Jack Warner, National Security Minister for Trinidad and Tobago, has hit the international headlines with an intriguingly positive view of statistics. They make you do bad things.
Warner, already controversial because of his role in FIFA (he was forced to stand down as vice president amid allegations of cronyism), said when figures show a drop in crime, or even identify areas with no crime, criminals are encouraged to perpetrate crime in response. ’They want to make news, they want to make headlines that spoil the record, and they get an incentive to do this’
The remedy, he says, to is to suppress crime data. ’No figures of any kind will be given anywhere … I’ve also instructed the police not to reveal any figures on murders anywhere, anytime,’ he said.
Kevin Baldeosingh, a columnist on the Trinidad Express, had some fun with the proposed ban – which police chiefs have so far resisted. He noted that the minister had been said by the Court of Arbitration for Sport in July to be ’prone to an economy with the truth’. To measure how prone, he went, on you need a statistical theorem.
‘This theorem, which describes the effect of experience on opinion, says that P (A\B) = P (B\A) x P (A)/ {P (B\A) x P (A)} + {P (B|~A) x P (~A)} where P is the probability that Jack lies (B) when he talks (A). If we assign a probability of 50 per cent to A and 66 per cent to B, that gives us a 67 per cent probability that, when Jack speaks, he lies. Which would explain why he doesn’t like statistics.’
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Is it possible that he is just anthropomorphising regression to the mean?An unusually extreme crime rate (low or high) is most likely to be followed by a more moderate value, essentially because most of the distribution lies on that side. The change in the amount of crime would similarly be more moderate, but that might also relate to the difficulty of measuring actual crimes committed rather than events in the process of policing. It is very difficult to incorporate a sense of what is random variation into the interpretation of data, but that is exactly what any kind of police commissioner needs to do.