DC police leaders face termination amid crime data probe

[chr0naut]

Of course it totally makes sense that the people whose job it is to arrest people, are covering up that they have arrested people.

[BeyondKnowledge]

It's spelled 'Beltane', and it was to celebrate the beginning of summer, an important seasonal marker festival for an agrarian society of 1,000 years ago in Ireland and Scotland. So, not really "evil" at all. But no doubt, back then, it did have religious overtones as well.

And I was responding to DB's post that was talking about the celebrations in the USA of worker statutory rights, which DB described as being 'communist'.

It is a different thing than the Gaelic/Celtic summer festival.

I thank you for the spelling correction and the information. If you knew all that already, then why post useless information that was different?

[BeyondKnowledge]

How does firing someone from their job fix bad data?

It stops it from continuing. It eliminates the source. It allows for investigation and correction without them interfering in both.

Why exactly do you have a problem with accountability for ones own actions?

[BeyondKnowledge]

No, the whole outrage is people broadcasting their ignorance of what others consider basic and essential primary school level knowledge.

There will be errors in any measurement. It's not something you can blame people for.

People who do this 'numbers' stuff for a job have multiple methods of determining confidence in the data, and can even remove errors!

Errors can be corrected for. Active falsifying of the data cannot. 

False data is not the same as data error.

[chr0naut]

I thank you for the spelling correction and the information. If you knew all that already, then why post useless information that was different?

There is an old joke about three former USSR leaders on a steam train journey across Siberia.

The train comes to a halt because the bridge up ahead is out, and people from the nearby town are currently working to fix it again. But the three great leaders, back in the luxury dining carriage, don't know what is going on.

After sitting for 20 minutes, Stalin says that he will get the train moving so he leaves the carriage and goes forward to sort things out.

Stalin comes back and sits down and says "I found the enginemen all sitting around not working, so I shot them all, but I left some alive, so the the train will be going on its way any minute now".

After another hour, the train is still sitting there, and so Khrushchev goes forward.

He finds that some of the drivers are dead, others are seriously injured, and everybody else has run away. So he binds up the wounds of the injured, buries the dead outside in the snow, and returns to the dining car saying, "I have been able to rehabilitate the engineers, and the train will start-up very, very, soon", and he sits down.

After yet another hour with nothing happening, Brezhnev goes forward to survey the scene.

He sees that the other engineers have now died, the fire under the boiler has completely gone out, and there are no other people left on the train as they have all disembarked and gone to the nearest village for lodging overnight.

So, he returns to the dining carriage and pulls down all the blinds, on all the carriage windows. Then he tells the other two that, "All is well, I have sorted everything out and the train is now moving. Please remain in your seats"!

This is exactly how propaganda works.

[IDELB2006]

Of course it totally makes sense that the people whose job it is to arrest people, are covering up that they have arrested people.

Well, the lying to lower the violent crime numbers was discovered during the time that Trump had put the National Guard on the streets of Washington.

And then, as if by magic violent crimes plummeted.

Now we know better.

[chr0naut]

Errors can be corrected for. Active falsifying of the data cannot. 

False data is not the same as data error.

Any systematic interference in data, like one that has a noticeable bias in outcome would be, can be quite trivially removed.

For instance if a 50Hz sinewave hum was introduced in an audio recording, it can be post-processed out by application of a direct inverse of the applied 50Hz sinewave noise signal.

Truly random interference, however, is far more problematic, as there is no simple algorithm that can be applied to negate it. An example of such a random signal interference in the audio world would be the thermal noise introduced in all high-gain semiconductor amplification.

However, even that 'random' interference can be compensated for to some degree, but more by fitting the combined signal to the restraints of the original ideal intelligible input signal i.e. filtering out components that could not possibly be part of the true data signal (high and low bandpass filtering, notch filtering and narrowband noise gating are just some practical examples of how this works in the audio realm).

So, non-systematic errors are actually harder to identify and remove than any systematic intention to skew the data. If the scope of interference can be quantified, even approximately, it can be mostly negated.

When you are talking about data sets of numbers; noise, errors and falsification are mostly perceptually indistinguishable from each other.

[chr0naut]

Well, the lying to lower the violent crime numbers was discovered during the time that Trump had put the National Guard on the streets of Washington.

And then, as if by magic violent crimes plummeted.

Now we know better.

So it was an attempt to cover up the fact that Trump's attempts to curtail crime, didn't actually work in practice?

That doesn't sound like something that you could blame on the leftists and liberals?

[govshill2]

Why was Bondi fired? Why was Noem fired? Why was Tillerson fired? Why was Sessions fired? Why was Bolton fired? I mean, they seemed to be strong supporters of Trump, doing their appointed jobs, until they became inconvenient.

Perhaps Trump realized from his TV days that saying "you're fired" made him feel important and powerful?

He does appear awfully untrustworthy, though.

non sequitur and red herring
none of those people had much to do with Washington DC and other cities that were/are fudging crime stats

[govshill2]

How does firing someone from their job fix bad data?

It don't. That's why there's audits and legislative correction.  Like funding cuts.  So why would you say it'd be logical to keep cheaters and liars in positions of power?