Thanks Nikhil! I have a copy if it’s taken down!

Learn more about how you can use 911 data to understand police deployment in our short blog post for ASA's Committee on Law and Justice Statistics:
community.amstat.org/lawandjustic...

In a new blog post for the @amstatnews.bsky.social, John Hall and I make novel use of the city's 911 data to show that overnight train patrols more than doubled after the city announced its new policy in January.

But it turns out the information we need is already public, in the city's "Calls for Service"—a.k.a. 911—dataset!

You might think that you'd need detailed police deployment records to answer this question.

Getting this information via a public records request could take months, and may be denied by the department altogether.

And read more in a great piece from the Mercury News in San Jose (where our study was conducted):
www.mercurynews.com/2025/10/01/s...

Learn more about our study in this thread from two years ago:
bsky.app/profile/alex...

Reminders alone are unlikely to dramatically reduce overall jail populations, as jail stays for missed court dates are often short.

But stacking them with other small, common-sense reforms could substantially improve our justice system.

Reminders also help everyone by saving precious public resources instead of paying for these wasteful jail stays.

The reminders themselves cost about 60¢ per case—less than the costs of paying for someone’s arrest and incarceration, even for a single night.

We found that a broad swath of clients appeared to benefit from reminders—even people facing low-level charges.

Think of a DUI case: make a bad mistake one night, then forget a court date, and suddenly you’re in jail for a few days. A minor case just became much more serious.

Court date reminders may seem small, but they make a big difference.

Our study was conducted with public defender clients who can’t afford a lawyer.

These nudges are a huge boon for low-income clients, helping them avoid the high costs of a disruptive stay in jail.

Our study has now been peer reviewed—and it's officially out today in Science Advances!

It’s open access, which means it’s free for anyone to read.

www.science.org/doi/epdf/10....

(And I'll be teaching a course like this next spring at NYU so I'd love to hear what else you find!)

And another from Jochen Hartmann here: cms.mgt.tum.de/fileadmin/mg...

I came across two courses recently, one from @zjelveh.bsky.social here: zjelveh.github.io/teaching/ins...

Yes to evaluating the *outcomes* of these systems rather than as a standalone algorithm! This is something that's been bothering me for a while about ML assisted decisions

Ultimately, we’ll likely achieve better outcomes if we think of algorithms as *policies* — and design them in a way that aims for the specific policy goals we desire.

(17/17)

bsky.app/profile/alex...