Asian Is Not a Virus, Covid Is

Demonstrators in San Francisco making my point in February. Photo by Jim Wilson/The New York Times.

This is nuts, from NYPD, reported in our terrific online newspaper Gothamist:

“F–king Chinese coronavirus,” a teenager shouted at a 59-year-old man before allegedly kicking him in the back on Madison Avenue in March 2020.

“Where the f--k is your mask?! You f---ing Chinese!” raged a man accused of attacking a 47-year-old Asian man in front of his 10-year-old son that month.

Despite the racial invective, the NYPD didn’t treat either incident as an anti-Asian hate crime — instead, it classified them under a new “anti-COVID” category, which tracks attackers who allegedly believed their victims had COVID-19 at the time of the underlying crime. The NYPD says that with this category of offense the motive is really about the victim’s disability status, not race.

The effect of this policy, apparently it was a kind of policy, was to reduce the number of anti-Asian hate crimes in the department's statistics. The attackers weren't acting out of any bias against Asians, they were acting out of hatred of imaginary Covid that Asians suffer from, not that they suffer from it, the only symptom is looking like an Asian, which is usually a symptom of being Asian, not of being infected with Covid, but the attackers weren't aware of that, so it's clearly not a matter of race. Really?

In 2020, the police logged just four anti-Asian crimes in New York, versus 25 anti-Covid crimes, 24 of which involved Asian victims. 

It looks as if they have stopped doing this now, since the establishment of the Asian Hate Crimes Task Force in August—this year the department has registered 31 anti-Asian hate crimes and just three "anti-Covid crimes"—so maybe it's mean-spirited to complain, but it's taken them time to get there: just three weeks ago they were telling the Daily News there'd been no anti-Asian crimes at all in the first three months of 2020, and it seems to be only a challenge from the paper that got them to correct the falsehood, though not before a clueless commissioner had gotten himself caught bullshitting:

Asked moments later by a Gothamist/WNYC reporter whether Corey’s number of zero was accurate, NYPD Commissioner Dermot Shea blamed victims for not reporting crimes.

“I don’t think there’s any way that that’s an accurate number,” Shea said, apparently unaware of the irony. “It’s an underreporting of crimes.”

But you have to ask yourself how it happened, or who thought it was a good idea to claim that Covid-19 is a "disability" that a person could think they could punish by kicking another person in the back without any evidence that the person they were kicking even had it, or what they thought could be the benefit to the city or the police force from denying that hate crime existed. And you have to ask yourself how much NYPD's famous data-collecting process is corrupted by this kind of idiocy.

Alarms and Excursions

Via NYTimes.

The Penn Wharton Budget Model at the University of Pennsylvania issued a new tool for estimating the costs and benefits of "reopening" states from their different lockdowns against the Covid-19 on Friday—costs being in infections and deaths, benefits in "economic growth" (scare quotes a function of having listened to this, which I hope to come back to) and regaining of lost jobs. Reporting on the thing is kind of nuts, as exemplified by this from Yahoo Business—

According to the Penn Wharton Budget Model (PWBM), reopening states will result in an additional 233,000 deaths from the virus — even if states don’t reopen at all and with social distancing rules in place. This means that if the states were to reopen, 350,000 people in total would die from coronavirus by the end of June, the study found....

Precious bodily fluids

Via League of Legends.

They're back!

Researchers from @HarvardHSPH find strong indications fluoride adversely affect cognitive development in children. | http://t.co/5xagx9J20a
— Richard J. Wood (@RichardJWood) February 21, 2014

Whaddaya know? The newest zombie scientific conspiracy theory ravaging our country is also one of the oldest, the very same one that took the John Birch Society to conspiracy-theory superstar status so many years ago! The fluoridation of our drinking water supply, [jump]

More on metadata

Image from Quicklabel.

Greenwald via Raw Story:

The Bush email metadata program had restrictions on the scope of the bulk email records the NSA could analyze. Those restrictions are detailed in a legal memorandum written in a 27 November 2007, by assistant attorney general Kenneth Weinstein to his new boss, attorney general Michael Mukasey, who had taken office just a few weeks earlier.

The purpose of that memorandum was to advise Mukasey of the Pentagon’s view that these restrictions were excessive, and to obtain permission for the NSA to expand its “contact chains” deeper into Americans’ email records. The agency, the memo noted, already had “in its databases a large amount of communications metadata associated with persons in the United States”.

But, Wainstein continued, “NSA’s present practice is to ‘stop’ when a chain hits a telephone number or [internet] address believed to be used by a United States person.”

Wainstein told Mukasey that giving NSA broader leeway to study Americans’ online habits would give the surveillance agency, ironically, greater visibility into the online habits of foreigners – NSA’s original mandate.

“NSA believes that it is over-identifying numbers and addresses that belong to United States persons and that modifying its practice to chain through all telephone numbers and addresses, including those reasonably believed to be used by a United States person,” Weinstein wrote, “will yield valuable foreign intelligence information primarily concerning non-United States persons outside the United States.”

"Ironically" is the wrong word there; better would be "paradoxically". I've tried to explain this before with reference to the story about Chicago police practice. The original NSA method was a "profiling" approach which tried to limit its data by marking all the "foreign" numbers first, and it dredged up too many dolphins along with its tuna, so to speak. The method they decided to replace it with was a "network" approach, throwing each dolphin back into the water as it came up on the way to the next tuna. It's paradoxical that starting with fewer limitations should get more narrowly tailored results, but it's true.

Big Data in Chicago

This is kind of interesting in its own right, and maybe clarifying in some other domains, on the precipitous decline in murder rates in Chicago over the past year, and what the cops hope is causing it:

In recent months, as many as 400 officers a day, working overtime, have been dispatched to just 20 small zones deemed the city’s most dangerous. The police say they are tamping down retaliatory shootings between gang factions by using a comprehensive analysis of the city’s tens of thousands of suspected gang members, the turf they claim and their rivalries. The police also are focusing on more than 400 people they have identified as having associations that make them the most likely to be involved in a murder, as a victim or an offender.

This is describing a Big Data approach to policing—the use of social network analysis to decide where to focus police attention—and it strikes me that it's in a way the opposite of the sort of Big Brother policing we are all worrying about in connection with the National Security Agency and total information awareness and so forth. [jump]

Copies of Indira Freitas Johnson's Peace piece in Chicago for the citywide Ten Million Ripples project. Loyola Dunes Restoration.