long time guy wrote:
Quote:
At FRONTLINE’s request, Roman analyzed the pool of 43,500 homicides by race in states with Stand Your Ground laws* and those without them. Because he wanted to control for multiple variables — the races of the victim and the shooter, whether they were strangers, whether they involved a firearm and whether the murders were in Stand Your Ground states — Roman used a technique known as regression analysis, which is a statistical tool to analyze the relationship between different pieces of data.
This means there wasn't enough data to actually support any claims, so the guy built a statistical model, probably based on conviction disparity between whites and blacks, and applied it to states with SYG laws and the number of interactions that fit the data. This means any conclusions are incredibly dependent on how the model was constructed (if black people represent a larger percentage of those convicted of murder and the like, does it also not follow that they will be convicted of murder even if SYG is invoked?) and the size of the sample to which the model was applied.
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So the disparity is clear. But the figures don’t yet prove bias. As Roman points out, the data doesn’t show the circumstances behind the killings, for example whether the people who were shot were involved in home invasions or in a confrontation on the street.
Additionally, there are far fewer white-on-black shootings in the FBI data — only 25 total in both the Stand Your Ground and non-Stand Your Ground states.
Yeah, that's not very reliable. No accounting for whether the white-on-black shooting instances were the result of a felony being committed, AND a projection based on a sample of only 25 instances that are completely devoid of context is bad, very bad, science.
And hey, remember that asterisk in the first quote of the report? Here's what it means:
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*Roman considered any state with a broad self-defense law to be a “Stand Your Ground” state, although states have passed different variations of the law and some states didn’t enforce the laws until the end of 2009.
So we have no idea if SYG was invoked or enforceable in the 25 instance sample this guy used to extrapolate an entire data set. This is irrefutably bad science.
long time guy wrote:
Sort of a predictable response.
Yes, a faulty study will be pointed out as faulty by a rational, sane person.