The only thing positive to say is that it has come out and it will be investigated.
At 7000 victims I think itâs safe to say the corruption here goes all the way to the top. Who do you suppose is going to investigate? The feds? Why should this be any different than any other big city in America? The victims are the wrong color. None of the responsible parties will ever see jail time and the good citizens of Chicago will pay for any reparations via taxes. âNothing to see here, move along.â
The frightening thing about operations like this is that could switch over to mass executions without skipping a beat, although it might take a few days to get a substitute for Zyklon-B.
That just gives you the shivers right down to your bones.
After so many years, it continues to surprise me that torturers keep their victims alive. Are they not guaranteed recruits for the enemy - whoever that is? Are they not certain to name you in court, some day? It just feels like one of those things that belongs on the Evil Overlordâs Donât List.
We have lots more ways to kill people now than fumigation salts. But point taken, yes it isnât too far of a step.
at 7000 victims, and torture, some people must have died, statistically speaking.
I mean even without torture somebody should have died there over the years, because some times people die. So if there havenât been any deaths there, at all, thatâs a big red flag to me - because that would imply that someone died as people sometimes will because they didnât have medication or whatever, were locked up didnât get looked at in time, and then they got rid of that inconvenient death.
And anyway, given that people often will die in American prisons or holding stations just because nobody cares to look in on them, or they will commit suicide for various reasons I would have to think that the statistic for how many people have died would be higher than the amount you would expect for just normal mortality rates among 7000 people over a space of what is it exactly - 11 years?
The combination of running a startup and being only middling good at stats prevents me from making the argument in full, but someone better at stats than I should look at it. Unless there are reported deaths, but the article makes it seem that there werenât any. which is, of course, weird.
Oh yes, excellent point. Places like this have always existed, and there is always a spot where bodies are disposed of. Thatâs the problem with âenhanced interrogationâ - a fair number of people will simply drop dead, and others will be brutally beaten to death. Even if itâs no worse than a fraternity initiation, hazing is illegal, because even young healthy college students can die suddenly in the middle of âfun and games.â
In Chicago, itâs safe to say the corruption is everywhere.
Because they genuinely believe theyâre the good guys. And because, even if they did have a milliqualm about what theyâre doing, âŚ
How can you run stats in the absence of having any information?
this seems something of a disingenuous question but off the top of my head:
part of the requirements of such a thing would be gathering information.
so data that needs to be gathered is how many people normally die out of a population of 7000 over a range of eleven years in holding facilities. Letâs call this number A.
Then we need to find out have there been any fatalities, letâs call this number B? compare B to A.
I guess we have to ask Chicago PD have there been any facilities. If they donât know thatâs pretty interesting, and gives more room to push. If there have been give us the data on these fatalities please.
If B is 0 and A is not 0 what is the likelihood of this arising.
If there is little likelihood well then an article about how great it is that Chicago have created a utopia were people are functionally immortal.
Then go to next step - if there is little likelihood are there lots of unsolved homicides, people being found dead in the streets near this location over the space of years in which this facility has been run? There would be lots of possible areas to explore but that would be the first - then what is the ethnicity of the people found dead if disproportionate amounts are found - are they predominantly composed of the same ethnic groups that are housed in the facility? and so on and so forth. Lots and lots of work for someone with time and a good grasp of either Python or R.
Actually unsolved fatalities in the area could be investigated separately of course and doesnât have to be related to A or B. If there is a higher than expected rate of fatalities in the area why is that? Correlation just might equal torture facility.
But there is confounding that we canât get around. We donât know if this facility even compares to other ones that we have data for. We donât know the average length of stay or anything about the population incarcerated there. It could be so different that any conjecture on what goes on inside it is meaningless.
true about the confounding, but in a case like that what are the possibilities -
the average length of stay is very short compared to other holding facilities
the average length of stay is comparable to other holding facilities
the average length of stay is long compared to other holding facilities
If we assume average length is comparable and that shows us that B is less than it should compared to A, then this gives a rhetorical device to open up Chicago PD to make statements because essentially this kind of exercise is about putting the pressure on to release data, if things look bad enough with the supposed data they have to argue the supposed data is wrong and to do that they have to release the real data. If things look good with the supposed data well - color me surprised.
Furthermore the article implies that we do know lengths of stay about some subpopulation of those kept, that can be used as a base for determining the length of stay for the population. If this gives an unfavorable result of Chicago PD, it would be up to Chicago PD to argue why it was wrong which would be best done by - I donât know - transparency?
You could say that, but you could also say a lot of things about that facility. Without knowing anything about the underlying population, aka the denominator, then all the gyrations about numerators have no meaning & are hand-waving. For this, the best path is a political one rather than a descriptive one. Iâd rely on law and pressuring local boards through the media rather than numbers. We can dissect it by the numbers AFTER itâs been shuttered or turned into a legit jail. (As if we need another jail.)
I guess Iâd believe that there are a number of things one can assume about that underlying population and that those assumptions should be rebutted by the Chicago PD - #1 assumption - given that ânearly 6,000 of those held at the facility were blackâ then that part of the population represented by that 6000 should match the general population properties for Black people taken into custody by Chicago PD - I agree that this isnât 100% infallible, but it is up to Chicago PD to provide more data if they want to contest the assumption. Anyway given that the Guardian can say that nearly 6000 were black it seems that they already have some data as to the demographics of the population. So Iâm guessing that yes, things can be known about that population it is not a complete Tabula Rasa.
The point is, they are not going to provide the data. They arenât going to acknowledge or rebut a data analysis. The way to evoke change here is via a different means.
#BERN THIS SHIT TO THE GROUND
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