreds of deaths that occurred in prisons operated by the DDS. The HRDAG report, State Coordinated Violence in Chad under ...
Tchad – Reportage Photo
[English]
Hissène Habré fût le Président de l’ancienne colonie française du Tchad de 1982 à 1990. De nombreuses allégations crédibles de torture systématique et de crimes contre l’humanité ont été faites contre la Direction de Documentation et de Sécurité (DDS), les forces de l’ordre responsables pour la persécution d’adversaires du régime Habré qui étaient aussi responsables pour l’administration de nombreuses prisons durant ce régime.
“La Piscine” est une ancienne piscine qui a été couverte par un toit en béton. Il est allégué qu’il s’agissait là d’une des prisons de la DDS dans laquelle de nombreux ...
Multiple Systems Estimation: The Basics
Multiple systems estimation, or MSE, is a family of techniques for statistical inference. MSE uses the overlaps between several incomplete lists of human rights violations to determine the total number of violations. In this blogpost, and four more to follow, I’ll answer both conceptual and practical questions about this important method. (In posts to follow, questions that refer to specific statistical procedures or debates will be marked, "In depth.") (more…)
Happy Ada Lovelace Day!
As an organization that uses science to advocate for human rights, the goals and issues represented by Ada Lovelace Day are very near and dear to our hearts. Additionally, we are lucky to work with and be advised by some pretty kick-ass ladies in STEM (see our People page to learn more about these amazing women (and men)).
I brainstormed a list of women I could write about, as Finding Ada suggests we celebrate today by blogging about a STEM heroine. I considered Anita Borg (she has her own institute!), who advocated tirelessly for women in computer science. I thought about Sally Wyatt, keynote speaker and organizer of the fascinating workshop...
Data on Kosovo Migration
[popup citation="For migrations: Ball, Patrick. (2000). AAAS/ Human Rights Data Analysis Group database of migrations in Albania and Kosovo. For killings: Patrick Ball, Wendy Betts, Fritz Scheuren, Jana Dudukovich, and Jana Asher. (2002). AAAS/ABA-CEELI/Human Rights Data Analysis Group database of killings in Kosovo. For other data: Human Rights Data Analysis Group. (2002). Database of NATO airstrikes, geographic coding, and KLA activity in Kosovo."]
The data on migration from Kosovo are in seven files. All of the files are comma-delimited ASCII. The fields in each file are described below. For more information, see Policy or Panic, section A1, pp. ...
HRDAG at Strata Conference 2014
Last Thursday, HRDAG co-founder and director of research Megan Price presented at Strata, the conference for data scientists and people who work with "big data." In her talk, she addressed the question of how we can know the actual number of conflict casualties in Syrian. Her short answer was, "We don't know." The longer answer was that we have a very good idea of how many conflict casualties have been reported, by several documentation groups, and that we're working on analyzing (more…)
BJS Report on Arrest-Related Deaths: True Number Likely Much Greater
(This post is co-authored by Patrick Ball and Kristian Lum.)
Today the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) released a report on their effort to document “all deaths that occur during the process of arrest in the United States.” The analysis estimates that the Arrest-Related Deaths (ARD) program covers only 34-49% of these deaths. A parallel program by the FBI (the Supplementary Homicide Reports, SHR) is estimated to cover approximately the same proportion of deaths. Even taking into consideration both programs, 28% of all police homicides remain unreported.
In order to estimate the total number of homicides that appear on neither the ARD or ...
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 ...
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 ...
Beka Steorts Named MIT Under-35 Innovator
We’ve known for years that Beka Steorts is on the cutting-edge of statistical science, and now The MIT Technology Review has realized the same. Last week she was named one of 35 Innovators Under 35, in the category of humanitarian.
We first became familiar with Beka's work in 2013 when she was a visiting professor at Carnegie Mellon and was introduced to us by Prof. Steve Fienberg. Since then, we’ve felt very fortunate to collaborate with her on projects such as the UN enumeration of casualties in the Syrian conflict, and we look forward to many more years of work with her. She is one of several young stars we include in our superheroine hall ...