Wednesday, July 2, 2025

How to lie with statistics: ICE edition

When anyone makes a claim that assaults on ICE agents have increased roughly 400% to 500% above last year, that will raise some eyebrows. As framed, it's no wonder these individuals would feel the need to hide their identities and faces. But what if there were less to the story than meets the eye? Techdirt has the dirt (pun intended) on the government's claim. It turns out that for the first half of 2024, there were 10 alleged assaults on ICE agents. For the first half of this year, that number is 79 alleged assaults. Keep in mind that just because an assault is claimed does not mean it was actually an assault (sometimes the DOJ just makes stuff up - I swear these folks would have had productive careers as social psychologists). Even if we take the DOJ claims at face value, the raw number of alleged assaults is really minuscule when we factor in the thousands of encounters ICE agents within each of those time periods have with the public and we would want to factor in that there may have been more encounters this year so far. In other words, once we start factoring in the baseline data for assaults and the sheer amount of ICE agent activity in a given year or half year as is the case, this "dramatic" increase in alleged assaults looks more like statistical noise. This is also my friendly reminder that when public officials use numbers like these to outrage or frighten you, it is important to look under the proverbial hood, kick the tires a bit, and really dig into the data to determine if these officials are being truthful or if they are trying to manipulate you by lying. I'm pretty jaded regarding politicians and political appointees, so often my default is to not believe them until they show verifiable receipts. 

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