woolfe9998
Lifer
- Apr 8, 2013
- 16,188
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What would you ask 10% of the population of all cities to figure out how many actual hate crimes there have been in a given year? I think your point about the police not reporting them all is a problem (as you say) but if the fbi has a baseline of crimes that they track year over year why isnt that a good source?
No one is talking about asking the population anything. We are talking about getting the information from police departments. We are using polls as an analogy here. Valid polls use random sampling, like calling telephone numbers at random. It's why the online polls are so unscientific. Remember when Ron Paul was winning every online poll and badly lost in the 2012 primaries? These bad online polls where the participants self-select instead of being chosen randomly are analogous to what is happening with the FBI crime data.
The FBI isn't asking a 10% random sampling of the PD's in the country for their crime data. They are asking for crime data from all of them, but allowing compliance to be voluntary. In the case of hate crimes, 90% are choosing not to report any data. Because this choice may be influenced or even entirely determined by factors related to the data itself, we cannot assume that the 10% who do report are representative of the 90% who do not. For example, it may be the case that most of those not reporting are failing to do so because their hate crime rates are very high and they don't want that to be known, or perhaps it's because many of those PD's not reporting are showing virtually no hate crimes because they simply do not enforce hate crimes laws. In either case, the reasons for not reporting could well mean that the 90% of statistics which are unreported are very different from the 10% which are.
The voluntary reporting introduces a self-selection bias. If I'm not making any sense to anyone here, this is a more thorough explanation of self-selection bias.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-selection_bias