Baghdad
tlambert | April 15, 2004 In July last year, Lott, armed with no evidence at all, claimed that Washington DC had a higher murder rate than Baghdad. Faced with overwhelming evidence to the contrary, Lott stuck to his guns, even demanding that the New York Times "correct" an article and use Lott's bogus murder rate. The whole discussion is here.
The New York Times has updated its figures:
April
July
October
January
Annualized Murder Rate in Baghdad per 100,000 (DC rate 43)
70
130
100
100
The authors also explain how they worked out the murder rate:
Our best estimates on murder…
tlambert | December 30, 2003 The New York Post has an article that claims that Baghdad has a lower murder rate than New York. The source, of course, is John Lott. Lott advances the numbers released by the 1st Infantry Division and deliberately conceals the contradictory data from the Baghdad morgue that shows that Lott's numbers are far far too low.
tlambert | December 30, 2003 Earlier I commented on Lott's op-ed where claimed that Albuquerque and O'Hanlon got the Baghdad murder rate wrong. In an update on his blog, Lott writes:
Update: Michael O'Hanlon, a co-author of one of the articles that I commented on in my Investors' Business Daily piece, was helpful in getting to the bottom of these claims. First, he responded quickly and was not defensive when I asked him for his sources on the Baghdad murder rate. Second, in an e-mail he told me that he had himself tried to contact the Defense Department to obtain their estimates…
tlambert | December 17, 2003 Last time I commented on Lott's claims about the Baghdad murder rate, I noted his pathological refusal to admit that he was wrong about the rate. Even though dozens of newspapers have reported that there are hundreds of murders each month in Baghdad (see the table with some of the stories at the end of this post), Lott insisted that the one single report he found that claimed that there were only 24 murders in October must be right and all the others must be wrong. He has now drafted on op-ed repeating his claim and complaining that the New York…
tlambert | November 22, 2003 In my previous entry on the Baghdad murder rate I noted that pretty well every paper that had reported the Baghdad murder rate had given a vastly higher figure than Lott's number and the only paper out of step was the Wall Street Journal. So, in Lott's 11/19/03 entry on his blog he draws the obvious conclusion: every other newspaper got it wrong, and in amazing display of chutzpah, he demands that the New York Times correct its "error":
A recent article in the New York Times got some of it's facts completely wrong about murder rates in Iraq. The…
tlambert | August 11, 2003 Keneth Miles describes Lott and Lehrer's claims that crime increased in Washington DC after the gun ban as an excellent example of cherry picking.
Earlier, I observed that the only justification Lott offered for another claim he made about DC crime, that Baghdad had fewer murders was "presumably Rumsfeld knows whether the number of murders is greater or less than 200 a month". Wyeth has found that the Baghdad city morgue handled 470 gunshot deaths in July. For comparison, metropolitan Washington has a similar population to Baghdad and…
tlambert | July 26, 2003Lott responds on his blog to Wyeth's accusation that he had no evidence for his claim about Baghdad murders. (My earlier comments are here.)
Notice that Lott responds on a minor point, once again ducking the question of the coding errors. And while he links to Wyeth and responds to some of my comments he doesn't link to me, but pretends my comments were emailed to him. I link to Lott's comments and have him in my blogroll because I want my readers to see what he says and what I say and make up their own minds about who is right. Lott doesn't link…
tlambert | July 23, 2003Chris Lawrence defends Lott against the charge Wyeth made yesterday. James Joyner also comments.
Lawrence is correct when he points out that Lott's claims about Baghdad murders are not lies unless Lott knows them to be false, and, in the absence of reliable data we don't know whether they are false or true. However, what Lott did was write with reckless disregard for the truth. Rumsfeld was actually comparing combat deaths of US soldiers in Baghdad with murders in Washington, DC, so Lott had absolutely no basis for his claim. The…
tlambert | July 22, 2003Tom Spencer finds Lott's misrepresentation of Duwe et al hilarious.
The Wyeth Wire takes Lott to task for his completely unsupported claim that Baghdad has fewer murders than Washington DC. Of course, Lott's defence will be that he was just reporting Donald Rumsfeld's claims and how was Lott to know that Rumsfeld was no criminologist?