Racial Bias by Police?

Do you think there's widespread bias and violence by police officers against blacks and other minorities? What you suspect and what you can prove are two different things.

In the midst of much lamented acts of police violence and equally lamentable reprisal comes a paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research titled An Empirical Analysis of Racial Differences in Police Use of Force. Among the media and related punditry are some claiming this study as ‘proof’ of the absence of racism in policing.

Yet the paper itself shows why that conclusion may be erroneous, starting with a frank notice on page one that it’s a working paper that hasn’t been peer reviewed. Other caveats start on page 7. (Page 7 of the PDF actually displays the number 5 on it’s bottom.) Caveats include problems with their source data and a concern that their methodology is inadequate. Snopes.com catalogs many other problems noted by critics and others.

I know what my gut's telling me about the veracity of the NERB paper. If this were an opinion piece I'd share that opinion. A New York Time story on the paper opens with the unequivocal “a new study confirms”. If the Times actually believes that then they need to either read more carefully or acquire a better understanding of how scientific research works. If they understand how science works, they're editorializing. in which case their whole article should on the opinion section, not posted as news.

I'm Tired of the Welfare Discussion

"People can't stay on the government dole forever."

Agreed. But everyone who says this thinks that's possible now. People look at me in stunned disbelief when I say it's not. (It's not, under federal law. We'll get to that shortly.) The response usually goes, "then why is it still an issue of public debate?" The obvious answer, I think, is that politicians gain support from beating that dead horse. And a dead horse it is. The proof is easy enough to find. Two minutes of internet searching lead me to the actual text of the current national welfare law, which has been in place since 1996. Provisions of this law include the requirement that recipients must acquire some kind of employment within two years of starting on assistance, even if said employment doesn't cover all expenses, and a lifetime limit of five years on benefits paid from the Federal budget.

Yet everyone I argue about this with seems to know someone or have heard about some someone who plans to live on the government for the rest of their life. Here-say is notoriously unreliable, so I can safely ignore the later. (While researching this, I found a study from 2003 suggesting that 37% of all welfare recipients and three quarters of Spanish speaking recipients don't know there are lifetime caps. That doesn't surprise me, and I expect the numbers are still high thirteen years later. If there's any truth to the hear-say, this is why.)

Is it possible to live a lifetime on state benefits? Last year I wrote two posts called "You Can't Get There from Here" about my frustration with finding certain kinds of information online. I could write part III on this question. I've so far been unable to find a source that I'd feel comfortable citing in a real debate. (There wouldn't be one primary source on this. There would be fifty primary sources. If I had a spare week, I could look for them.) Ehow.com has a list broken down by time limits. I present them with the caveat that I don't know accurate they are. If Ehow's information is correct, only four states have no lifetime limits. The other 46 have limits with exceptions.

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

In The Sherlock Holmes story "Silver Blaze" the resolution of the mystery of a stolen race horse and a murdered stable man hinges on this famous exchange:

Scotland Yard Detective: "Is there any other point to which you would wish to draw my attention?"

Holmes: "To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time."

Detective: "The dog did nothing in the night-time."

Holmes: "That was the curious incident."

Scotland Yard has a coherent theory of the crime, or it thinks it does. But Holmes isn't happy. He wants to know why the dog didn't bark at the horse thief. It's not explained by the Scotland Yard theory. It doesn't fit.

I'm driven to ask questions. Even when something seems cut and dry, I always ask questions just to be sure everything fits, just to be sure I haven't overlooked a dog that should've been barking but wasn't. This is where I need to be careful and not let my imagination fly off to the moon. Sometimes all I do is fill a few final gaps. Sometimes I find nothing at all. I ask anyway because sometimes what I find is gold.

A few days ago a video was release allegedly showing the act of shoplifting that prompted Michael Brown's pursuit by the Ferguson police. (If I ran a news operation of any kind, I'd find an alternative to the word 'aledged' and disallow its use. Aledged means the evidence is uncertain. When a news story says 'aledged crime', all anyone hears is 'crime'.)

Video is the epitome of the double-edged sword. It can provide an accurate depiction of events. It can also fool you into thinking you have a complete depiction of events. The first version of this video I saw was truncated. It showed only the portion of the video in which Brown tried to leave and was confronted by who we presume is a store employee. Brown is holding an object, and after pushing the store employee aside walks out with it. 

My encounter with this portion of the video was on social media. Everyone on the thread was already convinced they were watching a crime. Because we've been told that we're watching a crime, we assume he's carrying something he picked up in the store. The video doesn't show where the object came from. Did he bring it in with him? Maybe it's something from the store. This video doesn't show the checkout counter. Did he pay for it or not? How can I tell from this video?

This is the point. It turns out Brown was carrying something he picked up in the store. The full video seems to show that. I could not make that statement based on the part of the video that I saw. Being told Brown carried something he picked up in the store ins't the same as knowing he carried something he picked up in the store. 

Before I saw the full video, this was the thing that didn't fit. This was the dog in the night. Even after seeing the full video I still have questions. 

The employee steps in front of someone who is a head taller and a car-length wider than himself and who we are told is a criminal. I'm guessing that in a fair fight, Brown could pound the guy so hard his ancestors would beg for mercy. Yet the employee steps in front of him. This is another piece that doesn't fit. Why doesn't the store employee see Brown as a threat? It could be that said employee is a former marine. I can think of other explanations, some of which could indicate extenuating circumstances. I have no interest in any one possible explanation, but I want to be sure it's not something important.

The meme is already rising that Brown got what he deserved. Never mind that police don't decide guilt or innocence. Never mind that execution isn't a punishment for shoplifting. 

Lies, Damn Lies, Etc.

There's an oft-quoted aphorism that I deeply hate. It's attributed to 19th century Brittish Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli and goes, "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damn lies, and statistics." Statistics aren't automatically mendacious just becuase they're statistics.  They're first and foremost a means of cataloging observations about the real world.  You can also think of them as a means of communicating those observations. It's in this realm that I take issue with Disraeli. As with any other form of communication, it can be earnest or it can be deceitful.  It can also be misunderstood. 

It's in this last category that the next story comes. The results of a study were misunderstood because the distinction between proportions and overall numbers was forgotten.  I present this as a cautionary tale as I'll let the authors explain. One other thing to note here is that the authors of the original study themselves failed to notice or failed to communicate what was in their own data.

Head Injuries Didn't Rise in Bike Share Cities

Capital in the Twenty-First Century

Economic debates remind me of theological ones.  Where do the souls of babies go? Limbo or the bosom of Abraham?  Free will or predestination?

Keyensianism or neo-classicism? 

Let's leave economics aside for a bit. Have you ever heard of proponents of Einstein arguing with Newtonians? Neither have I.  What we recognize is that Newton had part of the story and Einstein added to it. He did this with observation and data. Physicists and astronomers have an advantage over economists when it comes to observation and data.  Every time there's a refinement in instrumentation, they can look at the same phenomenon again and find new data. Economists need to wait in real time for new data to accumulate.  Since they've been observing--about 200 years--there haven't been a statistically significant number of economic cycles.  Therein is the reason they sometimes sound more like astrologers than astronomers.

Introducing Thomas Piketty.  He's already somewhat known for coining the term "the 1%", referring to the world's richest. His recent book Capital in the Twenty-First Century attempts to explain the growing numeric divide between the 1% and the rest of us. Based on 200 years of data, Piketty posits that historically, wealth has grown about three times faster than productivity.

Predictably the left and right have taken opposing positions.  They've proceeded to attack or defend him based on those positions.  My interest in this is not to take sides.  My interest is in his approach.  He didn't try to find the data that supported his initial premis.  In fact, he criticizes Carl Marx for doing exactly that.  Instead, he collected all the data he could find and looked for what was in it.  

This is a key point for anyone who wishes to criticize Piketty.  It's a key point for understanding why his approach is more science than theology.  His own brief account of his life illustrates the point.  After getting his doctorate in France, Piketty accepted a university position outside Boston. After only a few years, he left.  As he tells it:

I realized that that there had been no significant effort to collect historical data on the dynamics of inequality since [Simon] Kuznets, yet the profession continued to churn out purely theoretical results without even knowing what facts needed to be explained. And it expected me to do the same

My jaw hit the floor when I read this.  My impression of economic debates could easily be dismissed.  I'm not an economist.  I could never be sure that my impression wasn't an artifact of the way economic issues are reported.  Here's a similar idea stated by a top member of the profession.  It's hard to imagine a clearer confirmation of a hypothesis.

It throws down the gauntlet to anyone who wants to challenge Piketty's conclusion.  Any criticism of Piketty has to do it with the same or larger data set. 

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Update: I should have pointed out when I originally published that Piketty has put his data set on line.  What's more, every chart in the book is accompanied by the web address of the data set. This is in the spirit of what real science calls peer review.  Reviews of this data have already generated some criticism, which I hope to write about in the coming week.  If you have the expertise, you can get Piketty's data here. (5/30/14)