LYING BY STATISTICS JOHN ENTINGH - 20 MAY 2012

Lying by statistics has three faces. The first and most used in everyday media are the advertising ploys that inform us 9 out of 10 dentists recommend SureSmile toothpaste! I cannot help but ask myself what would have happened if they had asked 11 dentists, or even 20. Reliable statistics should always include a statement about a random sample of X and give a definite number of how many people were polled, and where those polled came from. For example, if an advertisement claims that 10% of the Bankers in Vatican City recommend a certain investment I would be leery. How many bankers could have businesses within the Vatican Citys 0.2 square miles? We would also expect to see a plus or minus error rate, usually around 3%. No statistic is spot on; all are just well calculated estimates that have the possibility of being off. Take an advertisement that claims a recent test of drinkers of BrainFood Smoothies shows an increase in IQ scores by 10 points, but has an error rate of 12%. Since the average IQ is around 100, one could actually lose IQ points by drinking BrainFood Smoothies. The second face of how statistics are used to lie comes with pollsters. Polls and elections go hand in hand. Of course polls are used in all forms of persuasive arguments and advertising, but their mainstay is in political persuasion. Interest groups and political parties have deep pockets, and thus the ability to construct any type of poll that serves their needs, whatever those may be. The trickery in polling turns upon the key wording in the questions and the order in which the questions are asked. One of the better examples of tricky poll questions is provided by Todd McGreevy on his Third Rail Blog.1 McGreevy

McGreevy, Todd (June 7, 2010). USA Today Poll Is Trick Question on 2nd Amendment Rights. Third Rail Blog. Retrived May 16, 2012 from http://thirdrailblog.com/2nd-amendment-poll-is-a-trick
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points out a USA Today poll that asked: "Does the Second Amendment give individuals the right to bear arms?" McGreevy explains the logic for viewing this as a trick question: None of the Amendments "give" us our rights...that denotes a privilege that can be taken away as well. Our rights are unalienable... naturally occurring to us... if given at all, then given to us by our creator. The Amendments were put there to ensure that government does not "infringe" on our rights that were ours to begin with before government was formed. The first 10 Amendments were all about what government "shall not" do. There's nothing about what government "shall allow." So unfortunately the intention of the poll might be good (might be)... but it really is only going to create more uneducated Americans about their God-given rights. If they were truly interested in educating Americans they would actually PRINT the damn amendment next to their poll:"A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed." The poll should have been worded: Does the Second Amendment allow the government to inhibit or infringe an individual's unalienable right to bear arms? So it is a trick question... no matter how you answer it... answer No because the question is wrongly worded and you look like (to those that don't understand the Constitution) you want government to control your rights. Answer Yes and you are stating you believe government can "give" rights. We have a public education system that does not even teach the most fundamental basics of our Founding Principles, and a mainstream media that continues to dumb America down, to thank for this.

Obviously from the results of the poll McGreevy makes an excellent point. 97% of those polled seem to agree that the legislative body that promulgated the United States Constitution and the Bill of Rights has the power to give (and thus take away) inalienable rights. This is an extreme interpretation of poll trickery, but it follows in vain what social psychologists have been investigating for well over a century, that question wording can lead to less than accurate public sentiment. We see here how lying by statistics takes a turn toward agenda setting, a turn steered by mainstream media. It is the agenda setting function of statistical manipulation (especially through mainstream media) that highlights the third face of how statistics can be used to lie. The third face has nothing to do with how the numbers are collected and everything to do with how the numbers are presented. This is a framing effect the media is expert at when it comes to agenda setting. A very recent issue in the United States involves Fourth Amendment rights. Up to 9/11 the Fourth Amendment had been tattered by nearly twenty exceptions upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court, everything from a plain sight exception to a plain smell exception when dogs are involved. The Fourth Amendment (Amendment IV) to the United States Constitution is the part of the Bill of Rights which guards against unreasonable searches and seizures, along with requiring any warrant to be judicially sanctioned and supported by probable cause. It was adopted as a response to the abuse of the writ of assistance, which is a type of general search warrant, in the American Revolution. Search and arrest should be limited in scope according to specific information supplied to the issuing court, usually by a law enforcement officer, who has sworn by it (this purported inalienable right has been rendered

practicably unenforceable with the Patriot Act under the guise of national security). The recent abuse of the right to privacy involves the release of personal information through the departments of motor vehicles, which exposes drivers to profiling absent probable cause.

The Drivers Privacy Protection Act (DPPA), Public Law No. 103-322 codified as amended by Public Law 106-69, was originally enacted in 1994 to protect the privacy of personal information assembled by State Department of Motor Vehicles (DMVs). The DPPA was passed in response to a series of abuses of drivers' personal information collected by the government. Most notably was the 1989 death of actress Rebecca Schaeffer. In that case, a private investigator was hired by an obsessed fan to obtain Rebecca Schaeffer's address through her California motor vehicle record. The fan then used this information to stalk and to kill her. Other incidents cited by Congress included a ring of Iowa home robbers who targeted victims by writing down the license plates of expensive cars and obtaining home address information from the State's department of motor vehicles.2 The DPPA has recently come under successful attack from law enforcement with automated license plate readers and the argument of police safety. Most every developed country has police departments that have patrol cars outfitted with cameras that can read license plates and return driver information. Recent changes in law enforcement allow for a direct link between license plate scans and an extended data base under the pretense of protecting police officers from dangerous criminals. In short, they can collect any information deemed relevant to officer safety and supply that information each time the license plate is scanned. To justify collecting and making this information available the statistics on police officer fatalities is cited as trending upward. CBS News correspondent John Miller, a former assistant

The Drivers Privacy Protection Act (DPPA) and the Privacy of Your State Motor Vehicle Record. Retrieved May 16, 2012 from: http://epic.org/privacy/drivers/
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director of the FBI, spoke with CBS Evening News anchor Scott Pelley about this trend.3 Palley cites 72 police officer deaths in 2011 and 35 as of mid April 2012 in the United States. These statistics are very different from what CNN reports:

The number of police officers who have died in the line of duty in 2011 has increased 14% nationwide from last year, according to The National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund. The shooting death of a New York police officer early Monday morning marks the 166th death nationwide in the past 11 months, up from last year's 146.4

When reports conflict like this, one naturally asks who is right and who is wrong. As it turns out no one is wrong. It comes down to what data base was consulted and how the statistics are framed, and that framing depends on what agenda is trying to be set. Miller and Palley were reporting on actual felonious deaths where a police officer was murdered by another individual5 and CNN was reporting all deaths of police officers accidental or not (e.g. traffic accidents and natural causes). We would never want to imply that the safety of law enforcement officers is not a top priority; however, we also need to put these deaths in perspective. Law enforcement officers is an employment category that includes employees of departments of corrections and any related field (e.g. parole and probation officers and courthouse security), and also includes U.S territories. In 2008 1,133,000 state and local law enforcement personnel were reported.6 As of September 2004, U.S. federal agencies employed approximately 105,000 full-time personnel authorized to make arrests and carry firearms in the 50

Miller, John (April 13, 2012). Number of police officer deaths growing. CBS News. Retrieved May 16, 2012 from http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-18563_162-57413954/number-of-police-officer-deaths-growing/?tag=mncol;lst;1 4 Squeglia, Kristina & Digman, Chris (December 12, 2011). Number of police officers killed in line of duty spikes in 2011. CNN U.S. Retrieved May 16, 2012 from: http://articles.cnn.com/2011-12-12/us/us_law-enforcement-deaths2011_1_death-toll-police-officer-craig-floyd?_s=PM:US 5 Harger, Stover E. III (May 16, 2012). FBI: Officer deaths up 22 percent. The South County Spotlight. Retrieved May 16, 2012 from: http://www.spotlightnews.net/news/story.php?story_id=133719769724354200 6 Bureau of Justice Satistics. Census of State and Local LawEnforcement Agencies, 2008. Retrieved May 16, 2012 from http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/content/pub/pdf/csllea08.pdf
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States and the District of Columbia.7 That is an industry with a conservative estimate of a combined 1,238,000 employees. Even at the extreme end of the death statistics, the fatality rate is well below 0.1% for this industry. Comparatively there are approximately 1,250,200 construction workers in the U.S.8 with 751 fatalities in 2010 which translates to about a 17% fatality rate for that industry. Given worker safety concerns, being in law enforcement is far safer (100 times so) than a construction job. But this perspective, as realistic as it is, fails to support an agenda aimed at denying civil rights thus will not be framed objectively in an agenda setting media.

Furthering the concept of how valid statistics can be framed to set agendas, or not, we can look at the armed conflict statistics on fatalities. One version is provided by the Human Security Gateway in their Human Security Centre Dataset (UCDP).9 Ostensibly, the Human Security Gateway focuses attention on threats stemming from violence to individuals and to societies at risk. This approach is

Bureau of Justice Statistics. Federal Law Enforcement Officers, 2004. Retrived May 16, 2012 from http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/content/pub/pdf/fleo04.pdf 8 Bureau of Labor and Statistics (2010). Construction Laborers and Helpers. Retrived May 16, 2012 from: http://www.bls.gov/ooh/construction-and-extraction/construction-laborers-and-helpers.htm
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UCDP/Human Security Centre Dataset. Gleditsch et al. (2002). Retrieved March 26 from: http://www.humansecuritygateway.com/showRecord.php?RecordId=34079
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complementary to the broad concept of human security originally articulated by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in its 1994 Human Development Report. Objectively, the database is fairly misleading, such as the chart below.10 To be fair we must review UCDPs definitions. They define State as (state-based, non-state and one-sided) A state is either an internationally recognised sovereign government controlling a specified territory, or an internationally unrecognised government controlling a specified territory whose sovereignty is not disputed by another internationally recognised sovereign government previously controlling the same territory.11 To further objectivity and insure no confusion is afoot, we need to look at the statistics for fatalities created by the type of state actors12:

UCDP/Human Security Centre Dataset retrieved May 16, 2012 from: http://www.pcr.uu.se/digitalAssets/89/89170_non_state_fatalities_2010a.jpg 11 UCDP Definitions. Retrieved May 16, 2012 from http://www.pcr.uu.se/research/ucdp/definitions/#State 12 UCDP One sided fatalities by type of actor. Retrieved May 16, 2012 from: http://www.pcr.uu.se/digitalAssets/89/89184_one-sided_type_actor_2010a.jpg
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These numbers indicate that at no time since 1989 has the fatality rate of armed conflict exceeded 36,000, and since 1997 has not even reached 10,000. At first I believed UCDP was just reporting deaths that occurred directly by an enemy bullet as the reason for the numbers being so low, similar to the different interpretations on law enforcement fatalities. But that is not the case at all; here are the numbers related to those types of fatalities: Sudan's Darfur conflict (2003- ) puts a conservative estimate on the death toll at 300,000;13 Iraq fatalities (2003-2011) near 117,000;14 Ituri, Congo Major (1999-2007) 60,000 dead;15 Afghanistan (2001- ) 45,600 dead;16 Pakistan, Al Qaeda/Taliban War, (2004- ) 36,000 dead;17 and the Libyan revolt against Gaddafi (2011) 30,000 dead.18 The list goes on

13Sudan's 14 15

/1/hi/world/africa/3496731.stm

Darfur Conflict (23 February 2010) BBC News. Retrieved May 16, 2012 from: http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-

Iraq Body Count (IBC). Retrieved May 16, 2012 from: http://www.iraqbodycount.org/ Human Rights Watch. Retrieved May 16, 2012 from: http://hrw.org/english/docs/2005/03/11/congo10311.htm 16 Costs of War. Retrived May 16, 2012 from: http://costsofwar.org/article/afghan-civilians 17 Costs of War Retrieved May 16, 2012 from: http://costsofwar.org/article/pakistani-civilians 18 Laub, "Libyan estimate: At least 30,000 died in the war", AP, Sept. 8 2011. Retrived May 16, 2012 from: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/feedarticle/9835879

and on and importantly almost any single conflict alone exceeds UCDPs most extreme number of all incidents combined. The civilian fatalities associated with armed conflict are far bleaker. A reliable and well sourced conflict fatality data base is the Death Tolls for the Major Wars and Atrocities of the Twentieth Century .19 This database does more than just provide numbers and pretty graphs, it actually sources facts such as the back and forth massacres between Hutu and Tutsi in Rwanda and Burundi (1959-95) at an estimated 1,350,000 deaths; Ethiopia (1962-92) suffered two simultaneous civil wars, along with a major famine and dictatorial repression resulting in 2,000,000 deaths; Afghanistan (1979-2001) endured Soviet occupation resulting in 1,800,000 dead; Sudan (1983-2005) 1,900,000 dead; Kinshasa Congo (1998 et seq.) 3,800,000 dead; Angola (1975-2002) 500,000 dead; Mozambique (1975-1992) 800,000 dead; Iraq, under Saddam Hussein (1979-2003) left 300,000 dead; Somalia plagued by civil war (1991 et seq.), 500,000 dead; and the East Timor, Conquest by Indonesia (1975-99) resulting in 200,000 deaths. These instances are far from inclusive and are conservative estimates, but make a good point on lying by statistics. It is unclear what agenda UCDP is servicing from their reports; it is equally unclear what agenda USA Today was supporting in their poll on Second Amendment Rights. What is clear is that official looking statistics and poll results are being pushed at us by and through media outlets that color reality. There is a duty that comes with enjoying democracy, and that duty is to look beyond colored realities and see social facts and social responsibility. The chief justification for elite democracy is that the common man lacks these very abilities and capabilities. Of course it seems a little paradoxical that it is these same elites with deep pockets that go to such lengths to color our reality by lying to us with statistics.

Death Tolls for the Major Wars and Atrocities of the Twentieth Century. Retrieved May 16, 2012 from http://necrometrics.com/20c1m.htm
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