Misapplications Reviews: Crime News

Arnold Barnett
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Arnold Barnett: Operations Research Center, Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139

Interfaces, 1988, vol. 18, issue 3, 110-115

Abstract: It's been a while since I've talked about felonies in the analysis of crime data, but not because such transgressions have ceased to exist. Now as before, a distressing fraction of published statistics about crime are incomplete, illogical, or indisputably wrong. And such deficiencies do not seem to deprive these statistics of influence in the discussion and formulation of public policy.Here I will describe three of the more egregious misapplications I've encountered recently. I would not argue that the examples below are a random sample of anything; nor do I believe that the troubles arose from deliberate attempts at deception. But, as I hope will be apparent to the reader, any assertion that the problems are freakish and inconsequential is as implausible as the statistics themselves.

Keywords: judicial legal: crime; statistics: data analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1988
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