In June 2003 Lott wrote an op-ed where he claimed that all the AK-47s the Iraqis had made them safer so that there were fewer murders in Baghdad than in Washington DC. He was severely criticized for this, since he didn't have any actual data on Baghdad homicides. Later, extensive reports from the Baghdad morgue showed that there were hundreds of murders a month. Lott refused to admit that there was anything even the slightest bit wrong with his claim. In November, Lott latched onto some figures from the US army that clearly greatly understated the crime rates in Baghdad. Since then, he has energetically disseminated these bogus figures.

NY Post prints Lott’s bogus homicide figures

The New York Post has an article that claims that Baghdad has a lower murder rate than New York. The source, of course, is John Lott. Lott advances the numbers released by the 1st Infantry Division and deliberately conceals the contradictory data from the Baghdad morgue that shows that Lott’s numbers are far far too low.

03:56 | /guns/Lott/baghdad | 2 comments | link

Lott’s selective quoting of Michael O’Hanlon

Earlier I commented on Lott’s op-ed where eclaimed that Albuquerque and O’Hanlon got the Baghdad murder rate wrong. In an update on his blog, Lott writes:

Update: Michael O’Hanlon, a co-author of one of the articles that I commented on in my Investors’ Business Daily piece, was helpful in getting to the bottom of these claims. First, he responded quickly and was not defensive when I asked him for his sources on the Baghdad murder rate. Second, in an e-mail he told me that he had himself tried to contact the Defense Department to obtain their estimates on the number of murders in Baghdad. Unfortunately, as often occurs with bureaucracies, they did not get him the information that he requested. In a recent e-mail exchange that I had with him he indicated: “you were more successful, and I commend you for that.”

Gee, that sure sounds like O’Hanlon accepted Lott’s figures doesn’t it? I contacted O’Hanlon to check, and sure enough, Lott’s selective quotes give a misleading impression. O’Hanlon’s position is that Lott was more successful at getting bad data. He asked Lott to remove the misleading quotes from his blog. Lott has not done so. (And no, it’s not because he’s been on vacation—Lott has updated his blog since the request was made.)

03:04 | /guns/Lott/baghdad | Add the first comment | link

Baghdad’s Murder Rate Irresponsibly Distorted by Lott

Last time I commented on Lott’s claims about the Baghdad murder rate, I noted his pathological refusal to admit that he was wrong about the rate. Even though dozens of newspapers have reported that there are hundreds of murders each month in Baghdad (see the table with some of the stories at the end of this post), Lott insisted that the one single report he found that claimed that there were only 24 murders in October must be right and all the others must be wrong. He has now published on op-ed repeating his claim and complaining that the New York Times refused to print a “correction”.

Lott’s arguments about why all the other reports are wrong have to be seen to be believed:

I contacted the authors of both pieces. Albuquerque and O’Hanlon, who wrote the Times piece, provided two sources for their murder rate numbers: An article by Neil MacFarquhar in the New York Times (Sept. 16, 2003) and a piece by Lara Marlowe in the Irish Times (Oct. 11, 2003). Yet, both references clearly stated that much more than murder was included in the reports that they used from the Baghdad morgue. MacFarquhar notes that these deaths also included “automobile accidents” and cases where people “were shot dead by American soldiers,” cases that clearly did not involve murders. The Irish Times piece mentions that “up to a quarter of fatal shootings [in the morgue] are caused by U.S. troops.”

All right, suppose we want to exclude shootings by US troops from the total. If “up to a quarter” are by US troops, then, at least three quarters are not by US troops. The Irish Times article reports that 518 people were shot dead in August. Three-quarters of 518 is 388. That is a very conservative estimate for the number of murders since it doesn’t count those murdered by other means, or those victims whose bodies did not make it to the morgue and that it was “up to a quarter”, so the true number could well be higher.

Lott doesn’t mention it, but MacFarquhar’s piece also reported that 70% of the deaths were from gunfire, so you can do a similar calculation with his data to also see that there were hundreds of murders a month.

Anyway, that’s the logical way to correct the figures, but look at the way Lott “corrects” them:

For some perspective, in D.C., murders account for fewer than 5 percent of all deaths. Even counting only the types of deaths explicitly mentioned in the stories citing the Baghdad morgue (accidental deaths, murders, suicides) and assuming that soldiers were engaged in the same type of fighting in D.C. as they are in Iraq, murders in D.C. would account for just a third of deaths. (The respective numbers for the U.S. as a whole are even lower: a half of one percent and 11 percent.) Obviously, counting these other deaths as “murders” in D.C. would imply that murders were three to 20 times more common than they actually were.

Lott continues:

The Wall Street Journal Europe instead relied on the U.S. Army 1st Division stationed in Baghdad. A public affairs officer with that division, Jason Beck, confirmed for me that a large part of the Iraqi legal system is being overseen by the U.S. JAG officers, and they are using the same standards for murder rates as used in the U.S. and separating out murders from other deaths.

Lott finishes up by demanding that the New York Times print a “correction”:

When a publication of record such as the New York Times gets Baghdad’s October murder rates wrong by up to a factor of 28 to 1 and no correction is issued, the consequences are significant.

Blogger Michael Williams is fooled by Lott, while spc67 is little more skeptical.

Update: More bloggers fooled by Lott: Del Simmons, Little Green Footballs and Perry.

Update 2: Two more suckers: Say Uncle and Ranting profs.

Stories reporting on murders in Baghdad are listed below:

See more ...

04:04 | /guns/Lott/baghdad | 8 comments | link

Lott’s chutzpah on Baghdad murders

In my previous entry on the Baghdad murder rate I noted that pretty well every paper that had reported the Baghdad murder rate had given a vastly higher figure than Lott’s number and the only paper out of step was the Wall Street Journal . So, in Lott’s 11/19/03 entry on his blog he draws the obvious conclusion: every other newspaper got it wrong, and in amazing display of chutzpah, he demands that the New York Times correct its “error”:

A recent article in the New York Times got some of it’s facts completely wrong about murder rates in Iraq. The mistakes were up to around a factor of 12 fold. In fact, the piece couldn’t even accurately report another New York Times piece that it relied upon for its data. I point this out in a letter to the editor. Not surprisingly, the NYT has apparently decided not to correct this mistake.

And here is the letter that the NYT wisely decided not to print:

The Op-ed chart on “How are things really going in Iraq?” by Ms. Adriana de Albuquerque and Mr. Michael O’Hanlon contained grossly incorrect numbers (November 14). They claimed that the annualize murder rate in Baghdad from April to October this year ranged from an incredible 100 to 185 per 100,000 people. The number was contrasted to the District of Columbia’s murder rate in 2002 of 45.8 per 100,000 people. While the Baghdad “murder” rate came from another Times article by Neil MacFarquhar (9/16), the authors ignore that MacFarquhar clearly stated that these deaths included “automobile accidents” and cases where people “were shot dead by American soldiers,” not just murders. More importantly, other figures do not paint such a dreary picture. For example, the U.S. Army 1st Division in Baghdad reports that the annualized murder rate in Baghdad in August was 15.9, not the 185 reported in the article.

If you glance at the op-ed chart you will see that it includes the murder rate for October. It is impossible for this to come from an article published in September. As for the claim that the numbers in the MacFarquhar article were not relevant to the murder rate because MacFarquhar stated that they included automobile accidents, MacFarquhar also states that 70% died from gunshot wounds, which you generally don’t get in automobile accidents. Lott also discounts the numbers because MacFarquhar “clearly stated” that they included “cases where people ‘were shot dead by American soldiers’”. Let us provide a little more context:

Several families from Abu Ghraib, just west of Baghdad, are there to gather some of the four victims, including an 8-year-old girl, they said were shot to death by American soldiers who opened fire in the market after a grenade was thrown at their armored personnel carrier. The U.S. military spokesman’s office in Baghdad confirmed that one soldier was wounded in a grenade attack, but denied the soldiers from the 1st Armored Division fired back.

This whole episode gives us more insight into Lott’s pathology. In the survey affair, all he had to do was admit to making a mistake in citing the wrong brandishing number, but rather than admit to the error he invented a survey; and then had to actually conduct a survey to try to bolster his story and then had to fabricate the results of the real survey to make them agree with the invented survey. Here, rather than admit to making a mistake about the Baghdad murder rate (if you you’ve forgotten what this was originally about, Lott claimed that all the guns the Iraqis had were making them safer), Lott has now effectively accused the US armey of gunning down an eight year-old Iraqi girl. He’s pathological.

04:26 | /guns/Lott/baghdad | Add the first comment | link

Lott on Baghdad murders

In a June 26 op-ed Lott claimed that gun ownership was making Iraqis safer:

“Yet, despite Iraqis owning machine guns and the country still not under control, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld pointed out that Baghdad is experiencing fewer murders than Washington, D.C., where handguns are banned. ”

An October 12 Newsday story reports:

Perhaps the most hopeful change appeared several days ago in the office of Dr. Faiq Amin Bakr, director of the Institute of Judicial Medicine, Baghdad’s main morgue. Mulling a new sheet of statistics, he declared that Baghdad’s exploding homicide rate fell last month, the first monthly decline since the Americans arrived. The morgue counted 667 homicide victims in September, down from 800 in August and 702 in July. But even the September rate is 42 times the rough average recorded last year. And the bloodshed - from crime, revenge killings, shootings of civilians by U.S. troops or guerrilla fighters - is some degree higher than what the morgue measures, because an unknown number of homicide victims are buried without being brought to the morgue.

The Coalition decided they had better do something about the horrendous homicide rate. On October 19 PR Newswire reported:

In Baghdad, official control over the news is getting tighter. Journalists used to walk freely into the city’s hospitals and the morgue to keep count of the day’s dead and wounded. Now the hospitals have been declared off-limits and morgue officials turn away reporters who aren’t accompanied by a Coalition escort. Iraqi police refer reporters’ questions to American forces; the Americans refer them back to the Iraqis.

THE OTHER STORY IN BAGHDAD

July Aug. Sept. Oct. Murder 92 75 54 24 Kidnapping 29 28 27 11 Aggravated Assault 135 118 90 40 Reported crime in the Iraqi capital this year.

However, it is clear that the official figures only include a tiny fraction of all homicides. In September the official figures show just 54 homicides, but 667 homicide victims showed up at the morgue. Note also that there were supposedly just 78 aggravated assaults, which seems most implausible. For comparison, metro Washington, with about the same population as Baghdad, has about 30 homicides and 1,000 aggravated assaults each month.

I think any reasonable person would conclude that the official crime figures for Baghdad are not accurate. Not John Lott, however. On his blog (link under “Blogs” in sidebar, scroll to 11/10/03) he trumpets “Rumsfeld vindicated” and asserts that the new crime figures prove that the homicide rate in Baghdad is relatively low. Although he is well aware of it from previous discussion, he completely ignores the contradictory statistics from the Baghdad morgue. Unfortunately, this behaviour is typical of the way Lott approaches research—he just reports results favourable to his thesis and ignores the unfavourable ones.

My thanks to Seb for providing me with a copy of the WSJ article.

Update: The New York Times reports the following figures on the Baghdad murder rate:

April June August October Annualized Murder

Rate in Baghdad

per 100,000 100 135 185 140

14:38 | /guns/Lott/baghdad | 3 comments | link

Links

Keneth Miles describes Lott and Lehrer’s claims that crime increased in Washington DC after the gun ban as an excellent example of cherry picking.

Earlier, I observed that the only justification Lott offered for another claim he made about DC crime, that Baghdad had fewer murders was “presumably Rumsfeld knows whether the number of murders is greater or less than 200 a month”. Wyeth has found that the Baghdad city morgue handled 470 gunshot deaths in July. For comparison, metropolitan Washington has a similar population to Baghdad and about 20 gunshot murders each month. It would seem that all the AK47s floating around Baghdad haven’t reduced crime that much.

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Lott on Baghdad murders again

Notice that Lott responds on a minor point, once again ducking the question of the coding errors. And while he links to Wyeth and responds to some of my comments he doesn’t link to me, but pretends my comments were emailed to him. I link to Lott’s comments and have him in my blogroll because I want my readers to see what he says and what I say and make upi their own minds about who is right. Lott doesn’t link here or even let on that this site exists.

Anyway, what evidence does Lott offer that Baghdad has fewer murders than Washington DC? He states:

Baghdad is a city with a population some 8.5 times greater than Washington. While it might be difficult to keep track of the number of property crimes or robberies these days in Iraq, presumably Rumsfeld knows whether the number of murders is greater or less than 200 a month.

Q: Mr. Secretary, is there any sign in this department of any central control over these dead-enders, as you call them, who have now killed—well, 42 American troops have now died since the president declared major hostilities at an end. Any sign of—

Rumsfeld: Look, you got remember that if Washington D.C. were size of Baghdad, we would be having something like 215 murders a month. And it is—there’s going to be violence in a big city. It s five and a half million people. For the most part, it’s in that area I described. That’s where the active—and it tends not to be, at this stage, random killings. It’s not the kind of rioting you saw on television last night in Michigan, or that type of thing. What you’re seeing instead is what we believe is purposeful attacks against coalition forces as opposed to simply crime and that type of thing.

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Baghdad Murder Rate

Lawrence is correct when he points out that Lott’s claims about Baghdad murders are not lies unless Lott knows them to be false, and, in the absence of reliable data we don’t know whether they are false or true. However, what Lott did was write with reckless disregard for the truth. Rumsfeld was actually comparing combat deaths of US soldiers in Baghdad with murders in Washington, DC, so Lott had absolutely no basis for his claim. The important point for someone reading Lott is that any event, you should not believe anything he writes unless you have an independent source for it.

Lawrence also writes:

Indeed. And, that would be a worthwhile critique of Lott’s analysis, which gets to the whole “causal mechanism” thing I discussed above. The best I can say for Lott (if you accept his claims about the dispensation of the survey data, which I find dubious but not entirely improbable) is that he’s a sloppy social scientist—albeit perhaps not an not extraordinarily sloppy one, given the pure sludge that often is passed off as strong evidence in many peer-reviewed journals. * Lott’s missing data only affects a small part of his overall argument; it may speak to his overall credibility, but the vast majority of his data is available and has been analyzed by other scholars.

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Links

The Wyeth Wire takes Lott to task for his completely unsupported claim that Baghdad has fewer murders than Washington DC. Of course, Lott’s defence will be that he was just reporting Donald Rumsfeld’s claims and how was Lott to know that Rumsfeld was no criminologist?

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