Where's the Righteous Indignation?

... Before it slips beneath the waves forever, I would like to take a quick second look at the recent Dallas Morning News series, "Striking Differences," in which the newspaper accused the Dallas County prosecutor of racism.
... the Morning News series on jury selection in Dallas County criminal district courts was potentially volatile. In a racially charged atmosphere, the city's only daily newspaper publishes a huge two-years-long study accusing Dallas County District Attorney Bill Hill of running a racist department.
... the whole series--26 copyrighted stories, by my count--sank beneath the surface without making a ripple. It was like watching the Titanic disappear into a goldfish pond.
... How can that be, in a town where almost everybody black is shouting racism and almost everybody white is shouting not-racism? Here's a case of alleged racism in a very important public office. Everybody shrugs.
... This story didn't get any traction because the Morning News failed to make its case.
... The main ammunition the newspaper offered against Hill was an arcane statistical study that they said found racism in the techniques used by assistant district attorneys to strike black people from juries.
... In this case, the newspaper offered the results of a "logistic regression analysis model" to prove Hill and his staff are racists.
... The model works like this: You take all the documented factors that could explain a strike--age, race, income, prior experience with law enforcement and so on--and pour them in. The model whirs and chunks along for a while like an electric martini mixer. You open the lid, and what do you find?
   Racism.
... Or, as the social scientists say, "Garbage in, garbage out." The accuracy of the model's predictions depends entirely on the design of the model, the variables fed into it and the values assigned to those variables. You could have a model that gets it wrong most of the time.
... The first story starts out, "Key Findings--Dallas County prosecutors excluded black jurors at more than twice the rate they rejected whites."
   But when you read on, you find that the racial makeup of juries today in Dallas County almost exactly matches the makeup of the jury pools. The percentage of the original pool that is black is the same as the black percentage of the picked juries.
... The News says in its stories that the juries come out the same ratios as the jury pools more or less by accident. The paper reports that prosecutors reject blacks at twice the rate they reject whites, but the ratios come out the same because defense attorneys reject whites at three times the rate they reject blacks.
... The News presented a number of comparisons that seemed to show racism, especially where blacks were struck from juries more often than whites who answered the same question the same way. But you don't know if it's racism until you know what other factors were in play.
... The only thing that weaves all of that together properly is the model. And you can't tell if the model is any good if you can't see the typical measurements statisticians use to judge effectiveness. That's what Fritsch asked to see.
... "In my field, I say, 'I need to know what the hit ratio is,' and anybody could blurt that off the top of their head," Fritsch said.
   "It's not something that should be hidden. If the model is hanging around 50 percent, it's not any better than flipping a coin."
... the News talked about the 36-year term of former Dallas County prosecutor Henry Wade, "when prosecutors followed a stereotype-ridden manual in rejecting black jurors." The paper, describing 63-year-old Bill Hill as "a track star with a country twang," presented his side of the story by saying, "District Attorney Bill Hill, who was an assistant to hard-nosed former DA Henry Wade, called the analysis of his office's jury selection practices 'unfair and biased.'"
   That's all code. It's clear enough. You know what it means. Wade, Hill. Old white guys. Same-same.
... But the News didn't have any bullets in its gun.
... I did a little reality check on this and asked a couple liberal defense lawyers what they thought of the series. One, whom I will not name, paused a beat and then said, "Oh, yeah, you mean that series the News did trying to make Bill Hill look good."
   I said, "No. They said Hill and his staff are racists."
... He said, "Well, I didn't read it that carefully. I just got to the part where they said there are as many blacks on juries now as there are in the pool. That seemed like real progress to me. Maybe I've just been around too long."
   These are strange times in Dallas. Racism is a brutal charge anytime, especially if it's not true. It's surprising, isn't it, who tosses it around. And how. And why.