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Release of Yellow Book Calls on Salvadoran Military to Open Archives
With the release today of a civil war-era catalog of “enemies,” Salvadorans are calling for a new look at the 12-year civil war during which hundreds of citizens were victims of human rights violations such as torture, forced disappearance, and illegal imprisonment.
The recently leaked document, known as The Yellow Book, is a list created and (more…)
Herb Spirer, 1925 – 2018
Herb led and mentored a generation of statisticians working in human rights.
Timor-Leste 2006 – Combining Found Data and Innovative Surveys To Uncover the Truth
Large-scale human rights violations in Timor-Leste began in 1975 when the Indonesian government invaded the small island and continued until Timorese independence in 1999. Disappearances, torture, forced displacement and extra-judicial killings took place during the Indonesian occupation compounded by a severe famine. Estimates of deaths ranged from 50,000 to 200,000, but individual sources reflected only a fraction of total fatalities. The Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation in East Timor (CAVR) asked HRDAG to investigate abuses during the conflict. This chapter describes how Ball and HRDAG scientists Romesh Silva and Scott Weikart ...
Update on Work in Guatemala and the AHPN
HRDAG has sampled and analyzed documents at Guatemala's AHPN and has testified against war criminals based on that analysis.
Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Perú, Final Report – General Conclusions.
Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Perú, Final Report – General Conclusions. Comisión de la verdad y reconciliación, 2003.
Celebrating Ten Years of Data from the AHPN
Ten years ago, in July 2005, human rights officers stumbled upon a nondescript warehouse in a commercial zone of Guatemala City and changed history. They had discovered an archive–its existence kept secret–belonging to the Guatemalan National Police, whose officers committed human rights atrocities on behalf of the government during the civil war.
Inside the building was the bureaucratic detritus typical of a large government agency: 80 million pages detailing shifts worked, tasks assigned, assignments fulfilled, workers’ whereabouts, and who was supervising whom. The documents, which were found stacked on dirty floors, shoved into bags, ...
The AHPN: Home of Stories Old and New
Access to the records contained in archives is a concern shared by many. Archives support memory and free access to them strengthens democratic processes. Everyone should be allowed to see first-hand the records contained in an archive and be free to interpret them as needed.
Access to archives can increase knowledge on various topics and opens opportunities for different fields of knowledge. (more…)
Gaza death toll 40% higher than official number, Lancet study finds
“Patrick Ball, a statistician at the US-based Human Rights Data Analysis Group not involved in the research, has used capture-recapture methods to estimate death tolls for conflicts in Guatemala, Kosovo, Peru and Colombia.
Ball told AFP the well-tested technique had been used for centuries and that the researchers had reached “a good estimate” for Gaza.”
Pulling Back the Curtain on LLMs & Policing Data
Structural Zero Issue 04
September 30, 2025
Artificial intelligence is transforming how we work with information. At HRDAG, that changes how I do my job every day. My most recent project was using LLMs to explore and parse vast quantities of data about police abuses in California.
In this newsletter, I’ll pull back the curtain on that work. I’ll describe how a diverse coalition gathered more than a million pages of documents about police misconduct in California and how LLMs helped us make sense of them in ways that wouldn’t have been possible before the advent of this technology.
In addition to understanding my work, I hope that this ...
Free Software
Patrick Ball (2005). “Free Software,” in The Encyclopedia of Science, Technology, and Ethics. ed. by Carl Mitcham. Farmington Hills, MI: Thomson Gale.
Report on Measures of Fairness in NYC Risk Assessment Tool
The report tries to answer the question of whether a particular risk assessment model reinforces racial inequalities in the criminal justice system.
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…)
Measuring Elusive Populations with Bayesian Model Averaging for Multiple Systems Estimation: A Case Study on Lethal Violations in Casanare, 1998-2007
Kristian Lum, Megan Price, Tamy Guberek, and Patrick Ball. “Measuring Elusive Populations with Bayesian Model Averaging for Multiple Systems Estimation: A Case Study on Lethal Violations in Casanare, 1998-2007,” Statistics, Politics, and Policy. 1(1) 2010. All rights reserved.
Measuring lethal counterinsurgency violence in Amritsar District, India using a referral-based sampling technique
Romesh Silva, Jeff Klingner, and Scott Weikart. “Measuring lethal counterinsurgency violence in Amritsar District, India using a referral-based sampling technique.” In JSM Proceedings, Social Statistics Section. Alexandria, VA: American Statistical Association, 2010. © 201o JSM. All rights reserved.
Podcast: Dr. Patrick Ball on Using Statistics to Uncover Truth
Dr. Patrick Ball recently visited the Plutopia News Network podcast for a wide-ranging, inspiring conversation about his work for the Human Rights Data Analysis Group.
Patrick spoke about how he first discovered human rights work during his time in El Salvador with the Peace Brigades International. That led to his ongoing work as a statistician and computer programmer working to assess and analyze human rights violations. He also unpacked some common statistical techniques used by researchers at Human Rights Data Analysis Group, such as multiple systems estimation, which uses multiple different datasets to gain insights into the data we don't ...
Donate to HRDAG with a Donor Advised Fund
HRDAG is pleased to accept donations to our nonprofit via Donor Advised Funds. We’ve published step-by-step directions to make donating through a DAF simple and fast. Check out the directions now or contact us at info@hrdag.org if you have any questions.
October 9 is Donor Advised Fund Day—a recently established awareness day that encourages DAF holders to activate their funds by recommending charities to receive support. You can participate by donating to HRDAG via a Donor Advised Fund or read on to learn more.
What is a Donor Advised Fund?
A Donor-Advised Fund (DAF) is an easy, flexible way to support charities while taking advantage of ...
How Predictive Policing Reinforces Bias
Algorithmic tools like PredPol were supposed to reduce bias. But HRDAG has found that racial bias is baked into the data used to train the tools.
Guatemala 2011 – Developing Sampling Methods to Help Convict Perpetrators
During 36 years of internal armed conflict, which ended in 1996, an estimated 200,000 Guatemalans were killed or disappeared. HRDAG researchers returned to Guatemala in 2006 to analyze a sample of the estimated 46 million records discovered in the archive of the now disbanded Guatemalan National Police. HRDAG statisticians Daniel Guzmán, Romesh Silva, Patrick Ball and Tamy Guberek, together with Paul Zador and Gary Shapiro of the American Statistical Association, developed a multi-stage random sample of the archive to get a clearer picture of its contents. Sampled documents shed light on the disappearance of Guatemalan union leader Edgar Fernando ...