Stat Juking revisited

I'd reckoned you'd need a bit of stats-fu to find evidence of police juking of the crime statistics. Turns out there was an easier way. Bevan Hurley reports that the Herald on Sunday got a copy of a report showing that Counties Manukau police had been fiddling the burglary numbers by recoding burglaries as less serious offences. 

About 700 burglaries were “recoded” in the Counties Manukau south area over three years, an internal police investigation has found. It found that about 70 per cent of the time, the offences should have remained burglaries.

The revelations will be an embarrassment for Police Commissioner Mike Bush, who was district commander of the area at the time, although he was not responsible for overseeing the coding.

Police have not said why the statistics were altered, but say staff were not under instruction to do so. Tolley denied police were under political pressure to reduce burglary statistics.

You don't need overt political pressure to get this kind of outcome, just KPIs with strong enough incentives. On the plus side, they were caught. On the down side, I can't see how lower level staff doing the coding would have any incentive to muck the stats around unless they were getting pushed by those whose KPIs did provide such incentive. It would be really interesting to read the full report.

The review listed dozens of examples where break-ins and attempted burglaries were downgraded, including one case where police failed to follow up after a witness gave them a burglar’s registration number.

The review found the burglary recoding rates in Counties Manukau south at the time were 15 per cent to 30 per cent whereas other areas typically recoded about 5 per cent.

So where last week's rumours were about failing to pursue charges, which wouldn't have mattered for stats based on recorded complaints, downgrading the complaints to less serious offences would matter.

I'd be curious to know what kinds of lesser offences were artificially inflated to keep the burglary numbers down.

I hope that the Police stats units have informed any researchers who'd been using the incorrect figures of the updated and corrected series. Anything that relied too heavily on 2009-2012 Manukau data is now going to have to be re-done.

The Herald on Sunday broke the story on the 13th. Their version is gated. The Stuff version, which notes "It was reported" rather than crediting the Herald, is here.

Stat Juking?

Labour claims that National's instructed the police to charge fewer people to meet crime reduction targets.  HT: NoRightTurn

“Front line police and others in the criminal justice system are telling us police have had pressure put on by senior officers to reduce the number of charges they lay to meet the Government's targets,” Justice spokesperson Andrew Little says.

“Police are increasingly using pre-charge warnings as a device to not proceed with charges. At the same time I have heard of people being told to gather evidence themselves before police will consider bringing charges.

Labour’s Police spokesperson Jacinda Ardern said New Zealanders were owed an explanation.

“We won’t stop the cycle of repeat offending against women and children by lowering the threshold for prosecution.

“This directive coincides with a significant drop in the number of family violence prosecutions, while at the same time the number of family violence investigations has soared.

“It doesn’t help that police are still not recording domestic violence offences separately, or that access to many programmes aimed at stemming family violence are contingent on a prosecution.”

If it were true, how could we tell?

First off, the greater use of pre-charge warnings isn't a secret. It was something advertised as a deliberate move to free up police resources rather than bring charges for minor offences. Here's the Herald from 2012; here's 3 News from 2010.

The Police's fact sheet on Pre-Charge Warnings notes that they're only used for relatively minor offences:

Operationally, PCWs are more suited in urban rather than rural areas, and in particular the centres of larger localities with prevalent disorder or alcohol-related offending. The initiative targets those 17-30 years of age (highest rates of overall offending are in this age group, including for the key offences eligible for PCWs). Of the top five offences where PCWs are most commonly used, four have no victims (and are “Police initiated”, such as Possession of Cannabis or Disorderly Behaviour). Shoplifting under $500 is the only offence often resolved with a PCW with a recorded victim. 

That doesn't mean that there isn't juking, just that there mightn't be a presumption of juking. What would juking look like?

• There has to be some optimal use of PCWs rather than taking offenders through the courts: low-level offences where a scare should be enough. If the rate of subsequent offending among PCW offenders were higher than the rates among those formally charged, this could be suggestive of too many offenders going through PCW, and especially if the re-offending rates were increasing with increased use of PCWs without subsequent ratcheting back of PCWs by police.
• For non-PCW areas like family violence, we'd expect to see an increasing divergence between crime rates as measured by charged offences and crime rates as measured by survey responses to questions like "Have you been a victim of crime in the last six months". 
• There are crime victimisation questions in the NZ GSS, but it's only updated every two years. 
• The Ministry of Justice maintains the NZ Crime and Safety Survey, but the last iteration of it was 2009. 
• It isn't survey data, but if the hospitals maintain data on the source of ED-presented injuries, you could look for a growing divergence in the number of assaults backed out of that kind of source and the police charge rate. 
• In the absence of frequent survey data on crime victimisation rates, you might look to see whether policing districts with higher ex ante crime rates had increased conviction rates with declining charge rates. If the police were under pressure to reduce the number of charged offenders to keep the number of offences down, you'd hope they'd at least decide to avoid pursuing the cases that were least likely to yield convictions. If these pressures were then different across policing districts because of different crime rates, I'd expect that:
• A greater proportion of charges in juked districts fall on repeat offenders rather than first-time offenders;
• A greater proportion of charges in juked districts proceed to conviction as fewer of the less-certain cases get pursued.
• I'd expect some action in the time path, like districts getting close to some target crime rate start slowing their charge rate more quickly than we'd expect from mean reversion.

I'd be pretty surprised if the police here were juking the stats: that Little's presenting the use of PCWs as evidence of juking, when it was rather well announced policy, doesn't give me confidence. I've not looked at all at the kinds of statistics suggested above. But it's what I'd expect somebody laying accusations of stat-juking to be presenting.

UPDATE: Farrar notes that it shouldn't even be possible to juke the stats by failing to charge as the main crime stat series is based on recorded complaints. I'd assumed that Labour was effectively alleging that the police were juking things by failing to record complaints which didn't proceed to charge, which was part of my "I'd be pretty surprised" prior.

Harmful registries

New Zealand's Police Minister Anne Tolley is proposing a national sex offender registry. 

I don't know what's all planned for this registry. If it's restricted to violent or dangerous offenders, with access restricted to checks by employers for positions involving access to children, then it could do some good. Unfortunately, these things do often wind up overreaching. Here's Reason Magazine from a couple of years ago:

“Without the registry,” says Shirley Turner, “he would still be alive today.” She is referring, in a 2006 interview with Human Rights Watch, to her 24-year-old son, William Elliot. He was murdered that year by a pedophile-hunting Canadian gunman who found his name and address in Maine’s online database of sex offenders. Elliot’s crime: When he was 19, he had sex with his girlfriend, who was three weeks shy of 16, the age of consent in Maine.

The panic that followed Megan Kanka’s murder produced an alarm system that often fails to distinguish between dangerous predators like Timmendequas, who had a record of assaulting little girls, and nonviolent lawbreakers like Elliot, who posed no discernible threat to the general public. They are all mixed together in the online registries of sex offenders that every state is required to maintain as a condition of receiving federal law enforcement funding—a mandate imposed by another Megan’s Law, enacted by Congress in 1996.

American rules typically bundle completely nonviolent, no-risk offenders with the most violent rapists. They're restricted in many states from living near schools or parks or daycares. Some neighbourhoods consequently built tiny parks with the specific purpose of making it illegal for an offender to move in nearby. Consequently, there is literally almost nowhere that sex offenders can live in some places:

Registration only rarely leads to murder, but it routinely ruins relationships, triggers ostracism and harassment, and impedes education and employment. These burdens are compounded by state and local laws that ban sex offenders from living near schools, parks, day care centers, and other locations where children congregate. Such restrictions, which often apply even if an offender’s crime had nothing to do with children, can be so extensive that entire cities are effectively off limits. In Miami local residence restrictions have given rise to a colony of more than 70 sex offenders who live under the Julia Tuttle Causeway, a bridge that crosses Biscayne Bay. 

And the registry can be forever:

A man who was convicted of statutory rape when he was 16 for having consensual sex with his 14-year-old girlfriend told Human Rights Watch: “We were in love. And now we are married. So it’s like I am on the registry for having premarital sex. Does having premarital sex make me a danger to society? My wife doesn’t think so.” 

I hope that the Kiwi policymakers looking at this stuff will design it to avoid the kinds of problems evident in the US. Restrict it to violent or otherwise risky offenders, and restrict access to it.

Social costs of Easter

It's not just how much chocolate we're eating, it's how we're getting our Easter eggs. From the Herald:

The Egg Day Out was held across three locations in Auckland on Good Friday. It was organised by the Equippers church and sponsored by Cadbury. A thousand eggs were to be dropped at each location from a helicopter for children to "hunt" and gather. All went to plan at the city and North Shore locations but in Manukau at the Vodafone Events Centre air traffic control prevented the chopper from flying over the site and the eggs were scattered by hand.

Equippers pastor Wilhem Schaafhausen told the Herald he had expected up to 5000 people to attend at each site, but on the day about 30,000 showed up. He said one of the problems at the event was the behaviour of many parents.

"A lot of kids were getting hurt ... parents were just running in and running over the kids. I was like 'oh my goodness' and my volunteers were blown away by the behaviour of the parents," he said.

...They described other parents as greedy and abusive and said they were trying to get as many eggs as possible. Yvonne Pokotai-Ratana took her daughters to the event with some friends and their own kids. She said an adult set upon her younger daughter Yves to take any eggs she had collected.

"There was a point where the adults weren't allowed to access beyond, only the children. But arrogant adults ignored the commentator," she told the Herald.

"When the egg drop started the crowd of kids and adults rushed up the hill - most of whom I saw were adults being rough to others around them just to get the Easter eggs. My 7-year-old's face was scratched by an adult and she didn't even have an egg. Other children walking past were crying or even hurt."

A woman posted on the Facebook page that she ended up in the accident and emergency department with her young son after an incident at the event.

"Thanks for the A&E visit for my 3-year-old [after] getting pushed by adults and his fingers getting trampled on after egg ripped out of his hand," she wrote to organisers.

We know that chocolate is addictive. And look at the lengths to which even adults will go when chocolate-crazed. Events like this encourage precisely this kind of behaviour: a chocolate free-for-all. Clearly we need to ban free-chocolate events. But that isn't enough. Our obesity problems combined with this kind of mayhem point strongly towards tougher regulations on access to chocolate and chocolate minimum pricing. We need many hundred-thousand-dollar grants to the University of Otago's and University of Auckland's public health departments examining binge chocolate eating. They'll surely find that we're in a deep crisis and that More Must Be Done. We could establish Chocolate Healthwatch to send out anti-chocolate press releases every Easter and Halloween.

Or maybe we could instead start recognizing that there are just some real jerks out there and deal with the more general jerk problem. It would be ridiculous to start some anti-chocolate campaign on the basis of this weekend's event; it would be rather more appropriate to have parents go through their videos of the event, find the adults who were behaving like this, put their pictures up everywhere, and shame them for their loutish, awful behaviour. Would that we could take an individual responsibility approach more broadly.

Illegal leverage

Legalising prostitution wasn't enough to get the gangs out of prostitution in New Zealand. Joelle Dally's coverage of the Mellory Manning murder trial shows why:

Chilling insights into the Manchester St scene emerged during a just-concluded High Court murder trial, after which Mauha Huatahi Fawcett was found guilty of Manning's December 2008 killing.

At the time, the Mongrel Mob was vying for control of Manchester St.

The gang had set up territory at the Oxford St bridge on Manchester St, which they called "The Four Aves", where they minded their own girls.

But they also used standover tactics to "tax" working girls for $20 a job.

Fawcett, a Mongrel Mob prospect, was apparently told by senior gang members they "owned the streets".

Street workers who tout for business on Manchester St today recall the Mob presence being "full-on" right up to the February 2011 earthquake.

One, who had been working on the street for about 30 years, said when Manning was killed, "I just knew those mobsters were behind it".

"They've pulled away at the moment, the Mongrel Mob. I haven't seen them since I've been back out since after the earthquake. They used to be really intimidating," she said.

"Those boys will still creep back around here - push their drugs on to [girls], them buying their drugs. Then before you know it, you're ticked up so much, you're in debt."

All of this is well after prostitution was legalised. While legalisation means that sex workers can go to the police if they're being victimised, it does not solve the problem entirely where some sex workers are in the industry and choose street work over brothels (or aren't able to get employment in brothels) because of substance abuse issues. In general, post-legalisation outcomes have been good. But legalisation of prostitution by itself hasn't been panacea.

I doubt the Mongrel Mob could have had as much power over the Manchester Street workers if those workers were able to get drugs instead in legal and regulated markets.

I'd really like to know whether the Mongrel Mob's "standover" taxes were restricted to those girls beholden to them through debt, or whether they maintained broader intimidation despite legalisation. I can understand why addicts indebted to the Mongrel Mob might be reluctant to go to the police. I'm not sure what would have stopped workers not so beholden from going to the police. Were the police not credibly able to offer protection for those workers dobbing in Mongrel Mob members?

Drug dealers and the minimum wage

Steve Levitt demonstrated that low-ranking Chicago gang members earned less than minimum wage. Why did they get involved? In hopes of moving up the food chain. Tournament games invite excess investment.

I wonder whether New Zealand meth dealers also earn less than minimum wage.

Sharna Butcher was sentenced today for conspiring to sell methamphetamine. She is also the Unite Union South Island organiser. Here's 3 News:

Ms Butcher is well-known around the South Island, having both organised and attended several protests across this year. She attracted media attention in May after blocking the drive through to a McDonald's restaurant in Dunedin while lobbying for better pay rates and guaranteed hours for workers.

Do meth dealers earn a living wage? What are their hours like?

Do unions pay so little that their organisers are forced to deal drugs to make ends meet?

I think we need a Campbell Live investigation of working conditions for those working for the unions.