Citation

Piquero AR, Riddell JR, Bishopp SA, Narvey C, Reid JA, Piquero NL. Am. J. Crim. Justice 2020; 45(6): 1111-1118.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2020, College of Law Enforcement, Eastern Kentucky University, Publisher Holtzbrinck Springer Nature Publishing Group)

DOI

10.1007/s12103-020-09575-9

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

We appreciate Editor Miller's invitation to provide some remarks on a recent commentary submitted by Gonzalez et al. We reflected for some time on whether to dedicate our effort and time to countering the inaccuracies in the commentary but feel that the errors, contradictions, inconsistencies, and tone of the commentary, unfortunately demand our attention. Accordingly, and because journal space is precious, we take a brief moment to provide our thoughts on their work and highlight some key differences - doing so in a constructive way--the way the community of scholars is meant to operate.

The authors raise several points regarding our study: (1) the design itself was flawed and did not include more than 1 year of data for comparison; (2) the analytical methodology was non-conventional and appeared to be biased in favor of detecting a significant association; and (3) the authors' conclusions in the manuscript are contradictory and inaccurate findings were disseminated. We address each of them in turn.

Our paper was intentionally designed to look at short-term effects - a point we did not hide since the words 'short-term' were clearly articulated in the title. Additionally, we reminded readers in our Discussion section of the need for a longer follow-up time period. Gonzalez et al. indicate that we did not account for non-linear or seasonal effectsFootnote 1 and therefore this hampered the analyses. To make their claim, Gonzalez et al. provide a graph of data--without statistical analyses--to show trends over time, aggregated by week. Referencing week 1 as the January 1-7 period in each year, they conclude "that 2020 trends were largely similar to those observed in 2019 and 2018, with slightly fewer incidents reported in January 2020 compared to prior years…An increase in family violence incidents was observed between April 1-15 (weeks 14-16) each year."....

Language: en