Thread by @equalityAlec

THREAD. I've been thinking more about the alarming speculation by the New York Times two days ago that racial justice protests **caused a big spike in murders** and I noticed something fascinating that I missed in my first analysis. To me, it's maybe more insidious.

For background, here was my previous thread breaking down the ethical problems in the NYT this week, which is part of a pattern of pro-police bias.

https://twitter.com/equalityAlec/status/1483528179834888203

One of the strangest things to me in the article, which was full of unsupported speculation, was the claim that the "timing" doesn't support the theory that an unprecedented viral pandemic played a role in increasing murders that happened right after the pandemic.

Instead, article offers what was James Comey's claim of the Ferguson Effect, which is the idea that racial justice protest cause cops to be scared to do their jobs which leads to.....murder! That theory relies on a chain of unsupported inferences.

https://twitter.com/equalityAlec/status/1483935676353716226

The support for a "timing" claim that racial justice *protests* caused murders is link to article by, among others, a pro-police consultant who promotes the Ferguson Effect. Guess what: it's the same consultant who accused me of "bullying" NYT reporter by criticizing his article.

But if you actually go look at even that report by the pro-police consultant crowd, you see something interesting. You see that the rise in homicides actually does connect with the "timing" of pandemic.

Now, none of NYT's "timing" stuff is intellectually rigorous in the first place because things can have effects that don't happen immediately! This is why many good journalists don't speculate to millions of readers with no evidence about complex social phenomena like violence.

But it gets even weirder. The NYT reporter claims that things went up during pandemic but *even more* after George Floyd's death. But he omits from readers the rest of this chart: murders always increase in the summer! Look at the same source he cites above.

So, it's entirely consistent with the pandemic theory that his flimsy "timing"-based analysis dismisses that *pandemic* caused the *very normal and usual* summer crime increase to be exacerbated. On examination, his main (admittedly silly) thesis makes no sense on its own terms.

There are SO many more problems with the speculation in the NYT. So many unsupported inferences, casually asserted claims that are disputed by respected academics, and omissions of entire complex fields of research into medical care, inequality, toxic masculinity, etc...

E.g., it's incredible to dismiss the "pandemic" without noting research on mental illness, lack of access to medical care, financial stress, eviction, poverty, toxic masculinity. Article references other countries but not that inequality and social safety net differences.

In the end, thrust of article was to suggest that police have a huge effect on murders (though it doesn't bother to argue that the pro-cop research even supports idea that cops could have such a large effect) b/c reporter has long history of campaigning for more police budgets.

It's not my role on twitter to do a full debunking of the piece or explain murder--just to point out how careless the piece was and how, if the lack of rigor wasn't beneficial to corporate and police views, it would not have been tolerated by NYT. More:

https://twitter.com/equalityAlec/status/1483660948783210496

This is heavy stuff. If you made it to the end here you deserve a photo of string bean. He’s a little old and only has one tooth left, but he hates copaganda a lot.