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Predictive Policing Reinforces Police Bias

Issues surrounding policing in the United States are at the forefront of our national attention. Among these is the use of “predictive policing,” which is the application of statistical or machine learning models to police data, with the goal of predicting where or by whom crime will be committed in the future. Today Significance magazine published an article on this topic that I co-authored with William Isaac. Significance has kindly made this article open access (free!) for all of October. In the article we demonstrate the mechanism by which the use of predictive policing software may amplify the biases that already pervade our criminal ...

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.

Measures of Fairness for New York City’s Supervised Release Risk Assessment Tool

Kristian Lum and Tarak Shah (2019). Measures of Fairness for New York City's Supervised Release Risk Assessment Tool. Human Rights Data Analysis Group. 1 October 2019. © HRDAG 2019.

Kristian Lum and Tarak Shah (2019). Measures of Fairness for New York City’s Supervised Release Risk Assessment Tool. Human Rights Data Analysis Group. 1 October 2019. © HRDAG 2019.

The causal impact of bail on case outcomes for indigent defendants in New York City

Kristian Lum, Erwin Ma and Mike Baiocchi (2017). The causal impact of bail on case outcomes for indigent defendants in New York City. Observational Studies 3 (2017) 39-64. 31 October 2017. © 2017 Institute of Mathematical Statistics.

Kristian Lum, Erwin Ma and Mike Baiocchi (2017). The causal impact of bail on case outcomes for indigent defendants in New York City. Observational Studies 3 (2017) 39-64. 31 October 2017. © 2017 Institute of Mathematical Statistics.

Estimated Gaza Toll May Have Missed 25,000 Deaths, Study Says

Patrick Ball, director of research at the Human Rights Data Analysis Group, and a statistician who has conducted similar estimates of violent deaths in conflicts in other regions, said the study was strong and well reasoned. But he cautioned that the authors may have underestimated the amount of uncertainty caused by the ongoing conflict.

The authors used different variations of mathematical models in their calculations, but Dr. Ball said that rather than presenting a single figure — 64,260 deaths — as the estimate, it may have been more appropriate to present the number of deaths as a range from 47,457 to 88,332 deaths, a span that encompasses all of the estimates produced by modeling the overlap among the three lists.

“It’s really hard to do this kind of thing in the middle of a conflict,” Dr. Ball said. “It takes time, and it takes access. I think you could say the range is larger, and that would be plausible.”

Welcoming Our 2019-2020 Visiting Data Science Student

Bing Wang has joined HRDAG as a Visiting Data Science Student until the summer of 2020.

The case of Ana Lucrecia Orellana Stormont

When working with documents in an archive, every document offers the opportunity for statistical study and quantitative research. But a document can also offer the discovery of a story. That is the case with the disappearance of Ana Lucrecia Orellana Stormont, who was reported missing on June 6, 1983, at the age of 35. Ana Lucrecia, a professor of psychology at the University of San Carlos, was scheduled to attend a meeting with Edgar Raúl Rivas Rodríguez at the Plaza Hotel in Guatemala’s capital city. Edgar, who also went missing, was a teacher at the School of Political Science at the University. (Ana Lucrecia’s case is explained more fully ...

Truth and Myth in Sierra Leone: An Empirical Analysis of the Conflict, 1991–2000

Tamy Guberek, Daniel Guzmán, Romesh Silva, Kristen Cibelli, Jana Asher, Scott Weikart, Patrick Ball, and Wendy Grossman. “Truth and Myth in Sierra Leone: An Empirical Analysis of the Conflict, 1991–2000″ (pdf). A report by the Benetech Human Rights Data Analysis Group and the American Bar Association. March 28, 2006.

Guatemala 1993-1999 – Using MSE to Estimate the Number of Deaths

Propelled by the impact of data analysis in El Salvador, Patrick Ball applied his WDWTW model to human rights information in other countries. Throughout the 1990’s, Ball worked at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) analyzing large-scale human rights violations in Ethiopia, South Africa, Haiti and Guatemala. Together with senior scientific colleagues, including statistician Dr. Herb Spirer, Ball developed new methods for analyzing state-sanctioned violence. This chapter documents how the research expanded when a group of nongovernmental organizations in Guatemala asked the scientific community to gather and analyze ...

UN Raises Estimate of Dead in Syrian Conflict to 191,000

Nick Cumming-Bruce of the New York Times writes about 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:
In its third report on Syria commissioned by the United Nations, the Human Rights Data Analysis Group identified 191,369 deaths from the start of the conflict in March 2011 to April 2014, more than double the 92,901 deaths cited in their last report, which covered the first two years of the conflict.
“Tragically, it is probably an underestimate of the real total number of people killed during the first three years of this murderous conflict,” Ms. Pillay said in a statement that accompanied the report, which observed that many killings in Syria were undocumented.

HRDAG is hiring – technical lead

If this could be you, let us know. Also, please feel free to pass on this link to great people. Job Title. Technical lead with a hacker's heart Location. A cool office in SOMA, San Francisco. You need to be on-site with us. What we do. The Human Rights Data Analysis Group (HRDAG) develops statistical techniques to measure human rights atrocities. Our work helps bring dictators to justice through data analysis of human rights atrocities around the world. Over more than 20 years, our small team has developed technology and statistical techniques to take disjoint, incomplete, and inaccurate information from conflict zones and process it to identify ...

How Data Analysis Confirmed the Bias in a Family Screening Tool

In Pittsburgh …

verdata: An R package for analyzing data from the Truth Commission in Colombia

Maria Gargiulo, María Julia Durán, Paula Andrea Amado, and Patrick Ball (2024). verdata: An R package for analyzing data from the Truth Commission in Colombia. The Journal of Open Source Software. 6 January, 2024. 9(93), 5844, https://doi.org/10.21105/joss.05844. Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Maria Gargiulo, María Julia Durán, Paula Andrea Amado, and Patrick Ball (2024). verdata: An R package for analyzing data from the Truth Commission in Colombia. The Journal of Open Source Software. 6 January, 2024. 9(93), 5844, https://doi.org/10.21105/joss.05844. Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Reflections: A Simple Plan

I got an email from my superheroic PhD adviser in June 2006: Would I be interested in relocating to Palo Alto for six months in order to work with Patrick Ball at the Human Rights Data Analysis Group? (She'd gotten a grant and would cover my stipend.) Since I'd spent the last several months in New Haven wrestling ineffectually with giant, brain-melting methodological problems, I said yes immediately. The plan with my adviser was simple: I'd digitize the ancient, multiply-photocopied pages of data from the United Nations Truth Commission for El Salvador, combine them with two other datasets, match across all the records, and produce reliable ...

Why Just Counting the Dead in Syria Won’t Bring Them Justice

Patrick Ball (2016). Why Just Counting the Dead in Syria Won’t Bring Them Justice. Foreign Policy. October 19, 2016. © 2016 Foreign Policy. 

Patrick Ball (2016). Why Just Counting the Dead in Syria Won’t Bring Them Justice. Foreign Policy. October 19, 2016. © 2016 Foreign Policy. 

Donate with a Donor Advised Fund

To donate to Human Rights Data Analysis Group via a Donor Advised Fund, you should follow three steps: In your Donor Advised Fund portal, look up our fiscal sponsor Community Partners using the Tax ID 95-4302067. It is important to use the tax ID, not the name, as there are many organizations with the same or similar names. Once you have selected Community Partners, look for a way to customize the donation or donate to a specific project that allows you to write-in the name of a fund or project. Then please write in "Human Rights Data Analysis Group." Please email info@hrdag.org to let us know that you have sent the donation so we can make ...

Reality and Risk in Our Mortality Study of the Peruvian TRC

HRDAG researchers and analysts at Peru's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) estimated conflict mortality due to violence using Capture-Recapture methods.

Investigating Boston Police Department SWAT Raids from 2012 to 2020

HRDAG collaborated with Data for Justice Project on a tool tool allowing members of the public to visualize and analyze nearly a decade of Boston Police Department SWAT team after-action reports. Tarak Shah of HRDAG is named in the acknowledgments.

Reflections: Richard Savage’s Vision Fulfilled

In 1984, as a fresh PhD, I heard Richard Savage give his presidential address at the Joint Statistical Meetings in Philadelphia. He called it "Hard/Soft Problems" and made a big pitch for statisticians to get involved in human rights data analysis. It was inspirational, and I was immediately sold. I started working with the American Statistical Association's Committee on Scientific Freedom and Human Rights (now chaired by HRDAG's own Megan Price). Over time, a growing set of statisticians became involved, initially in letter-writing campaigns to help dissident statisticians (and other quantitative academics—economists seemed to have a particular ...

Colombian Key in Guatemala Forced Disappearance Case

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