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.
Sloppy recordkeeping by Chicago police has compromised missing persons cases. HRDAG is working with Pulitzer Prize-winning Invisible Institute to shed light on these stories.
Boston Police deployed SWAT teams disproportionately to Black neighborhoods, sometimes raiding homes with young children. HRDAG extracted data revealing just how disproportionate.
Causal inference methods show that for indigent clients, money bail increases their likelihood of a guilty conviction.
Structural Zero Issue 01
Jun 03, 2025
Part One of Our Three Part “Gathering the Data” Series
As a statistician, I spend most days trying to wrangle and analyze massive data sets. The specific data I deal with is documentation of human rights violations. My job is to make sense of data that I know is incomplete and answer questions about the past using statistical analysis and scientific reasoning.
But where does this data come from? How was it generated, and how do human rights advocates and researchers access it and secure it?
To kick off our new newsletter Structural Zero, I’ll be writing a ...
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 ...
SILICON VALLEY GROUP USES TECHNOLOGY TO HELP THE TRUTH COMMISSION ANSWER DISPUTED QUESTIONS ABOUT MASSIVE POLITICAL VIOLENCE IN TIMOR-LESTE
Palo Alto, CA, February 9, 2006 – The Benetech® Initiative today released a statistical report detailing widespread and systematic violations in Timor-Leste during the period 1974-1999. Benetech's statistical analysis establishes that at least 102,800 (+/- 11,000) Timorese died as a result of the conflict. Approximately 18,600 (+/- 1000) Timorese were killed or disappeared, while the remainder died due to hunger and illness in excess of what would be expected due to peacetime mortality.
The magnitude of deaths ...
Last month Significance magazine published an article on the topic of predictive policing and police bias, which I co-authored with William Isaac. Since then, we've published a blogpost about it and fielded a few recurring questions. Here they are, along with our responses.
Do your findings still apply given that PredPol uses crime reports rather than arrests as training data?
Because this article was meant for an audience that is not necessarily well-versed in criminal justice data and we were under a strict word limit, we simplified language in describing the data. The data we used is a version of the Oakland Police Department’s crime report...
ITJP and HRDAG are urging groups inside and outside Sri Lanka to share existing casualty lists.
Under apartheid, South Africans from all sides suffered violence and human rights abuses. One of the mandates of the the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) was to report truth by reporting on violations and victims.
Dr. Patrick Ball, as Deputy Director of the Science and Human Rights Program (SHRP) of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), used the who-did-what-to-whom data model to provide statistical analysis of the violations reported to the Commission, for use in the final report of the TRC.
Links:
http://shr.aaas.org/southafrica/trcsa/
http://www.doj.gov.za/trc/index....
Palo Alto, CA, November 12, 2006 –The Benetech® Initiative congratulates the Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation (CAVR) and the Timorese people for the official release of the CAVR's final report Chega! in Australia today. The 2,500 page report uncovers previously unknown findings about past human rights abuses in Timor-Leste between 1974 and 1999. In particular, the report uncovers widespread and systematic human rights violations in Timor-Leste during the period 1974-1999.
Benetech's statistical analysis establishes that at least 102,800 (+/- 11,000) Timorese died as a result of the conflict. Approximately 18,600 (+/- 1000) ...
On November 4, 2015, the BMJ published our "Rapid Response" to Civilian deaths from weapons used in the Syrian conflict (BMJ 2015;351:h4736). The response was co-authored by Megan Price, Anita Gohdes, Jay Aronson (Carnegie Mellon University, Center for Human Rights Science), and Christopher McNaboe (Carter Center, Syria Conflict Mapping Project).
We have three concerns about this article. First, the article apportions responsibility for casualties to particular perpetrator organizations based on a single snapshot of territorial control that ignores the numerous (and well-documented) changes in this phenomenon over time. Second, combining Syrian ...
Richard Conibere (2004). Foundation of Human Rights Statistics in Sierra Leone (abstr.), Joint Statistical Meetings. Toronto, Canada.
Romesh Silva and Patrick Ball. “The Demography of Conflict-Related Mortality in Timor-Leste (1974-1999): Empirical Quantitative Measurement of Civilian Killings, Disappearances & Famine-Related Deaths” In Statistical Methods for Human Rights, J. Asher, D. Banks and F. Scheuren, eds., Springer (New York) (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.
ed. by Taylor B. Seybolt, Jay D. Aronson, and Baruch Fischhoff. Oxford University Press. © 2013 Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.
The following four chapters are included:
— Todd Landman and Anita Gohdes (2013). “A Matter of Convenience: Challenges of Non-Random Data in Analyzing Human Rights Violations in Peru and Sierra Leone.”
— Jeff Klingner and Romesh Silva (2013). “Combining Found Data and Surveys to Measure Conflict Mortality.”
— Daniel Manrique-Vallier, Megan E. Price, and Anita Gohdes (2013). “Multiple-Systems Estimation Techniques for Estimating Casualties in Armed Conflict.”
— Jule Krüger, Patrick Ball, Megan Price, and Amelia Hoover Green (2013). “It Doesn’t Add Up: Methodological and Policy Implications of Conflicting Casualty Data.”
Lum, Kristian, Megan Emily Price, and David Banks. 2013. The American Statistician 67, no. 4: 191-200. doi: 10.1080/00031305.2013.821093. © 2013 The American Statistician. All rights reserved. [free eprint may be available].
