Study: bodycams increase some fatal police shootings

boing
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Rogue statistician away!

rogue.png684×2105 400 KB

I really just came to chime in with “maybe there were the same amount of (or more) fatal police shootings before the body cams but they weren’t filmed and they weren’t filed. Peow! Peow!”.

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let’s blame increasing failures in police training, accountability, and of our justice system on cameras

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I don’t know that this study is really telling us anything at all. But I do think that body cameras are overrated by many as a tool to create accountability for the police. Many seem to think that body cameras are the magic pill to solve all our problems. They are not.

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Interesting stuff, from the article you linked to:

" By focusing on links that are beyond dispute, the statisticians could test their model and see whether it came to the logical, established conclusion. Remarkably, the study suggests that the additive noise model was quite accurate. Roughly 80 percent of the correlations were appropriately linked through cause and effect."

From the abstract of the paper:

“more benchmark data would be needed to obtain statistically significant conclusions.”

The paper’s conclusions are not statistically significant.

So, even under the right circumstances, it still does not equal causation, but rather may imply it.

I think one of the mistakes people make is claiming that correlation does not imply causation. I think that is false, correlation often does imply causation. However mere implication does not equal causation.

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Correlation correlates with causation. :wink:

I wonder if the correlation can be explained as a causation the other way around: in places where police shoot many people, people are more likely to demand that police wear body cams.
I mean, do police on Iceland wear body cams? Do the Icelanders even care?

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My first (one of two) accident was because of that, someone trying to stop in the dead middle of the intersection for some reason.

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They’re also using a flawed database. I imagine they mashed together police killing data from the Washington Post + FBI + KilledbyPolice.net.

  1. I know FBI data doesn’t break down police killings by ethnicity
  2. None of the sources can say if its a Police Killing vs. Death by Cop (murder vs. suicide)
  3. Time range is going to be awful, Washington Post database is quite recent and won’t fully capture killings before 2010 etc.
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