serbianslayer:

thatbrony98:

bimbotheclownfuneralcircus:

tilthat:

TIL: in 2015, NYPD went on strike to show how important they were to the city and later studies showed the rates of crimes actually decreased

via reddit.com

Lol fuck Reddit

The crime rate went down because there was no one to report it this is the same logic of vaccines causing autism. Correlation does not equal causation. People are also less likely to call in crimes if they know no one will enforce them. Just because you want it to be true doesn’t mean it is. Same can be said for flat earthers.

Wow I never considered that! None of the authors did either or the journal editors or the reviewers tasked with checking the paper. Or the researchers who read the paper that would have published a response paper calling for this paper’s retraction.

Of course they fucking considered that, Nature is one of the most prestigious science journals in the world. I had a lab mate’s paper go through three rounds of review for Nature before it was rejected. Six rounds of review for accepted papers is common. They’re thorough.

If you actually read the paper, they do address this concern. First off: “focusing on major crime complaints is relatively standard within the literature, largely because these statistics are the most reliable across time and space⁵. Research auditing the NYPD’s major crime complaints data validates the statistics: patterns found in independent sources of crime data, including victims’ surveys, coroners’ reports and insurance losses, appear identical to major crime complaints²⁴. “ This means that major crime complaints are shown to agree well with other more objective measures of crime like coroners’ reports.

Second, “In our analyses, we examine how crime under-reporting may bias the results. We employ precinct fixed-effects to address time-invariant sources of under-reporting, such as communities’ varying histories of police distrust. We then model time-variant sources of under-reporting biases, such as those caused by the killing of Eric Garner and/or the heightened conflict between protesters and police.” They acknowledge that people could be less likely to report crime during this period and their model takes that into account. What the TIL headline doesn’t really show is that this wasn’t a full police strike. They just cut down on proactive policing so they would still respond to serious crime complaints. That’s why the paper focuses on serious crime complaints since the police would still respond to those, thus people would likely still report them, and those crimes are harder to hide than more minor crimes. 

I would suggest actually reading something before you smugly criticize it and compare a prestigious science journal to flat-earthers.

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