ASA Connect

The American Statistical Association's Committee on Law & Justice Statistics and Committee on Scientific Freedom and Human Rights invite you to our webinar on June 11 from 1-1:30pm ET featuring Dean Knox. The abstract is included below and registration is posted on our website and below.

Title: "Statistical challenges in police accountability"
Date/Time: June 11, 1-1:30pm ET
Register here!

Abstract: Statistical analyses are now central to public discourse and policy-making about policing in the United States and beyond, but widespread support for "evidence-based policing" belies the difficulty of rigorous policing research. In practice, analyses are often driven by convenience, applying standard techniques to readily available administrative datasets, rather than by formalizing policy questions into precisely defined estimands and then developing statistical estimators that recover them. Key challenges inherent in policing data—including unavoidable selection, mismeasurement, and missingness issues—are frequently ignored, leaving the policy implications of many analyses unclear. We review key policy questions, with a particular focus on racial bias and excessive force, then discuss how these data challenges have led to spurious findings in the study of police accountability. Finally, we propose statistically principled approaches drawing on graphical causal models and partial identification.