Clearing Up Trump Trial Misinformation

[Dill]

(06-08-2024, 11:40 AM)Sociopathicsteelerfan Wrote: I found this whole thing very interesting.  Every single major news outlet ran with this data and treated it as gospel.  I didn't find any real investigation into the source's claims or any explanation of their methodology.  

Responding to three issues regarding your assessment of my sources and their data should be enough here. (As I promised in #43)

1.  I gave you TWO different sources, each drawing on a DIFFERENT data collection project, which separately reached similar conclusions about ratio of non-volent to violent protests. The CNN article was using the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (ACLED)  https://acleddata.com/2020/09/03/demonstrations-political-violence-in-america-new-data-for-summer-2020/

The Christian Science Monitor article was based upon a different data collection group--the Crowd Counting Consortium (CCC) at Harvard's Ash Center.  https://ash.harvard.edu/programs/crowd-counting-consortium/

Newspaper reports are not research articles. While it is their job to report data and cite sources, it is not necessarily their job to explain their sources' methods of collection. People with questions about the source can then go directly to the source and evaluate, as I demonstrate in #3 below. 

(06-08-2024, 11:40 AM)Sociopathicsteelerfan Wrote: Contrast that to counter claims that are more critical.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/03/19/ron-johnsons-misleading-citation-data-back-his-concern-about-blm-protestors/

Notice the great pains they go to to attempt to debunk these claims? 

2. I do indeed "notice." And they don't simply "attempt."  

Sen. Johnson's hyperbolic anti-BLM claims align with yours and are debunked by the same ACLED data sourced in my CNN link.
E.g., Johnson jumped to the conclusion that the violent riots were the fault of BLM or antifa protesters. But that’s not the case either. ACLED’s data does not say that at all. In fact, the violence may have been more the result of police behavior than the actions of demonstrators. Thus it is misleading to frame all of these events as “BLM riots,” Jones said.  etc. etc. 

So that's basically what I've been doing with your BLM whattabout--correcting disinformation. Why would you mistake an article which further develops my position and affirms my sources as one which refutes them? 

(06-08-2024, 11:40 AM)Sociopathicsteelerfan Wrote:  Unfortunately, for your point, I cannot agree with your source as I can say, solely from personal experience, that their numbers cannot be accurate.  Let's start off with a small point, but an odd one.  How did they get the oddly specific number of 2,938,406 protestors?  Then let us move on to the oddly phrased "police officers injured" statistic.  What's odd about that, you may ask.  Why so specific?  Why injured instead of assaulted?  We all know a person can be assaulted but suffer no injury of consequence.  A thinking person may come to the conclusion that they use injured as their metric as the number would be far smaller than officers assaulted.  As I can personally attest, I witnessed hundreds of officers being assaulted in just a month period.  And that was in a specific area of Los Angeles.  That being the case one can only logically conclude that the numbers for Los Angeles County as a whole would be higher, as it would for the entire state, as it would for the entire country.  Also, what constitutes being "injured"?  A cut to your arm?  A broken bone"  An injury that requires medical attention?  Some specificity would be welcome, and it's odd it's not included.

Another small, but odd, fact about this source, it says police officers injured, not law enforcement officers.  Why is that significant?  Because sheriff's deputies are not "police officers".  If a person was trying to manipulate data to make these protests seem less violent than they actually were they could truthfully omit all injuries to sheriff's deputies, or other LEO's not considered police officers, and still correctly claim to present factual, albeit misleading, data...

One would think that area alone would account for a large number of "injuries".  So, again, I would be very interested in a deep dive of these numbers and how they were concluded, because from my personal experience alone, coupled with the above, I find the claim to be far fetched at the very least.  

3. Your questions can be rather easily answered. Two examples:

The Crowd Counting Consortium collects and complies public data about demonstrations and displays them on spreadsheets so anyone can follow up their data. Here is the spreadsheet for June 2020.  https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1-HM-bFsnTd9omYOrB8JOMeQ0XzPvCaVaADKqXQ_RpXg/edit#gid=0.
Notice the number for Alton, NH, is very precise--"7." While that for Madison, IL, is less so--"over 150." After compiling such numbers from every community reporting a protest, they then add them together. That's how the result becomes "oddly specific." 

Then regarding your question "why injured" and  not "assaulted." A "thinking person" should quickly see that the CCC is relying on public data, whose criteria of selection are set by a number of different sources, such as local newspapers relying on local police and hospitals and reporters. Your own description of the vagaries of what counts as assault already suggest why assessing scale of violence might make "injuries" the more reliable guide. Yet you rush to speculate whether those at CCC collecting data already categorized as "injury" themselves DECIDED to use numbers of injured rather than assaulted--i.e., data which no one has compiled--to "manipulate data."   

Looks as if you read my sources looking for anything you could regard as suspicious, and checked no fuirther. I.e., looks like you were starting from conclusions and stopping with their first confirmation. 

Had you made clear from the beginning that you were going to disregard external evidence and data that conflict with your impressions you'd have saved us both a lot of trouble.