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peer-reviewed-myopia t1_ived3nk wrote

Regardless of how I feel about this topic, this study is layered with so many questionable assumptions and manipulations of data, it's hard to take any of their conclusions seriously.

With an initial sample of 15,851 agencies and 11,058,289 posts, there better be good reason for excluding ~63% and ~94% of them respectively.

> > We took several steps to clean the data.
>

> - A very small number of agency-months report 10,000, 20,000, 30,000, 40,000, 50,000 or 60,000 arrests for a given crime type. Because these figures are improbably large, we assumed they actually reflect missing values. > - In the rows the total number of arrests for at least one crime type is smaller than the sum of race-specific arrests for that crime, we replaced the total number of arrests with the sum of race-specific arrests. > - We dropped incidents in which the most serious offense was not a UCR Part I offense. > - We drop rows for suspects who lack race information.

> > We then compute agency-level measures of the proportion of reported offenders who are Black based on the remaining rows. >

Wow. I guess they really did "clean" the data.

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Irish_Astronaut t1_iveiv34 wrote

Can you ELI5?

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Strazdas1 t1_iveocuv wrote

They removed most of the data, then got results that support their worldview.

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Irish_Astronaut t1_iveuzhj wrote

I mean I get that...but what is a UCR part 1 offense? How does getting rid of it affect that data? The second bullet, what's that about?

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Strazdas1 t1_ivf52v0 wrote

> UCR part 1

Part I Offenses include murder, rape, aggravated assault, robbery, burglary, larceny, motor vehicle theft, arson, human trafficking – commercial sex acts, and human trafficking – involuntary servitude.

So basically any arrests for things that are lighter than that got dropped from the data.

The second bullet point is if the sum of race-categorized arrests is not the same as sum of arrests in the dataset they replaced the total with the sum of race-categorized ones. This theoretically shouldnt be an issue and are probably rounding errors.

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peer-reviewed-myopia t1_ivflm7r wrote

The replacement was actually made for individual agency reports, not the whole dataset. So, definitely not just rounding errors.

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