{"id":113,"date":"2015-09-08T17:24:43","date_gmt":"2015-09-08T21:24:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/l-stires.com\/thinking-slowly\/?p=113"},"modified":"2015-09-11T14:59:41","modified_gmt":"2015-09-11T18:59:41","slug":"a-theory-in-search-of-evidence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/l-stires.com\/thinking-slowly\/a-theory-in-search-of-evidence\/","title":{"rendered":"A Theory in Search of Evidence"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/p>On Sunday, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette<\/i> published an editorial<\/a> headlined \u201cMurder on the Rise.\u201d It states that the homicide rate is up this year \u201cin more than 30 major American cities\u201d\u2014but not including Pittsburgh. It repeats the \u201ctheory\u201d that this change is due to the \u201cFerguson effect,\u201d which argues that police, facing criticism from African-American activists, have been \u201cless aggressive in patrolling problem neighborhoods.\u201d It concludes that a return to the \u201cbad old days\u201d of high homicide rates is unacceptable and that law enforcement and the Justice Department \u201cmust bring their resources to bear to figure this out.\u201d\n

The statistics they cite come from an August 31 New York Times<\/i> article<\/a> whose authors, Monica Davey and Mitch Smith, surveyed an unspecified number of cities and reported that at least 35 of them have seen increases in \u201cmurder, violent crimes, or both.\u201d The article is accompanied by a chart showing increases in the homicide rate of between 4% and 76% in ten cities. But not all cities have seen more killing. They mention three cities where murders have not<\/i> increased.<\/p>\n

There are several problems with the Times<\/i> article. First of all, their statistic has neither a numerator nor a denominator<\/a>. Since they lump murder together with other violent crimes, the authors don\u2019t specify exactly how many cities reported increases in murders. More importantly, they fail to report how many cities they surveyed\u2014a critical point, since if the actual homicide rate is unchanged, half of cities can be expected to show increases just by chance. Finally, they give no summary statistic indicating whether the overall homicide rate in the cities surveyed is up or down, by what percentage, and whether the change is statistically significant. This is important since homicide rates in many cities fluctuate quite a bit from year to year, and the number of violent crimes<\/a> was\u00a0unusually low in 2014.<\/p>\n

The authors had to conduct their own survey because there are no up-to-date, authoritative data on homicides in the nation\u2019s cities. The FBI\u2019s Uniform Crime Reports<\/a>, which provide city-level crime data, do not come out until the following\u00a0year. This lack of hard data allows people to claim that the crime rate is either increasing or decreasing, whichever their ideology leads them to prefer, based on incomplete samples.<\/p>\n

Even if the homicide rate has increased significantly, there is nothing to connect it to the protests following the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO, one year ago. To their credit, the Times<\/i> mentions the research of criminologist Richard Rosenfeld<\/a>, who found that homicides in the St. Louis area peaked before Michael Brown was shot, and who states that there is no evidence of a \u201cFerguson effect.\u201d Unfortunately, this finding is buried deep in the article and is surrounded by stories about specific murders and theories which lack\u00a0empirical support.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/a>
A man holds his grandson at a rally protesting the death of Walter Scott in Charleston, NC. (Photo: AP\/David Goldman)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Three days later, the Washington Post<\/i> got into the act<\/a> in an article about the shooting death of Illinois police officer Charles Gliniewicz. Although there is no evidence that race or anti-police sentiment played a role in his death, Jim Pasco, executive director of the national Fraternal Order of Police and several other law enforcement sources hold\u00a0the Black Lives Matter movement responsible for what they imply is an increase in the killing of police officers. One of them blames the \u201cdangerous national rhetoric that is out there today.\u201d One Black activist who disputes these claims is also quoted.<\/p>\n

Buried in the middle of this article is a critical fact. The National Law Enforcment Officers Memorial Fund reports that 24 police officers have been killed by suspects so far this year, \u201cthe second lowest number in the past five years.\u201d\u00a0Yet according to a September 1 Rasmussen poll<\/a>, 58% of likely voters believe \u201cthere is a war on police in America today,\u201d while just 27% disagree.<\/p>\n

Ta-Nehisi Coates criticized the Times<\/i> article<\/a> as an example of \u201cfalse equivalence,\u201d since the authors don\u2019t make a clear distinction between opinions and facts. Unless they read the story carefully, readers could easily conclude that \u201cthere is as much proof for the idea that protests against police brutality caused crime to rise, as there is against it.\u201d (The author of the Post-Gazette<\/i>\u00a0editorial seems to have fallen into this trap.) This same argument applies to the Post<\/i> article.<\/p>\n

Social scientists refer to this journalistic practice as false balancing<\/a><\/i>. It\u2019s found, for example, in articles about climate change which imply that scientists are evenly divided as to whether the climate is changing, and which fail to evaluate the quality of the evidence each side presents. Cautious journalists have been transformed into stenographers, faithfully reporting what everyone says but never examining whether what they say makes sense. Paul Krugman once suggested<\/a> that if candidates of one party said the Earth is flat and and the other party said it\u2019s a sphere, the newspaper headline would read \u201cViews Differ on Shape of Planet.\u201d<\/p>\n

As of this writing, at least 820 people<\/a> have been killed by the police so far this year. African-Americans, with 13.2% of the population, account for one-third<\/a> of these deaths. For those deaths in which the victim is unarmed, the Black percentage is even higher<\/a>. While it is clear that major changes in policing are needed, law enforcement is digging in its heels and fighting back with theories such as the \u201cFerguson effect.\u201d By failing to make it clear\u00a0that claims of a \u201cwar on police\u201d are without empirical support, the corporate media play into the hands of those who are trying to convince the public to sacrifice the civil liberties of African-Americans in exchange for an illusory increase in public safety.<\/p>\n

Update (9\/11\/15):<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"police1\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The American Enterprise Institute<\/a> published this chart showing the number of gun-related police deaths per capita from 1870 to the present. As they point out, exaggerating the danger to police has been used as a justification for the increasing militarization of U. S. law enforcement<\/a>.<\/p>\n

You may also be interested in reading:<\/strong><\/p>\n

White People Don\u2019t Riot: \u00a0A Manual of Style For Ambitious Young Journalists<\/a><\/p>\n<\/body>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On Sunday, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette published an editorial headlined \u201cMurder on the Rise.\u201d It states that the homicide rate is up this year \u201cin more than 30 major American cities\u201d\u2014but not including Pittsburgh. It repeats the \u201ctheory\u201d that this change is due to the \u201cFerguson effect,\u201d which argues that police, facing criticism from African-American activists, … Continue reading A Theory in Search of Evidence<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[3,10],"tags":[23,19,24],"class_list":["post-113","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-media","category-politics","tag-false-balancing","tag-police","tag-protest-movements"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6FkJj-1P","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/l-stires.com\/thinking-slowly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/l-stires.com\/thinking-slowly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/l-stires.com\/thinking-slowly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/l-stires.com\/thinking-slowly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/l-stires.com\/thinking-slowly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=113"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/l-stires.com\/thinking-slowly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":125,"href":"https:\/\/l-stires.com\/thinking-slowly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113\/revisions\/125"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/l-stires.com\/thinking-slowly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=113"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/l-stires.com\/thinking-slowly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=113"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/l-stires.com\/thinking-slowly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=113"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}