Why we can’t trust crime analyses in New Zealand
Jarrod Gilbert has spent a lot of time hanging out with people in biker gangs.
That’s how he wrote his book, Patched, a history of gangs in New Zealand. According to the Herald, it’s also the police’s rationale for not letting him have access to crime data. I don’t know whether it would be more charitable to the Police to accept that this is their real reason or not.
Conceivably, you might be concerned about access to these data for people with certain sorts of criminal connections. There might be ways to misuse the data, perhaps for some sort of scam on crime victims. No-one suggests that is the sort of association with criminals that Dr Gilbert has.
It gets worse. According to Dr Gilbert, also writing in the Herald, the standard data access agreement for the data says police “retain the sole right to veto any findings from release.” Even drug companies don’t get away with those sorts of clauses nowadays.
To the extent these reports are true, we can’t entirely trust any analysis of New Zealand crime data that goes beyond what’s publicly available. There might be a lot of research that hasn’t been affected by censorship and threats to block future work, but we have no way of picking it out.
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »
I’ve worked with different MoH data sources, StatsNZ and MoE and they type of stuff Jarrod is going through is nothing like I have experienced. The people I have been in contact with have always been incredibly helpful.
Most restrictions are put on unit record data of people which is highly appropriate. But that’s more to do with confidentiality for respondents rather than restricting research.
9 years ago
Ah, ….’If the results are deemed to be “negative” then the police will seek to “improve its outcomes”.’ ??
Without seeing the full context it’s hard to see if this is as bad as it sounds — and it sounds pretty bad. But if this effort is really being put in to massaging external research findings, should there be trust in the publicly available crime data? Someone getting the wrong message from the Wire?
9 years ago
context can be found at:
http://www.jarrodgilbert.com/blog/the-police-research-contract
“8.2 Police retain the sole right to veto any Project findings from release”
…
but they will not 9.2
“unreasonably: a) encroach on the Researchers’ academic independence;”
Together with the threat of blacklist, this is obviously chilling. But I can also imagine that a policy audience will just (if forced to it) point to 9.2 a and argue that there’s no problem.
9 years ago