The Thing About Fact Claims…

Is that facts can in fact be checked.  That’s what makes them great.  There’s no shame in being wrong on a fact claim if you can accept the values of falliblism and the rejection of the idea that ideas that are not your own can (and likely usually are) better than your own.  I bring this up in the context of a blog debate between Andrew at BlogDC and John at AMERICABlog. 

I am interested in the deliberative aspect of this discussion.  From a personal view, of course I am on Andrew’s side.  I am highly biased in his favor as Andrew is a very close friend of mine and I have no idea who this other guy even is.  There has been some verbal sparring, and on Andrew’s blog, I posed a couple of questions along these lines, but more interesting to me are the fact claims themselves. 

Andrew cited some DoJ crime statistics to support his view.  It’s in his usual wiriting style, so the tone is not exaclty neutral, but his claims on the numbers seem sturdy. 

The response Andrew claims to have recieved from John icluded this statement:

Any serious review of crime data begins with the FBI’s official data
and not numbers on the MPD Web site. If you look at the latest official
data available, you’ll confirm that DC has the highest violent crime
rate of any state in America, and very likely any city in America (I’ve
gone through the data twice, but would want to go through it a third
time, before writing this publicly, in order to make sure I didn’t miss
any metropolitan area whose data was worse – it’s a long list and in a
small-font database – but even so, we’re clearly at the bottom again,
and been there for years with no end in sight).

I assume that John is referring to these statistics on the FBI site (The main page on the Uniform Crime Report is linked here). 

Using the miracle of SPSS, here is what the FBI data tells us about the number of cases of violent crime reported in cases over 7000 reports for the year 2005:

And, here is a scatterplot adjusting for population size (I took out New York because its population stretched the graph to far to the upper right):

   

As you can see, Washington does not seem particularly anomoulous when it comes to violent crime in 2005.  When it comes to violent crime, I see no evidence that it is a comparatively worse place to live to most other major American cities, nor does it, as Andrew previously pointed out, compare disfavorably to itself over the past 20 years. 

What is nice about this conversation is that it has appealed to facts and a discussion about accepted sources of data that both sides of the argument agree are legitimate were discussed and appealed to.  This gives anyone interested in the question the ability to sift through the data themselves and try to make a reasonable go at analyzing the data (which I hope I did okay, I’m getting sleepy).  If I made a mistake, the data is still out there, still publicly available, and I can easily be corrected.  I highlight these points to celebrate them.  Even if the tone in the writing styles of each of the authors is combatative from time to time, the meat of their arguments rest on testable hypotheses, and this allows (1) free and fair participation (2) norms for acceptable arguments (3) the ability to persuade and the possibility that consensus might be reached if everyone has the right information.  I’m not saying that my information is necessarily laid out in a perfect study on the matter, but from where I sit, the FBI and DoJ data seem to tell the same story.  John made it clear that his statements were provisional and that he was careful not to be too insistent unless he looked more closely at the data and Andrew asked for several empricial clarifications from John.  All of the other parts of their conversation aside, these are the traits of good discussants in a deliberative political community.