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Letter from Alejandro Valencia Villa
Alejandro Valencia Villa is a Former Commissioner of the Colombian Truth Commission. (Letter in English, and letter in Spanish.)
Introduction
One of the most obvious and most difficult questions to answer when analyzing an armed conflict is determining the number of victims. In a conflict like Colombia’s, prolonged and with complex characteristics due to the different nature of the armed actors and because they committed a great variety and quantity of human rights violations and breaches of humanitarian law, the challenge is even greater. As if this were not enough, Colombia also had a large number of records of these violations and infract...
Human Rights and the Decentralized Web
Our partners were eager to learn and talk about emerging decentralized technology.
14 Questions about Counting Casualties in Syria
In early 2012, HRDAG was commissioned by the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) to do an enumeration project, essentially a count of all of the reported casualties in the Syrian conflict. HRDAG has published two analyses so far, the first in January 2013, and the second in June 2013. In this post, HRDAG scientists Anita Gohdes, Megan Price, and Patrick Ball answer questions about that project.
So, how many people have been killed in the Syrian conflict?
This is a complicated question. As of our last report, in June 2013, we know that there have been at least 93,000 reported, identifiable conflict-related casualties. The ...
Our Story
Dec 10, 1991
HRDAG is born when Patrick Ball begins database design at the Human Rights Office of the Salvadoran Lutheran Church. The work soon moves to the non-governmental Human Rights Commission (CDHES). The database analysis identified the 100 worst officers in the Salvadoran military — who were forced to resign as part of the peace process.
1994
Patrick publishes A Definit...
Timor-Leste
During the violence in Timor-Leste in June 2006, armed gangs broke into the offices of the Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation (CAVR) in Dili and stole their motorbikes.
The Human Rights Data Analysis Group, then at Benetech®, and other human rights observers wondered whether the mobs would soon return to loot the irreplaceable paper records used by the CAVR to compile their definitive report entitled "Chega!"
The Benetech Initiative contributed to the CAVR findings and released a separate statistical report (PDF) establishing that at least 102,800 (+/- 11,000) Timorese died as a result of human rights violations in Timor-Leste ...
How we go about estimating casualties in Syria—Part 1
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…)
Rise of the racist robots – how AI is learning all our worst impulses
“If you’re not careful, you risk automating the exact same biases these programs are supposed to eliminate,” says Kristian Lum, the lead statistician at the San Francisco-based, non-profit Human Rights Data Analysis Group (HRDAG). Last year, Lum and a co-author showed that PredPol, a program for police departments that predicts hotspots where future crime might occur, could potentially get stuck in a feedback loop of over-policing majority black and brown neighbourhoods. The program was “learning” from previous crime reports. For Samuel Sinyangwe, a justice activist and policy researcher, this kind of approach is “especially nefarious” because police can say: “We’re not being biased, we’re just doing what the math tells us.” And the public perception might be that the algorithms are impartial.
Primer to Inform Discussions about Bail Reform
The primer addresses what pretrial risk assessment is and what the research supports.
.Rproj Considered Harmful
We aim to produce code that is clear, replicatable across machines and operating systems, and that leaves an easy-to-follow audit trail.
How Data Analysis Confirmed the Bias in a Family Screening Tool
In Pittsburgh …
The Truth of Truth Commissions: Comparative Lessons from Haiti, South Africa, and Guatemala.
Audrey Chapman and Patrick Ball. “The Truth of Truth Commissions: Comparative Lessons from Haiti, South Africa, and Guatemala.” Human Rights Quarterly. 23(4):1-42. 2001
Open Source Summit 2018
On October 23, 2018, Patrick Ball keynoted at the Open Source Summit in Edinburgh, Scotland.
FAQ about the JEP-CEV-HRDAG data integration and statistical estimation project
1. Is there a single source of information about the victims of the armed conflict in Colombia?
No. Colombia has an extensive documentation process for victims of the armed conflict. Hundreds of institutions, victims' organizations, and civil society organizations have focused their efforts on recording this information. However, each entity or organization develops their documentation process with its own limitations related to technical, logistical, social, and missionary capacities. No entity or organization is able to document the complete universe of victims. This is because it is impossible for them to reach every part of the country, ...
Violence in Blue
Note from the author (June 2020)
The largest public demonstrations in a generation are at this moment demanding reform or abolition of the police in the United States.[1] The overwhelming and destabilizing violence by police against protesters has been egregiously disproportionate to the threats to property posed by a tiny minority of the demonstrators. Thanks to cell phone video and media coverage, Americans seem to be noticing, and there may be sufficient political momentum for meaningful change.
It is essential in this moment to remember how authorities will respond to this pressure. Always, those authorities will claim that their extraordinary ...
Colombia
Data integration and statistical estimation: A collaboration with the Colombian Truth Commission (CEV) and the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP)
The Colombian government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) guerrilla group reached a Peace Agreement in 2016, which created the Commission for the Clarification of the Truth, Coexistence and Non-Repetition (CEV). The objective of this temporary institution was to discover the truth of what happened in the context of the armed conflict.
2020–2022: The Truth Commission joined with the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP) and HRDAG in the “Joint JEP-CEV-HRDAG data integration and ...
HRDAG Retreat 2022
A week in the California redwoods amongst a hodgepodge of people united by their passion for using quantitative analysis to combat injustice.
Transitional Justice in Syria: Accountability and Reconciliation Conference
I spent last weekend in Istanbul at an excellent conference organized by the Syrian Center for Political and Strategic Studies (SCPSS). The conference included numerous non-governmental organizations (NGOs) from Syria as well as international human rights researchers and advocates. Families of victims told their stories, data collection groups discussed the challenges, and need, to document violations, transitional justice experts worried about infrastructure such as the police force and judicial system, and local leaders pledged to work together for peace.
I was invited to speak about HRDAG's recent report examining killings in Syria documented by ...
Quantitative Research at the AHPN Guatemala
In early 2006 I joined the Historical Archive of the National Police (Archivo Histórico de la Policía Nacional, or AHPN) without knowing the impact it would have on my future. I started with cleaning, organizing and classifying documents—and learning, with other colleagues, what a historical archive is and how it works.
By April of that year, parallel to these learning processes, I was selected along with 20 other people to begin work on the challenging Quantitative Research project. I started as a "coder," transferring key content from documents into a database. (more…)
The Art and Science of Coding AHPN Documents
The coding, from my perspective, is the heart of the project. I say this, because the coding team has the responsibility of selecting documents according to the random sample, recording the documents’ contents, and applying the criteria to convert that content into an entry in a quantitative database. Not to mention the fact that this team has the privilege of being in direct contact with the documents.
At present, because of advanced organizational processes, not everyone has a chance to hold an original document in their hands. The quantitative study had many advantages in this regard; since we started work in parallel with the archival ...
IRR: Agreement Among Coders is Key
For years I have been engaged in a quantitative study at Guatemala’s Historic Archive of the National Police, or AHPN. (See the blogposts below.) In this study coders collect data on sheets of paper according to criteria established and explained in manuals. But when collecting data, there’s always room for human error—this is why the validity of the study hinges on verifying that coders use the correct criteria.
It is important to mention that the mainstay of coding is the use of a controlled vocabulary. A controlled vocabulary gives analysts a framework, or frame of reference, when converting qualitative information into categories ...