"To really try to be informed and literate today," David Foster Wallace wrote, "is to feel stupid nearly all of the time." He called the sound of U.S. Culture, "Total Noise" and despaired that partisan news outlets are the only way we currently know how to manage the deluge of information. The news outlet I choose acts as a filter, so if my politics are liberal, I will stick with MSNBC or CNN to filter my data. If I am conservative, I'll stick with Fox. I trust them. I trust their point of view. But tackling all that raw data myself? Well, now we just got back to me feeling stupid all of the time.
Two short weeks ago, my intent was to look through all Cincinnati Police Department street level data for patterns, once I found patterns I would narrow to a population with the riskiest behavior, say women of child-bearing age who carry firearms, then I would plan an intervention to reduce this behavior.
But, with over 90,000 pieces of street level data, I was overwhelmed. Aside from compelling, but not strong, numbers on men who carry and use firearms, the rest of the data did not fall into any discernible pattern. Women of childbearing age in Cincinnati commit crimes of immediate financial need -- larceny, non-aggravated burglaries -- but not in overwhelming numbers.
And my conclusion was no conclusion, since there were no data spikes hitting me right between the eyes. Where's the statistician to whom I could outsource pulling back the curtains and opening up the closets of 90,000 bits of data? Surely there's a painless computer program that would tell me which population needs an intervention the most?
But even more concerning than not picking out the pattern are the ethical implications of choice when one must move forward. When I make the choice about the population of focus, how will I know it's not biassed? Because when choice becomes bias, affecting randomization, it inches ever closer to the dark side of judgment. Discrimination. The Tuskegee Syphilis Trials, the HeLa cell line. We need our filters to manage the deluge, but what happens when the filter leaves the most important stuff out, like justice?
So getting back to women of childbearing age, I wanted to pick them. I'd spent the last two years working for the Nurse Family Partnership (NFP), a nurse home visitation program for at-risk mothers. Within the families served, NFP has produced remarkable improvements in (among other things) crime outcomes. The World Health Organization cites women's health as a leading indicator of the health of a community. When a woman's health is improved, twelve other people (those she supports, lives with, works with or interacts) will be positively impacted, too.
But during most of my home visitations with mothers and babies, the male counterparts were nearly absent. Not a generalization. Just what I saw. Who were these young men? Counterparts in the creation of life, but nearly invisible now. Without them, the mother I visited wouldn't be there. The baby wouldn't be there. I wouldn't be there.
Starting in 2000, The Coalition for a Drug Free Cincinnatiasked 5th through 12th graders in five southwestern Ohio counties if they had carried a gun to school six or more times in the past year. In 2008, 2.69 percent of the females and more than 3.57 percent of the males responded yes. If you find that number underwhelming, remember that, according to the Centers for Disease Control, youths bringing weapons to school is tied to a host of correlated risky behaviors – criminal activity, substance use and abuse, domestic violence.
While these male adolescents are not necessarily the invisible fathers from my past work, they do paint a portrait of who our young men in this region are.
So, there you have it -- young males, weapons, schools. Sometimes filtering leaves the most important things out, but maybe in this case, a wider world might be exposed.
OASIS
The Online Analysis and Statistical Information System
Turning Statistics into Information
Take me to OASIS!
