Earlier this week, the think-tank known as the RAND Corporation withdrew a study that was intended to examine in a fairly comprehensive manner the occurrence of crime around licenced medical marijuana outlets in the Los Angeles area:
RAND retracts pot study in LA
What makes this an important and instructive item is not simply the fact that the researchers at RAND committed a serious error of oversight in terms of the sufficiency of their research, but also, that the organization was very quick to alert the policing research community that the data was in fact compromised.
According to sources at RAND, the researchers engaged in this study neglected to ascertain that the crime data they were using did not include statistics from the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD). RAND staff relied upon statistics gathered and published online by CrimeReports.com and simply assumed that the LAPD data would be included in the statistics. This was a false assumption. Clearly, there needs to be much tighter protocols within the RAND organization with respect to the verification and substantiation of research inputs and results.
This will, undoubtedly, be a source of some amusement within the operational side of policing as their officers are often the subject of critical commentary from the research community for split-second front-line police decision-making. Here we have a well-funded research agency with all the time in the world to pore over statistics in order to make evidence-based observations, assessments and recommendations.
Although this is highly embarassing for the RAND Corporation, it is encouraging that they are willing to bear the brunt of the error, own up to it and start over again, with the proper range of statistics. Would that all policing matters had such a reset button!
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