#Clare Malone and Jeff Asher

[theliberaltony]

via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

Late last month, FiveThirtyEight published an article that noted that the FBI’s most recent accounting of crime data in the United States was missing almost 70 percent of the data tables that had been included in past editions. The FBI has since disputed that the removal of those tables was out of the ordinary. But closer scrutiny doesn’t seem to bear this claim out.

In our earlier story, FiveThirtyEight reported that a large number of year-to-year data tables that typically appear in the FBI’s Crime in the United States Report had been removed in the most recent edition, which covers data from 2016 and is the first report of its kind published during the Trump administration. The yearly report is considered the gold standard of crime-trend tracking and is used by law enforcement, researchers, journalists and the general public. Changes to the structure of the report typically go through a body called the Advisory Policy Board (APB), which is responsible for managing and reviewing operational issues for a number of FBI programs. But this change was not reviewed by the APB. One former FBI employee told FiveThirtyEight the decision not to consult with the APB was “shocking.”

Following our story’s publication, the FBI informed FiveThirtyEight that it took issue with what FBI spokesman Wyn Hornbuckle called “a false narrative.” The agency also publicly posted a statement on the data tables in the report, titled “Understanding Changes in ‘Crime in the United States, 2016.’” The statement, which was published about a month after the data was initially released, noted that the FBI “has been working on what has become the UCR-Technical Refresh since 2010” and that “throughout the planning of this project, it has been the intention of the UCR program to streamline the publications, including Crime in the United States (CIUS), and to reduce the number of data tables in the reports.”

But while the FBI says the plan to remove data tables had been in place since 2010, state-level UCR managers do not seem to have been informed of it until late 2016. “State UCR Program managers were advised of the FBI’s plan in the fall of 2016 through individual teleconferences,” Hornbuckle said in an email. The FBI did not respond to a follow-up question about whether that was the first time UCR managers were told of the impending deletions.

While it’s true that the FBI is on record saying it hoped to improve the report, the FBI had not publicly included the removal of data tables as part of those improvements until the statement it released following the FiveThirtyEight story. Instead, the FBI’s past statements said the agency aimed only to make data available more quickly and to improve digital features to allow users to access more data more easily.

The UCR-Technical Refresh page that the FBI links to in its statement asserting that the intention of the project has always included reducing the number of data tables, appears to have been created only relatively recently. A search through the Internet Archive fails to retrieve a cache of the page, suggesting a relatively new URL.

What does appear to have been referenced as early as 2010 is what was called “the UCR Redevelopment Project.” In 2010, the FBI described the goals of the UCR Redevelopment Project as: “decrease the time it takes to analyze data,” “reduce … the exchange of printed materials,” “provide an enhanced external data query tool,” and “decrease the time needed to release and publish crime data.”

In essence, the UCR Redevelopment Project appeared to largely be concerned with improving the process by which agencies submit data to the FBI, along with creating a tool for analyzing the data. This intended direction can be seen in project updates from March 2013 and December 2013.

In September 2016 the project became the “New UCR Project,” which had the stated goal “to manage the acquisition, development, and integration of a new and improved data collection system.” Sometime between September and October 2017, the New UCR Project became the UCR-Technical Refresh, though the overarching goals seem identical to its previous iterations.

While it is possible that reducing the number of available data tables was always a goal of the UCR Redevelopment Project, we were unable to identify any evidence of this objective in any publicly available publications or presentations on the subject. On the contrary, this project appears designed to improve the speed and efficiency with which law enforcement data can be submitted, processed and provided to the public.

A digital presentation dated April of 2012 describes the technical changes to the project with no mention of removing data tables. The earliest webpage reference to the project appears to be from March 2013, and it largely details technical upgrades intended to improve reporting from local law enforcement agencies to the FBI. The Internet Archive’s last capture of the site came as recently as May of 2016. We reviewed the documents and found no mentions of removing data tables in any of these iterations.

The April 2016 update lays out the plan in more detail. Of note is the last bullet point, which says, “We will continue to keep the APB and the broader UCR Program stakeholders apprised of our status as we work toward successful implementation of the new UCR System.” The APB was ultimately not involved in the decision to remove data tables from the 2016 report, but rather the tables were removed after consultation with the FBI’s Office of Public Affairs.

In a capture of the page that includes an update from February of 2017, the project is noted to have moved from development to implementation. One of its stated goals is to “provide a streamlined publication process that will give users quicker access to the data,” though it again makes no reference to data table removal.

When the New UCR Project became what is now called the UCR-Technical Refresh this fall, The FBI published a page devoted to the Technical Refresh that has very few details of the plan. But there is a change to wording that is striking.

One bullet-pointed goal of the project that once read, “Provide a streamlined publication process that will give users quicker access to the data,” now reads as two bullet points: “Provide a streamlined publication process” and “Provide users swifter access to the data.”

That may seem insignificant, but that grammatical sleight of hand could mean that the FBI is looking to justify a new interpretation of what it means to “streamline” the publication process. Rather than streamline by providing users swifter access to the data, perhaps the FBI is now looking to streamline by decreasing the amount of data they provide. Given that the FBI has not yet responded to further requests for comment, we’re left to read between the lines.

[jodyedgarus]

We Hope We Do This Much Cool Stuff In 2018

As the FiveThirtyEight staff recovers from a hectic year of news, we’ve been reflecting on our favorite stories from the past 12 months. What follows is not a comprehensive list of our best work, but it is some of what has lingered in our minds as we get ready for 2018.1

Our editor in chief, Nate Silver, started the year like many others: trying to make sense of the 2016 presidential election. He wrote a dozen essays about what happened, including entries on President Trump’s superior Electoral College strategy, the media’s probability problem and “the Comey letter.”

This summer, Kid Rock was rumored to be the next celebrity to follow Trump’s path into politics. But the poll that started the buzz came from a shady corner of the internet and may not have been conducted as advertised. Harry Enten went down a rabbit hole and found that fake polls are a real problem.

When Trump was a candidate, he often noted that the electoral system was rigged because so many noncitizens were registered to vote. But the evidence that Trump cited when making claims of voter fraud didn’t show what Trump said it did. Maggie Koerth-Baker investigated how an academic paper became a keystone of the Trump administration’s allegations of voter fraud.

After about half a year of the Trump presidency, Julia Azari came to a striking realization: Trump is a 19th-century president facing 21st-century problems.

The media’s coverage of the Trump administration has been filled with stories that employ anonymous sources to discuss what’s happening in the White House. Not all anonymous sources are created equally, though. Perry Bacon Jr. put together a guide for when to trust a story that uses anonymous sources and which anonymous sources are worth paying attention to.

As the Democrats seek to take back Congress in 2018, David Wasserman wrote about their uphill climb: The congressional map is historically biased toward the GOP.

Trump’s rise to power inspired a huge following in some corners of the internet. In March, we profiled one of the president’s most rabid fan clubs: a subreddit called “The_Donald.”

As the Supreme Court deliberates partisan gerrymandering, Galen Druke has been profiling the problems with redistricting reform efforts: Partisanship always finds a way back in.

Trump’s contentious back and forth with North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong Un, was a defining story of the summer. As the heads of state traded threats, Oliver Roeder wrote about how game theory can be used to win a nuclear standoff.

As stories about sexual assault and harassment inundated the fall, Clare Malone noted that nearly all of them were about people in white-collar industries. That prompted her to investigate whether the #MeToo moment will reach women in low-wage jobs.

Anna Maria Barry-Jester spent much of the year covering the Republicans’ efforts to roll back the Affordable Care Act. But she also looked beyond Obamacare. In April, she wrote about how patterns of death in the South still show the outlines of slavery, and in June, she wrote that the health care system is leaving the southern Black Belt behind. In conjunction with those stories, Ella Koeze created an interactive map that shows 35 years of American death data.

After the mass shooting in Las Vegas, there was some debate over whether stronger gun laws lead to less gun violence. But just looking at correlations between gun laws and violence isn’t enough, Jeff Asher and Mai Nguyen wrote, because guns can cross state lines even when gun laws don’t.

When the FBI released its first crime report under Trump, Clare Malone and Jeff Asher noticed something: It was missing a ton of data, and the agency’s explanations for why didn’t add up. FBI Director Christopher Wray now says the data will again be released to the public.

This hurricane season was relentless for the U.S., with several major storms causing major damage. If Hurricane Sandy is any indication, the recovery from that damage is not going to be quick. Julia Wolfe and Oliver Roeder used FiveThirtyEight’s longest chart ever to show that New York City is still getting calls about Sandy recovery.

After the U.S. men’s national soccer team broke our hearts with the worst loss in the history of U.S. men’s soccer, we went looking for another squad to support. It’s not like us to just pick things at random, so we designed a quiz that helps you find the World Cup team you should root for.

Despite never playing a snap in the 2017 NFL season, Colin Kaepernick dominated the conversation around football this year. As Kaepernick went unsigned in the offseason, Kyle Wagner and Neil Paine investigated whether it was Kaepernick’s skills that were to blame. It wasn’t.

As the 2016-17 NBA season came to a close, FiveThirtyEight’s NBA team made the case for five different MVPs, including the eventual winner, Russell Westbrook.

One of the runner-ups for MVP, James Harden, has bloomed over the past few years into one of the league’s best players. Chris Herring noted one of Harden’s many quirks: He’s great at drawing fouls behind the 3-point line.

Nate Silver is tired of baseball closers being used only as ninth-inning specialists. So, to help get more of a team’s best relievers in the game earlier, he created a new stat: the goose egg, which tracks which relievers are the best at putting out fires when the stakes are highest.

People are still trying to figure out why there are so many dang home runs in baseball now. Rob Arthur continued his investigation into the home-run surge, and the evidence points to the balls being juiced.

Speaking of those home runs, midway through this MLB season, there had been 56,785 home runs hit since the start of 2006. Neil Paine and Rachael Dottle charted how far those home runs would have traveled if you put them all together (4,280 miles) and which MLB player’s bombs traveled the furthest.

For years, the Bechdel Test has been used to evaluate whether a film is invested in its female characters. But the Bechdel Test is an imperfect measure of Hollywood’s inequalities. So Walt Hickey, Ella Koeze, Rachael Dottle and Gus Wezerek canvassed Hollywood in search of a new one and watched 2016’s 50 top-grossing movies to see how they stacked up.

Is your Dungeons & Dragons character rare? Gus Wezerek went spelunking to tell you whether you’re basic in your selection of a goliath paladin.

If you’re still searching for that perfect margarita recipe, Walt Hickey, Nate Silver, Christine Laskowski and Tony Chow have you covered.

If one of your 2018 resolutions is to get better at spelling bees, we have the perfect guide for you. (It’s harder than it looks.)

In February and March, FiveThirtyEight’s science team explored Mars. As part of that series, Christine Laskowski and Maggie Koerth-Baker noted why sex is one of space’s final frontiers.

When Maggie Koerth-Baker wasn’t writing about space sex, she was writing about panda sex. In November, she wrote about Pan Pan, the panda who was so good at sex that he helped save his species.

The Trump administration has reshaped the nation’s science agenda, and Republicans are often demanding that researchers provide “sound science” to substantiate their claims. Christie Aschwanden wrote about that term and why the easiest way to dismiss good science is to demand sound science.

Dan Engber went to rural Oregon to find the grandfather of alt-science. His name is Art Robinson, and his contrarian views about things like climate change have found their way into powerful circles in Washington.

from News About Sports https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/we-hope-we-do-this-much-cool-stuff-in-2018/

[theliberaltony]

via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

Every year, the FBI releases a report that is considered the gold standard for tracking crime statistics in the United States: the Crime in the United States report, a collection of crime statistics gathered from over 18,000 law-enforcement agencies in cities around the country. But according to an analysis by FiveThirtyEight, the 2016 Crime in the United States report — the first released under President Trump’s administration — contains close to 70 percent fewer data tables1 than the 2015 version did, a removal that could affect analysts’ understanding of crime trends in the country. The removal comes after consecutive years in which violent crime rose nationally, and it limits access to high-quality crime data that could help inform solutions.

Published under the auspices of the Uniform Crime Reporting Program, the Crime in the United States report contains national data on homicides, violent crimes, arrests, clearances and police employment that has been collected since the 1960s. The UCR’s report is an invaluable resource for researchers who track national crime trends and is a rich reference database for journalists and members of the general public who are interested in official crime statistics. Among the data missing from the 2016 report is information on arrests, the circumstances of homicides (such as the relationships between victims and perpetrators), and the only national estimate of annual gang murders.

Tables, by category, in the FBI’s Crime in the United States report, 2015-16

NUMBER OF TABLES CATEGORY 2015 2016 CHANGE Arrests 51 7 -44 Context for crimes* 23 6 -17 Crimes† 25 17 -8 Police dept. employee counts 12 7 -5 Clearances 4 1 -3 Total 115 38 -77

* Expanded offense data beyond the aggregate number of crimes reported by law enforcement. † Aggregates of the number of violent and property crime offenses reported by law enforcement.

Source: FBI

Changes to the UCR’s yearly report are not unheard of, and the press release that accompanies the 2016 report, which was published in late September, acknowledges the removal of some tables, saying that the UCR program had “streamlined the 2016 edition.” But changes to the report typically go through a body called the Advisory Policy Board (APB), which is responsible for managing and reviewing operational issues for a number of FBI programs. This time they did not.

In response to queries from FiveThirtyEight about whether the changes to the 2016 report had been made in consultation with the Advisory Policy Board, a spokesman for the UCR responded that the program had “worked with staff from the Office of Public Affairs to review the number of times a user actually viewed the tables on the internet.” When FiveThirtyEight informed a former FBI employee of the process, he said it was abnormal.

“To me it’s shocking that they made these decisions to publish that many fewer tables and they didn’t make the decision with the APB,” James Nolan, who worked at the UCR for five years and now teaches at West Virginia University, told FiveThirtyEight.

Nolan called the FBI’s removal of the tables for lack of web traffic, “somewhat illogical.” (A spokesman for the UCR program told FiveThirtyEight that in the last year, the UCR received 3,045,789 visitors.)

“How much time and savings is there in moving an online table?” Nolan said. “These are canned programs: You create table 71 and table 71 is connected to a link in a blink of an eye.”

These removals mean that there is less data available concerning a perennial focus of Trump and his attorney general, Jeff Sessions: violent crime. Trump and Sessions have frequently talked about MS-13, a gang with Salvadoran roots, as a looming problem in the country. MS-13 has been cited in 37 Department of Justice press releases and speeches in 2017, compared to only nine mentions in 2016 and five in 2015. Sessions gave a speech on the organization last month, while Trump gave a speech on Long Island in July, saying the gang had “transformed peaceful parks and beautiful quiet neighborhoods into bloodstained killing fields. They’re animals.” Trump also frequently refers to gun violence in Chicago, and at the beginning of his presidency, he established a Victims of Immigration Crime Engagement Office, which aims to study and promote awareness of crimes committed by immigrants who entered the country illegally.

Although the removal of the tables makes it more difficult to get information on one of the White House’s most prominent causes, it also seems like part of a trend in the Trump administration: the suppression of government data and an unwillingness to share information with the press and public. About two weeks after Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico, the FEMA website stopped displaying key metrics relating to island residents’ access to drinkable water and electricity. The data was later restored. The early days of the Trump administration were marked by reports that federal agency employees had been instructed not to talk to the press and to restrict social media postings.

Since Trump took office, government watchdog groups have been concerned about access to government data and maintaining the integrity of that data. Before Trump’s inauguration, Louis Clark, the executive director and CEO of the Government Accountability Project, an organization that protects whistleblowers, told FiveThirtyEight that he worried that the public information offices in various agencies could interfere with transparent sharing of information with the public.

The fact that the FBI Office of Public Affairs rather than the Advisory Policy Board determined which data tables to remove hearkens back to patterns of suppression from the George W. Bush administration. “They set up all these PR operations,” Clark said about the Bush administration’s tactics. “If a reporter called up and wanted to know about the Arctic, the scientists getting the question couldn’t answer and were required to send the reporter to the government PR person.”

The data missing from the report is mostly about arrests and homicides. There were 51 tables of arrest data in the 2015 report, and there are only seven2 in the 2016 report. Data about clearance rates — essentially the percentage of crimes solved — was covered in four tables in 2015 but just one in 2016. The expanded offense data — information collected by the FBI beyond the number of crimes committed, such as the type of weapon used or the location of a crimes — went from 23 tables in 2015 to 6 in 2016.

There were 15 tables of murder data in 2015, but in 2016 there were only a few tables offering expanded insights on homicides. The expanded homicide data from 2016 doesn’t include statistics on the relationship between victims and offenders; victims’ and offenders’ age, sex, race or ethnicity; or what weapons were used in different circumstances. Practically speaking, that means that researchers can no longer easily identify the number of children under the age of 18 murdered by firearm in a given year. Additionally, data tables used to identify the number of women murdered by their partners are similarly no longer available.

The removal of this expanded homicide information is not acknowledged in the report. Also, the FBI’s 2016 definition of expanded homicide data, which is identical to the one from 2015, says that the agency collects “supplementary homicide data that provide the age, sex, race, and ethnicity of the murder victim and offender; the type of weapon used; the relationship of the victim to the offender; and the circumstance surrounding the incident. Statistics gleaned from these supplemental data are provided in this section.” This suggests that murder circumstance data will be provided, though none is.

While the UCR says that the data no longer included in the report was available upon request, the FBI only provided a raw data file, which is more difficult to analyze — especially compared to easily accessible data tables — and does not always match the figures posted online in the UCR reports.3

The FBI noted that in addition to its decision to streamline the report, UCR had launched a Crime Data Explorer, which aims to make crime data more user-interactive. But data contained in the explorer does not replicate what is missing from the 2016 UCR report, and it doesn’t allow users to view data for particular years, but rather aggregates trends over a minimum period of 10 years. The National Incident-Based Reporting System is another tool the FBI uses to provide more detailed information on crimes, but it too does not replicate what is missing from the 2016 UCR report and has a substantially lower participation rate4 from police departments across the country.

Richard Rosenfeld, former president of the American Society of Criminology and a professor at the University of Missouri, St. Louis, noticed that the 2016 report no longer had data for a trend area that he tracks — homicides related to the narcotic drug trade. “One could argue the Trump administration is interested in the opioid epidemic and might be interested in its criminal justice consequences,” he said.

“I simply don’t understand why they would omit any of the tables that they have included from years past.”

If you have any tips or insights into the changes to the 2016 Crime in the United States Report, please send them to clare.malone@fivethirtyeight.com.

[theliberaltony]

via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

As the FiveThirtyEight staff recovers from a hectic year of news, we’ve been reflecting on our favorite stories from the past 12 months. What follows is not a comprehensive list of our best work, but it is some of what has lingered in our minds as we get ready for 2018.1

Our editor in chief, Nate Silver, started the year like many others: trying to make sense of the 2016 presidential election. He wrote a dozen essays about what happened, including entries on President Trump’s superior Electoral College strategy, the media’s probability problem and “the Comey letter.”

This summer, Kid Rock was rumored to be the next celebrity to follow Trump’s path into politics. But the poll that started the buzz came from a shady corner of the internet and may not have been conducted as advertised. Harry Enten went down a rabbit hole and found that fake polls are a real problem.

When Trump was a candidate, he often noted that the electoral system was rigged because so many noncitizens were registered to vote. But the evidence that Trump cited when making claims of voter fraud didn’t show what Trump said it did. Maggie Koerth-Baker investigated how an academic paper became a keystone of the Trump administration’s allegations of voter fraud.

After about half a year of the Trump presidency, Julia Azari came to a striking realization: Trump is a 19th-century president facing 21st-century problems.

The media’s coverage of the Trump administration has been filled with stories that employ anonymous sources to discuss what’s happening in the White House. Not all anonymous sources are created equally, though. Perry Bacon Jr. put together a guide for when to trust a story that uses anonymous sources and which anonymous sources are worth paying attention to.

As the Democrats seek to take back Congress in 2018, David Wasserman wrote about their uphill climb: The congressional map is historically biased toward the GOP.

Trump’s rise to power inspired a huge following in some corners of the internet. In March, we profiled one of the president’s most rabid fan clubs: a subreddit called “The_Donald.”

As the Supreme Court deliberates partisan gerrymandering, Galen Druke has been profiling the problems with redistricting reform efforts: Partisanship always finds a way back in.

Trump’s contentious back and forth with North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong Un, was a defining story of the summer. As the heads of state traded threats, Oliver Roeder wrote about how game theory can be used to win a nuclear standoff.

As stories about sexual assault and harassment inundated the fall, Clare Malone noted that nearly all of them were about people in white-collar industries. That prompted her to investigate whether the #MeToo moment will reach women in low-wage jobs.

Anna Maria Barry-Jester spent much of the year covering the Republicans’ efforts to roll back the Affordable Care Act. But she also looked beyond Obamacare. In April, she wrote about how patterns of death in the South still show the outlines of slavery, and in June, she wrote that the health care system is leaving the southern Black Belt behind. In conjunction with those stories, Ella Koeze created an interactive map that shows 35 years of American death data.

After the mass shooting in Las Vegas, there was some debate over whether stronger gun laws lead to less gun violence. But just looking at correlations between gun laws and violence isn’t enough, Jeff Asher and Mai Nguyen wrote, because guns can cross state lines even when gun laws don’t.

When the FBI released its first crime report under Trump, Clare Malone and Jeff Asher noticed something: It was missing a ton of data, and the agency’s explanations for why didn’t add up. FBI Director Christopher Wray now says the data will again be released to the public.

This hurricane season was relentless for the U.S., with several major storms causing major damage. If Hurricane Sandy is any indication, the recovery from that damage is not going to be quick. Julia Wolfe and Oliver Roeder used FiveThirtyEight’s longest chart ever to show that New York City is still getting calls about Sandy recovery.

After the U.S. men’s national soccer team broke our hearts with the worst loss in the history of U.S. men’s soccer, we went looking for another squad to support. It’s not like us to just pick things at random, so we designed a quiz that helps you find the World Cup team you should root for.

Despite never playing a snap in the 2017 NFL season, Colin Kaepernick dominated the conversation around football this year. As Kaepernick went unsigned in the offseason, Kyle Wagner and Neil Paine investigated whether it was Kaepernick’s skills that were to blame. It wasn’t.

As the 2016-17 NBA season came to a close, FiveThirtyEight’s NBA team made the case for five different MVPs, including the eventual winner, Russell Westbrook.

One of the runner-ups for MVP, James Harden, has bloomed over the past few years into one of the league’s best players. Chris Herring noted one of Harden’s many quirks: He’s great at drawing fouls behind the 3-point line.

Nate Silver is tired of baseball closers being used only as ninth-inning specialists. So, to help get more of a team’s best relievers in the game earlier, he created a new stat: the goose egg, which tracks which relievers are the best at putting out fires when the stakes are highest.

People are still trying to figure out why there are so many dang home runs in baseball now. Rob Arthur continued his investigation into the home-run surge, and the evidence points to the balls being juiced.

Speaking of those home runs, midway through this MLB season, there had been 56,785 home runs hit since the start of 2006. Neil Paine and Rachael Dottle charted how far those home runs would have traveled if you put them all together (4,280 miles) and which MLB player’s bombs traveled the furthest.

For years, the Bechdel Test has been used to evaluate whether a film is invested in its female characters. But the Bechdel Test is an imperfect measure of Hollywood’s inequalities. So Walt Hickey, Ella Koeze, Rachael Dottle and Gus Wezerek canvassed Hollywood in search of a new one and watched 2016’s 50 top-grossing movies to see how they stacked up.

Is your Dungeons & Dragons character rare? Gus Wezerek went spelunking to tell you whether you’re basic in your selection of a goliath paladin.

If you’re still searching for that perfect margarita recipe, Walt Hickey, Nate Silver, Christine Laskowski and Tony Chow have you covered.

If one of your 2018 resolutions is to get better at spelling bees, we have the perfect guide for you. (It’s harder than it looks.)

In February and March, FiveThirtyEight’s science team explored Mars. As part of that series, Christine Laskowski and Maggie Koerth-Baker noted why sex is one of space’s final frontiers.

When Maggie Koerth-Baker wasn’t writing about space sex, she was writing about panda sex. In November, she wrote about Pan Pan, the panda who was so good at sex that he helped save his species.

The Trump administration has reshaped the nation’s science agenda, and Republicans are often demanding that researchers provide “sound science” to substantiate their claims. Christie Aschwanden wrote about that term and why the easiest way to dismiss good science is to demand sound science.

Dan Engber went to rural Oregon to find the grandfather of alt-science. His name is Art Robinson, and his contrarian views about things like climate change have found their way into powerful circles in Washington.