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.”

Kristian Lum discusses the challenges of getting accurate data from conflict zones, as well as her concerns about predictive policing if law enforcement gets it wrong.

HRDAG director of research Patrick Ball is quoted in this Nature article about how body counts are a crude measure of the war’s impact and more reliable estimates will take time to compile.

NPR Illinois has covered the new National Police Index, created by HRDAG’s Tarak Shah, Ayyub Ibrahim of Innocence Project, and Sam Stecklow of Invisible Institute.

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.

The Human Rights Data Analysis Group employs AI to analyze data from conflict zones, identifying patterns of human rights abuses that might be overlooked. This assists international organizations in holding perpetrators accountable.

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.”

Eric Sears, a director at the MacArthur Foundation who leads the grantmaker’s Technology in the Public Interest program, worked at Human Rights First and Amnesty International before joining MacArthur, and has been following HRDAG’s work for years. … One of HRDAG’s strengths is the long relationships it maintains with partners around the globe. “HRDAG is notable in that it really develops deep relationships and partnerships and trust with organizations and actors in different parts of the world,” Sears said. “I think they’re unique in the sense that they don’t parachute into a situation and do a project and leave. They tend to stick with organizations and with issues over the long term, and continually help build cases around evidence and documentation to ensure that when the day comes, when accountability is possible, the facts and the evidence are there.”

International human rights work attracts activists and lawyers, diplomats and retired politicians. One of the most admired figures in the field, however, is a ponytailed statistics guru from Silicon Valley named Patrick Ball, who has spent nearly two decades fashioning a career for himself at the intersection of mathematics and murder. You could call him a forensic humanitarian.

The tension started in the witness room. “You could feel the stress rolling off the walls in there,” Patrick Ball remembers. “I can remember realizing that this is why lawyers wear sport coats – you can’t see all the sweat on their arms and back.” He was, you could say, a little nervous to be cross-examined by Slobodan Milosevic.

In this NPR story, HRDAG’s Patrick Ball comments on first-of-its-kind projections.