Indigenous academic apologises for calling African crime study ‘racist’
theage.com.au/national/indigenous-academic-ap...
theage.com.auPosted Apr 13, 2021, 11:53 AM UTC
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theage.com.auHow embarrassing.
It is seriously alarming seeing academics like Amanda Porter appear more like deranged ideologues well versed in reciting garbage rather than people encouraging factual analysis.
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Hilarious.
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I think the takeaway here is fuck journalists.
Here is the original twitter criticism, coming from an academic who was previously on the editorial board of this journal.
Hello editorial board of the A&NZ Journal of Criminology @SAGEcriminology, can we please talk about how this was published in your journal and, in particular, how it passed peer review? Can we please talk about academic integrity, rigour and racism?
Look there are quite a few problems with the article itself, but the most obvious one is the conflation of "offending" and "rates of crime". Isn't it a basic lesson in Criminology 1001 and Laws 1001 that one is innocent until proven guilty?
Why are authors referring to "rates of crime" in the same breath as "offending"? Maybe they need to go back to law school? Why wasn't this picked up by the anonymous peer review process, the members of the Editorial Board or the Editors? Another point is the flimsiness of this throwaway line on media reporting, even though the article contains no discourse analysis or in-depth analysis of media representations and 'crime', but I digress...
But back to the study, which claims to be a "dispassionate analysis and understanding of the rates and causes of involvement in crime for this group" (2020: 355).
More specifically the article aims to test this against two hypotheses: (1) whether Sudanese-born Victorians are targeted by the police or (2) whether Sudanese-born Victorians are involved in crime more "compared to other cultural sub-groups" (2020:355). The authors call the latter the "demographic effect"
Again the basic problem is that the article conflates "crime rates" with "offending" throughout. There is a small caveat that appears right at the end of the article on p 364: "CSA offending data refers to police charges only" but no discussion of this.
The author says on p 364 "However, rates based on convictions only, would have omitted some perpetrators whose cases did not progress between charge and court for various reasons". Dude get a law degree! How was this crap not picked up by editors??!!!!
The article relies exclusively on data provided by the Victorian Crime Statistics Agency (CSA). No interviews, no consultation with community organisers, advocates or Community Legal Centres
The authors dont interview or cite any of the reports by the @Police_Acc_Proj. Nor do they interview Victoria Police Service (VPS) officers or refer to any of their internal documents or policy about policing strategies and operations. It's literally just official rates of crime
Back to the crime rates and statistics, even these calculations are flawed in significant ways. First, the small numbers merit an in-text explanation or at least a footnote with a word of caution, because the numbers are so small (n = 649) (2020: 356)
and caution should be used when comparing rates when incident numbers of populations are small, since LARGE change between rates will result from small changes in incident or population counts. For these and other reasons the analysis which follows is basically meaningless. In the absence of caveats or footnotes explaining the meaninglessness of the data, the authors proceed to make significant over-claims about "offending rates across cultural sub-groups" (2020:362).
In conclusion this is very embarrassing for the editors and the editorial board. Please do something about the racist trollop that appears on the regular in your not-so-academic journal.
And there's more in academic squabbling,
https://twitter.com/amanda_j_porter/status/1379612588401516545
Statement from the journal,
And statements from the current editorial board that the piece was contentious,
All of which the journo ignores and instead writes up a nice simple "cancel culture is out of control" for outrage clicks.
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Thank you for taking the time to post Amanda.
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It's absolutely shocking that someone in the Internet would go through the trouble of putting this together to make a just as bullshit and reductive point as the one they're complaining about. Fucking embarrassment.
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The quote from Mr Kuot sums up, perfectly, why people like Dr Porter are causing significant problems:
“This research helps the community to identify where the focus needs to be ... If we have the intention of helping these young people, we need to open it up and ask ourselves the difficult questions.”
When people like Dr Porter try to shut down reasonable discourse, they are helping absolutely no one. Slamming things as “racist” when there is a genuine problem only serves to push more moderate people away from her and towards more treacherous territory and, more importantly, prevents help from being offered to the relevant communities which means the problem can only worsen.
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Some of Porter's criticism is fair. She points out that they conflate "offending" and "rates of crime" as measured solely by the Victorian crime statistics agency's stats on police charges only. Charges. Not convictions. She also critiques their failure to note the significance of the small sample size - small changes in incident numbers will have a much larger impact on incident rates when compared to larger populations, which is what the paper does.
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So some facts hurt peoples feelings. The police were found not to be racist and people tried to cancel the evidence to fit their narrative. The study provided information that would help reduce crime and is supported by community leaders.
Imagine if they did similar research for other communities and found out the underlying issues that could be worked on instead of just blaming the police for everything.