Things You Don't Talk About in Polite Company

This is totally unrelated to California's racial privacy proposition that failed, but U.S. Magistrate Judge Michael R. Merz ordered researchers at the University of Cincinnati to withhold their findings on racial-profiling until both sides can analyze the data. Since some race riots in 2001, Cincinnati has been gathering race, gender, and age information of everyone stopped by police.

I can understanding not wanting to release the data. It's pretty explosive, whatever the results are, and it will take time to digest. Even the ACLU wants keep the info secret until after upcoming city council elections.

I am also curious to see the police given time to formulate policies in response to the data before there is any public pressure. Would new policies, if necessary, seem full and comprehensive or would they be token measures?

Assisted by grad students Growette Bostaph, Robert Brown and Shawn Minor , University of Cincinnati associate professor in criminal justiceJohn Eck has been gathering and analyzing the data. His specialty is policing, criminal investigations. Eck was hired by the Aria Group, a firm that mediated the settlement in a racial profiling lawsuit against the city of Cincinnati. If you're curious how much that costs, Aria has budgeted $50,000 for Eck and his assistants.

I can only imagine how this product will work. Presumably, there will have to be a comparison of crime statistics before and after the lawsuit, to see if the extent of any Hawthorne effect on a police department that knows it is being scrutinized. I'm not sure if there will be an assumption of zero demographic change in the pre- and post- periods of data. I'm guessing there will be comparison of Cincinnati to other locales, and I wonder what data exists for other cities. I suspect the hardest part is ruling out spurious causes of changes.

I do think that when given the basic numbers without any context or explanation, people will jump to conclusions. I see no evidence that the hoi polloi have any grasp of statistics or social science. Nor would I expect them to; even learned people sometimes have trouble grasping the basics outside of their field. Mostly, what people need is a trusted interpreter of data.