Opinion

Letter: Data can be manipulated

Posted December 23, 2022 12:00 am

Reading the article in Sunday's paper, "Confusion about what to do next," on the Elgin Police bias investigations immediately brought to mind the line borrowed: "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics." The point was that statistics are dependent on the data analyzed and the factors or variables included, and that they can therefore be manipulated by the statistician to support an assumed outcome.

I don't have a lot of faith in an analysis that basically equates bias with the data that says one race has more encounters with police than its percentage of the city's population without looking at who's committing the crimes, in which neighborhoods they occur and how many police patrols are in those neighborhoods.

David Swanson

Elgin

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