According to the Human Rights Data Analysis Group, at least 17,723 people were killed in government custody from the start of the uprising in March 2011 to December 2015 – an average of 300 deaths each month. There are no figures for subsequent years but there is no reason to believe the killings stopped.
“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 has been used for centuries and that the researchers had reached “a good estimate” for Gaza.”
This morning I got a query from a journalist asking for our data from the report we published yesterday. The journalist was hoping to create an interactive infographic to track the number of deaths in the Syrian conflict over time. Our data would not support an analysis like the one proposed, so I wrote this reply.
We can't send you these data because they would be misleading—seriously misleading—for the purpose you describe. Here's why:
What we have is a list of documented deaths, in essence, a highly non-random sample, though a very big one. We like bigger samples because we think that they must be closer to true. The mathematical justificat...
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.
We welcome the verdict of a week ago by Judges Barrios, Bustamante, and Xitumul in the conviction of General Efraín Ríos Montt for genocide and crimes against humanity. Their 718-page written opinion contains many compelling arguments, findings, and conclusions. But the section we at HRDAG are most interested in is the one on page 245 (see original, below), where Patrick's testimony is referred to. (more…)
At some point in the next week, HRDAG's executive director, Patrick Ball, will be providing expert testimony in the trial of General José Efraín Ríos Montt, the de-facto president of Guatemala in 1982-1983. Gen. Ríos is being tried on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity. (His military intelligence director, Gen. Mauricio Rodríguez Sánchez is also on trial.) Patrick will testify on approximately April 15-18, 2013, and he may begin as early as this Friday, April 12.
The trial opened on March 20, 2013, in the Supreme Court building in Guatemala City. According to an Open Society Justice Initiative blogpost covering the event, the ...
James E Johndrow, Kristian Lum and D B Dunson (2018). Theoretical limits of microclustering for record linkage. Biometrika. 19 March 2018. © 2018 Oxford University Press. DOI 10.1093/biomet/asy003.
John E Johndrow, Kristian Lum and D B Dunson (2018). Theoretical limits of microclustering for record linkage. Biometrika. 19 March 2018. © 2018 Oxford University Press. DOI 10.1093/biomet/asy003.
2021 Rafto Prize Videos
.ugb-1c7c838 .ugb-video-popup__wrapper{height:460px !important;background-color:#000000;background-image:url(https://hrdag.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/Screen-Shot-2022-12-09-at-3.41.30-PM.png)}.ugb-1c7c838 .ugb-video-popup__wrapper:before{background-color:#000000;opacity:0.3}.ugb-1c7c838 .ugb-video-popup__wrapper:hover:before{opacity:0.6}.ugb-1c7c838 .ugb-block-title{color:#ffffff}.ugb-1c7c838 .ugb-block-description{color:#ffffff}@media screen and (max-width:768px){.ugb-1c7c838 .ugb-video-popup__wrapper{height:208px !important}}The Rafto Prize 2021 | Rafto Foundation Rafto Foundation | HRDAG team | 2021 | 4 ...
With HRDAG's help, the University of Washington Center for Human Rights team has been able to analyze the scraped text and search for key words such as “jail” in order to gain insight into where immigration arrests are being made.
Patrick Ball keynoted the Data Science Symposium at Vanderbilt University.
HRDAG contributes to the project by helping to classify, filter, extract, and standardize the records so that they can be useful in the database.
We are non-partisan—we do not take sides in political or military conflicts, nor do we advocate any particular political party or government policy. However, we are not neutral: we are always in favor of human rights. We support the protections established in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and other international human rights treaties and instruments.
The Historic Archive of the Guatemalan National Police (hereafter the Archive) was discovered, quite by accident, in July 2005. Researchers immediately recognized both the importance and the fragility of the Archive's contents. As a result, in early 2006 the Archive team invited Patrick to evaluate the documents and help them answer a seemingly simple question: How can we learn about the contents of the Archive in a shorter period of time than is needed to systematically examine each individual document?
After inspecting the Archive, Patrick designed a multi-stage random sample of documents. In May 2006, Tamy Guberek, Daniel Guzmán, and ...