Today the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) released a report prepared by me and my colleagues describing the current state of reported killings in the Syrian Arab Republic from the beginning of the conflict in March 2011 through April 2013. (UN news release here.) This report is an update of work we published in January 2013. This updated analysis includes records from eight data sources documenting a total of 92,901 reported killings.
Our analysis begins with 263,055 total records reported by the eight data sources that include sufficient identifying information (name, date, and location*) to conduct ...
At the end of 2014 we completed the evaluation of the Kosovo Memory Book database and are pleased to conclude that the database has succeeded in documenting all or nearly all the human losses during conflicts in Kosovo during the period from 1998 to 2000.
With a motto of "Let people remember people," the goal of the Kosovo Memory Book (KMB) is to document all people who were killed or disappeared in connection with the war in Kosovo. The project aimed to document all human losses during armed conflict in the territory of the Former Yugoslav Republic (FYR) between 1998 and 2000.
The KMB database evaluation is the fruition of several years of ...
In Puerto Rico, some people are more likely to be victims of police violence than others. HRDAG processed a flood of data to illuminate the racial bias.
Megan Price (2022). Beautiful game, ugly truth? Significance, 19: 18-21. December 2022. © The Royal Statistical Society. https://doi.org/10.1111/1740-9713.01702
Megan Price (2022). Beautiful game, ugly truth? Significance, 19: 18-21. December 2022. © The Royal Statistical Society. https://doi.org/10.1111/1740-9713.01702
Cecilia Olliveira, Patrick Ball, Dayana Blanco, Eduardo Ribeiro, Juliana Borges, Maria Isabel Couto, Nathália Oliveira (2024)."Unveiling Statistical Invisibility: The Structural Racism of the War on Drugs, its Impact on Social Inequalities, and the Need for Citizen Data Empowerment in Latin America." T20 Brasil. September 2024.
Cecilia Olliveira, Patrick Ball, Dayana Blanco, Eduardo Ribeiro, Juliana Borges, Maria Isabel Couto, Nathália Oliveira (2024).”Unveiling Statistical Invisibility: The Structural Racism of the War on Drugs, its Impact on Social Inequalities, and the Need for Citizen Data Empowerment in Latin America.” T20 Brasil. September 2024.
Anjana Samant, Noam Shemtov, Kath Xu, Sophie Beiers, Marissa Gerchick, Ana Gutierrez, Aaron Horowitz, Tobi Jegede, Tarak Shah (2023). The Allegheny Family Screening Tool’s Overestimation of Utility and Risk. Logic(s). 13 December, 2023. Issue 20.
Anjana Samant, Noam Shemtov, Kath Xu, Sophie Beiers, Marissa Gerchick, Ana Gutierrez, Aaron Horowitz, Tobi Jegede, Tarak Shah (2023). The Allegheny Family Screening Tool’s Overestimation of Utility and Risk. Logic(s). 13 December, 2023. Issue 20.
Anjana Samant, Noam Shemtov, Kath Xu, Sophie Beiers, Marissa Gerchick, Ana Gutierrez, Aaron Horowitz, Tobi Jegede, Tarak Shah (2023). The Devil is in the Details: Interrogating Values Embedded in the Allegheny Family Screening Tool. ACLU. Summer 2023.
Anjana Samant, Noam Shemtov, Kath Xu, Sophie Beiers, Marissa Gerchick, Ana Gutierrez, Aaron Horowitz, Tobi Jegede, Tarak Shah (2023). The Devil is in the Details: Interrogating Values Embedded in the Allegheny Family Screening Tool. ACLU. Summer 2023.
ed. by Taylor B. Seybolt, Jay D. Aronson, and Baruch Fischhoff. Oxford University Press. © 2013 Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.
The following four chapters are included:
— Todd Landman and Anita Gohdes (2013). “A Matter of Convenience: Challenges of Non-Random Data in Analyzing Human Rights Violations in Peru and Sierra Leone.”
— Jeff Klingner and Romesh Silva (2013). “Combining Found Data and Surveys to Measure Conflict Mortality.”
— Daniel Manrique-Vallier, Megan E. Price, and Anita Gohdes (2013). “Multiple-Systems Estimation Techniques for Estimating Casualties in Armed Conflict.”
— Jule Krüger, Patrick Ball, Megan Price, and Amelia Hoover Green (2013). “It Doesn’t Add Up: Methodological and Policy Implications of Conflicting Casualty Data.”
Some police officers avoid accountability by “wandering” to another agency. HRDAG and partners created a data tool that tracks officers’ employment history.
The primer addresses what pretrial risk assessment is and what the research supports.
I spent the two weeks over Easter working with Patrick and Megan in San Francisco, trying to figure out a strategy of how best to estimate the number of casualties the Syrian civil war has claimed in the past two years. In January, HRDAG published a report on the number of fully identified casualties reported in the Syrian Arab Republic between March 2011 and November 2012. The number of de-duplicated records of killings for this period was 59,648, a number that is likely to be an undercount since we know that many incidences of lethal violence in conflict go unreported, and that the unreported cases are not missing at random. (more…)
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. ...
Doing an investigation on the contents of the Archive brought with it three major lessons. The first big lesson was the constant movement (nothing was static), The second great lesson was that everything evolved (the changes were a constant). The third major lesson was to discover how two institutions can work together while geographically far apart.
The constant movement
As there were other processes being carried out at the Archive, everything was in constant movement. In other words, one day the documents were in X location and tomorrow they may be in location Y or dispersed in multiple locations. This made it impossible to know with certai...
HRDAG has been working with the Historic Archive of the National Police in Guatemala (hereafter, the Archive) for the past seven years. The Archive contains a treasure trove of data recorded and kept by the Guatemalan National Police over the past century. When the Archive was first discovered in 2005, researchers there immediately recognized both the value and fragility of the tens of millions of documents. As a result, they reached out to HRDAG, and we reached out to volunteers at Westat to devise a plan to estimate the contents of the entire Archive as quickly as possible in case the documents were destroyed or access to them was limited. ...
William Isaac and Kristian Lum. Predictive policing violates more than it protects. USA Today. December 2, 2016. © USA Today.
William Isaac and Kristian Lum. Predictive policing violates more than it protects. USA Today. December 2, 2016. © USA Today.
It took me a while to realize I had become part of the HRDAG incubator—at least that’s what it felt like to me—for young data analysts who wanted to use statistical knowledge to make a real impact on human rights debates.
On November 7, 2014, the Department of Political Science, University of Wisconsin–Madison, and the University of Wisconsin Law School, hosted a mini-conference with speakers Jennifer Alix-Garcia, Patrick Ball, Chad Hazlett, Volker Radeloff, and Philip Schrodt to speak about "Big Data and Death." The conference was organized by John Ahlquist and Jon Pevehouse.
Big Data and Death
Department of Political Science
University of Wisconsin–Madison
November 7, 2014
Madison, Wisconsin