Carl Bialik of 538 Politics interviews HRDAG executive director Patrick Ball in an article about the recently released Bureau of Justice Statistics report about the number of annual police killings, both reported and unreported. As Bialik writes, this is a math puzzle with real consequences.
El modelo “puede distinguir entre los municipios en que vamos a encontrar fosas clandestinas, y en los que es improbable que vayamos a encontrar estas fosas”, explicó Patrick Ball, estadístico estadounidense que colabora con el Programa de Derechos Humanos de la Universidad Iberoamericana de la Ciudad de México.
Profile touching on HRDAG’s work on the trial and conviction of Hissène Habré, its US Policing Project, data integrity, data archaeology and more.
Dave Neary described “5 Humanitarian FOSS Projects to Watch,” listing HRDAG’s work on police homicides in the U.S. and other human rights abuses in other countries.
An excerpt: The “It breaks the human” report released by the human rights group Amnesty International highlights new statistics from the Human Rights Data Analysis Group, or HRDAG, an organization that uses scientific approaches to analyze human rights violations.
Kristian Lum’s work on the HRDAG Policing Project is referred to here: “In fact, Lum argues, it’s not clear how well this model worked at depicting the situation in Oakland. Those data on drug crimes were biased, she now reports. The problem was not deliberate, she says. Rather, data collectors just missed some criminals and crime sites. So data on them never made it into her model.”
Les auditions d’experts se poursuivent au palais de justice de Dakar sur le procès de l’ex-président tchadien Hissène Habré. Hier, c’était au tour de Patrick Ball, seul inscrit au rôle, commis par la chambre d’accusation de N’Djamena pour dresser les statistiques sur le taux de mortalité dans les centres de détention.
Patrick Ball, estadístico norteamericano, colabora con el Programa de Derechos Humanos de la Universidad Iberoamericana en una investigación sobre fosas clandestinas.
“In a recent article, social scientist Patrick Ball revisited his and Kristian Lum’s 2015 study, which made a compelling argument for the underreporting of lethal police shootings by the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS). Lum and Ball’s study may be old, but it bears revisiting amid debates over the American police system — debates that have featured plenty of data on the excessive use of police force. It is a useful reminder that many of the facts and figures we rely on require further verification.”
Elizabeth Eagen of the Citizens and Technology Lab at Cornell University will expand the HRDAG advisory board.
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You may contact us directly via email at info @ hrdag.org.
A note for persons in search of assistance with specific human rights cases: We are very sorry for your troubles and your suffering; however, HRDAG does not take on casework. If you need help with a human rights case, you might consider requesting it from the International Committee of the Red Cross (www.icrc.org).
Photo: U.S. National Archives
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I've been working with various projects in Guatemala to document mass violence since 1993, so in 2011, when Claudia Paz y Paz asked me to revisit the analysis I did for the Commission for Historical Clarification examining the differential mortality rates due to homicide for indigenous and non-indigenous people in the Ixil region, I was delighted. We have far better data processing and statistical methods than we had in 1998, plus much more data. I think the resulting analysis is a conservative lower bound on total homicides of indigenous people. (more…)
<iframe src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/MfThopD7L1Y?list=PL8mc5VYrQH_Nx9jSWF2rYEgQhHyVobk6s" width="560" height="315" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe>Kristian Lum, lead statistician at HRDAG | <em>Predictive Policing: Bias In, Bias Out</em> | 56 mins
Ayan Sheikh of PBS News Hour reports on the UN Office of the High Commissioner of Human Right’s release of HRDAG’s third report on reported killings in the Syrian conflict.
From the article:
The latest death toll figure covers the period from March 2011 to April of this year, came from the Human Rights Data Analysis Group and is the third study of its kind on Syria. The analysis group identified 191,269 deaths. Data was collected from five different sources to exclude inaccuracies and repetitions.
PBS News Hour
Ayan Sheikh
August 22, 2014
Link to story on PBS News Hour
Related blogpost (Updated Casualty Count for Syria)
Back to Press Room
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 ...
As of today, the Human Rights Data Analysis Group (HRDAG) is an independent* non-profit! It's been a long time coming, and we're delighted to have gotten to this point. HRDAG is a non-profit, non-partisan organization that applies rigorous science to the analysis of human rights violations around the world; for more information, see our About Us page.
Benetech has spun out the scientific and statistical part of the Human Rights Program to HRDAG. The spinout includes (as staff) me -- Patrick Ball -- and Dr Megan Price, as well as our many part-time scientific and field consultants (a list is here). The software and technology component of our work -- ...
You are invited to
Illuminating the dark through data science:
Stories from the Human Rights Data Analysis Group
Thursday, 3 June 2021, 12–1pm PDT
A conversation with HRDAG advisory board member Margot Gerritsen, executive director Megan Price, statistician Maria Gargiulo, and field consultant Anita Gohdes.
The Human Rights Data Analysis Group uses data to help the world understand human stories. In this intimate, virtual conversation, executive director Megan Price and other inspiring HRDAG data scientists will share stories about how their data analysis has powered truth commissions and grassroots justice organizations, and held human rights ...