Category Archives: Criminal Justice IQ Trainwrecks

Wrong Number for Jury

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This story in the Irish Examiner caught our eye recently:

mix-up-leaves-350-potential-jurors-calling-sex-line-

It’s an example of a classic digit transposition error in telephone numbers, but in this case the wrong number called was one that might cause offence for some of the people making the call. Also, as the article points out, there was a question over whether the County Clerk would be liable for the cost of calls to the (almost certainly premium rated) sex line.

The article ends with the Count Clerk saying they’d be reviewing all letters that went out in future. This is an example of Scrap and Rework – a non-value adding action that catches defects but doesn’t actually improve the process.

A better solution: Change the phone number for the jury duty office so that it is different to the sex line and the transposition error cannot occur. Or use a standard letter template that has been properly proof-read.

But checking each letter… that’s not cost effective or sustainable as a quality control.

 

Police Untelligence

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From The Register comes this wonderful example of the problems that can arise where data is used for unintended purposes, resulting in poor quality outcomes for all involved.

The NYPD have been regularly raiding the home of an elderly Brooklyn couple. They’ve been hit 50 times over the past 4 years, which might mark them out as leading crime kingpins but for the fact that their address has wound up included in police data used to test notification systems. The Reg tags this as “a glitch in one of the department’s computers”, but Information Quality trainwreck observers will immediately recognise that the problem isn’t with the technology but with the Information.

The trainwreck is compounded by two facts which emerge in the article:

  1. NYPD believed that they had removed the couple’s address from the system back in 2007, but it appears to have not been the case (or perhaps it was restored from a backup)
  2. The solution the NYPD have now implemented is to put a flag on the couple’s address advising officers NOT to respond to calls to that address.

The latter “solution” echoes many of the pitfalls information quality professionals encounter on a daily basis where a “quick fix” is put in to address a specific symptom which then triggers (as el Reg puts it) “the law of unintended consequences”.  To cut through implication and suggestion, let’s pose the question – what happens if there is an actual incident at this couple’s home which requires a police response?

What might the alternative approaches or solutions be to this?

(And are the NYPD in discussions with the Slovak Border police about the perils of using live data or live subjects for testing?)

Did you check on the cheques we sent to County Jail?

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Courtesy of Keith Underdown comes yet another classic IQ Trainwreck  which he came across on the CBS News.

It seems that up to 3900 prisoners received cheques (or ‘checks’ to our North American readers) of US$250 each, despite the very low probability that they would be able to actually use them to stimulate the economy. Of the 3900, 2200 were, it seems, entitled to receive them as they had not been incarcerated in any one of the three months prior to the enactment of the Stimulus bill.

However, that still leaves 1700 prisoners who should not have received cheques who did. The root cause?

According to CBS News:

…government records didn’t accurately show they were in prison

A classic information quality problem… accuracy of master data being used in a process resulting in an unexpected or undesired outcome.

While most prisons have intercepted and returned the cheques, there will now need to be a process to identify,  for each prisoner, whether the Recovery payment was actually due. Again, a necessary manual check (no pun intended) at this stage but one which will add to the cost and time involved in processing the Recovery cheques.

Of course, we’ve already written here about the problem with Stimulus cheques being sent to deceased people.

These cases highlight the fact that an Information Quality problem doesn’t have to be massively impacting on your bottom line or impact significant numbers of people to have an impact on your reputation.

The terror of the Terrorist Watch list

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A source who wishes to remain anoynymous sent us this link to a story on Wired.com about the state of the US Government’s Terrorist watch list.

The many and varied problems with the watch list have been covered on this blog before.

However, the reason that this most recent story constitutes an IQTrainwreck is that it seems that, despite undertakings to improve quality, the exact opposite has actually happened given:

  • The growth in the number of entries on the list
  • The failures on the part of the FBI to properly maintain and update information in a timely manner.

According to the report 15% of active terrorism suspects under investigation were not added to the Watch list. 72% of people cleared in closed investigations were not removed.

The report from the US Inspector General said that they “believe that the FBI’s failure to consistently nominate subjects of international and domestic terrorism investigations to the terrorist watchlist could pose a risk to national security.”

That quote sums up why this is an IQTrainwreck.

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Duff Data dumps 1 million on the dole (social security)… in France.

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The Register carries a story this week that clearly shows  the impact of poor quality information on people, particularly in this time of tightening economic conditions when getting a job is hard enough.

It appears that the French Government’s Police Vetting database is not very complete or accurate. According to the French Data Protection authorities (CNIL), this highlights the

serious issues over the provenance of data illustrate all too clearly what happens when the government starts to collect data on its citizens without putting adequate measures in place for updating and accuracy checking.

It would appear that there are errors in 83% of records, with a range of degrees of seriousness. The errors in the database arise as a result of “the simple mechanism of mis-recording actual verifiable data”. In other words, poorly designed processes,  poorly designed data creation/maintenance processes, poorly trained staff, and a lack of information quality control contribute to the errors.

But what  of the cost to the French economy? Well, every person who has been blacklisted in error by this system is potentially drawing social security payments. On top of that they are not paying taxes into the French economy.

If, in a month, they are drawing €100 in social insurance instead of paying €100 in taxes, the net loss to the French economy is €200 per month.  €200 x 1Million =€200 million per month, or €2,400,000,000 per year.

So, on the basis of a very rough guesstimate, the value to the French economy of fixing these errors is €2.4billion per year. Is that a business case?

Grevious misuse of statistics

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The BBC today (2008-10-23) carries a news story about the under-reporting of serious crime due to the mis-classification of certain crimes. The story is examined in more detail in an op-ed piece “How the police missed the violence”..

The problem has come about when the intended victim manages to escape serious harm when attacked. The example given concerns a pub fight in which the assailant attempts to “glass” the victim but she suffers only minor injuries not the intended major damage to her face. The police then classify the crime not as “grievous bodily harm with intent to cause serious injury.” but as merely(?) “grievous bodily harm”.

14 forces have gone back through their statistics and reclassified GBH’s as the more serious crime where intent was clearly present but no great injury was suffered. This has resulted in a 22% jump in reported violent crime over the same period last year although it has not affected the total number of offences reported.

The IQ lesson here concerns the way in which business terms are defined and then applied. The key word in the definition is “intent” but many officers on the ground concentrate on the phrase “to cause serious injury”.Mind you as an ordinary man in the street I think I would classify GBH as a violent crime but officially in falls into the “Other personal crime (with Injury)” category which is not seemed a serious category.

I shot the Sheriff (but I didn’t update the warrants database)

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The headline doesn’t scan as well as the original Bob Marley lyric, but that jarring dischord is nothing compared to the problems with the PNC (Police National Computer) in the UK.

A review is underway of the processes used to update the PNC database across the UK covering the “national process and practice for withdrawing warrants, involving courts, the police, and the crown prosecution service”. The review is also extending into Magistrate Courts (lower level ‘district’ courts in England and Wales) due to “differing practices” which may require procedures to be clarified.

At the heart of the issue is the withdrawal of warrants for thousands of defendants who never turned up for their court dates and have escaped justice because no warrants were issued for their arrest, no police pursued them and their ‘failure to appear’ wasn’t logged on the PNC. The power to withdraw a warrant rests (or should rest) with judges only…

Regular visitors to this site will recall the IQ Trainwreck that emerged about the DNA database in the UK a while ago… oh dear.

What’s in a number?

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From the ever vigilant The Register comes a story of a man who was detained by authorities for 50 days due to an error on the part of his ISP in identifying who had used a particular IP address to upload satirical images of a revered Indian (as in sub-continent, not Native American) leader of the 17th Century.

Details of the story can be found here

This is, to my mind, an IQ trainwreck as it caused a man to be deprived of his liberty for 50 days.

Also, the exact same information from ISPs is being used by law enforcement and Recording Rights groups to find terrorists and filesharers, so problems with the accuracy of the information will lead to wasted law enforcement efforts (terrorism) or defamation (Recording Rights groups accusing you of downloading when you didn’t).

Once the legal system becomes an ‘information consumer’ for this type of data then the standard of care and expectation of quality and accuracy must increase.

Cumbrian Train Crash—Poor IQ Management implicated

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According to a report in the Guardian of 2007-08-27  the Cumbrian rail crash in Febuary 2007 that killed one person and injured many others had an Information Quality component which was the final link in the causal chain:

Alongside concerns over the points, the study’s focus will be a breakdown in communications among Network Rail’s Cumbria workforce which contributed directly to the crash. It is expected to state that track inspections were not carried out as planned, that records of inspections were flawed and that safety certification used by some engineers had expired.

Industry sources also confirmed reports yesterday that two different inspection teams thought the other had inspected the points prior to the crash and therefore failed to inspect a crucial stretch of track at Grayrigg. As a result, a Virgin Pendolino train travelling from London to Glasgow on the night of February 23 was derailed by a broken set of points that should have been noticed earlier by track inspection teams.

There are at least three information management issues here:

  1. The maintenance of inspection logs
  2. the maintenance of staff certification information
  3. training of staff in the importance of information and its use

The cost of the rescue effort was huge as was the cost to the NHS, the managers and maitnenance workers stand lose their bonuses and one person has been arrested. so once again we can see that Poor Information Quality can:

  1. kill
  2. cost huge sums of public money
  3. send people to prison
  4. hit individuals in the pocket

What’s in a name?

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The Irish national broadcaster RTE has this story on their website this morning…

The wrong prisoner was let out of one of Ireland’s main prisons yesterday because he had the same name as another prisoner who was due for release.  It seems that there were two Mark Kennys in the prison, one serving a short sentence for a minor offence, the other serving a longer sentence for a serious offence.

For the sake of clarity and a bad pun I’ll refer to the Kenny with the minor sentence as “Mark 1” and the other as (inevitably) “Mark 2”.

“Mark 1” had been granted temporary release. “Mark 2” was the prisoner released. Nobody noticed for 20 minutes. One can only assume that the error was identified by “Mark 1” enquiring when he was going to be let out.

This is a case of a process failure triggered by poor quality management of information which resulted in a serious criminal being released in error who will now have to be tracked down and re-arrested by police (the Gardaí as they are called in Ireland).

An investigation into how this came to happen has been ordered by the Director of the Irish Prison Service. Which is a bit like locking the stable door after the prisoner has bolted.