The Annual Misuse of Hate Crime Statistics
Every year around this time, the FBI publishes its statutorily-mandated annual report on hate crime statistics. Like clockwork, every year that report gets misused no matter what the FBI does to discourage that misuse (previous examples of misuse here). This year is no exception, as several prominent liberal sites have picked up on the lede that this year’s report shows a “sharp increase” in anti-gay hate crime while also noting that race-based hate crimes barely decreased at all.
The problem is that these particular FBI statistics are virtually useless for evaluating year-to-year trends – always have been, always will be. This year, the FBI itself went out of its way to warn against such readings, stating “our Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program doesn’t report trends in hate crime stats—yearly increases or decreases often occur because the number of agencies who report to us varies from year to year.”
Yet in reporting an 11 percent increase in hate crimes against gays while lamenting a mere 1% decrease in race-based hate crimes, Think Progress and Feministing ignore this important disclaimer. This failure is significant because several hundred more law enforcement agencies participated in this year’s survey than last year’s survey: last year’s survey had the participation of 13,241 agencies, this year’s of 13,690. Of those agencies, 2025 in 2007 and 2145 in 2008 actually reported any hate crimes. This discrepancy in reporting agencies alone makes a worthwhile one-to-one, year-to-year comparison very difficult to make. At a minimum, for the purposes of this year’s numbers, the discrepancy in reporting agencies accounts for somewhere between 1/3 and 1/2 of the apparent increase in hate crimes against gays.
November 23, 2009 21 Comments
Return of the Yellow Press
November 11, 2009 Comments Off
Liar, Liar: Jim Carrey and the Misinformation About Vaccines and Autism
By Dan Summers
Corynebacterium diphtheriae, the infectious agent responsible for diphtheria, is a nasty little germ. Known once upon a time as the “strangling angel of children,” affected patients would develop a membrane that covered the airway, as well as significant irritation in the throat and surrounding tissue. Respiratory and circulatory collapse commonly followed, with resultant coma and death. Removal of the membrane would lead to profuse bleeding.
I graduated from medical school almost exactly ten years ago, and did my residency in pediatrics at NYU Medical Center in New York City. I have never seen a single case of diphtheria in my career, which is a statement that many pediatricians of my generation could probably echo. Indeed, I have never seen a single case of smallpox, polio, tetanus, measles or a handful of other once-common childhood illnesses, despite having been taught about all of them in medical school and being expected to know about them to pass my certification exams,. The pediatric wards of Bellevue Hospital, once full of children ill with epiglottitis and bacterial meningitis, were largely empty during my time there.
The reason for this gulf between my textbooks and my experience can be attributed to the various vaccines now commonly administered as part of a standard schedule in the United States. While very little in contemporary medical practice is totally free of risk or adverse effects, from the perspective of pediatric infectious disease the advent of vaccinations has been as close to an unalloyed good as is likely ever to occur. Diseases that once killed thousands of children a year are all but unheard of now.
It’s hard to argue with that kind of success.
Sadly, Jim Carrey has seen fit to try. It was with singular frustration that I read his recent missive in the Huffington Post, full of the usual “vaccines lead to autism” misinformation and pseudoscientific mumbo-jumbo. What was most frustrating about the post was not so much that I think Mr. Carrey is wrong (though I think that he is very, very wrong), but that he is dishonest.
May 7, 2009 54 Comments
