[open-government] Problem with Cost-Benefit for FOIA or State/Local Records wrt human lives

Tue Aug 17 13:52:56 UTC 2010

This is a good discussion but one of the areas I've been trying to get data
on at the state and local levels is traffic accidents.   It is not as easy
as you would think.  It is even more difficult to think about cost/benefits
of open records (deidentified of course) when you learn there are several
ways to value a human life.

To put the 40,000 so or people who are killed in auto accidents each year
into perspective, it helped me to learn that many counties in the U.S.
collect extensive data on their traffic and accidents.  Getting those local
data sets are difficult.  Getting State data sets (at least for Florida) are
relatively simple and cost free, as are federal data sets. The problem is
that the data sets do not always agree, the quality of data, at least for a
number of states providing data to the feds varies from awful to good (and I
don't know what the determinants are for the quality variation), and the
data sets are massive and complex and take a good while to understand so
people like me are not analyzing tobacco smokers by apple eaters thinking it
is clear day rear end accidents and dead dogs in the road.

Now, because we are in a recession, at least at the local level in Florida,
there are not rooms full of people exploring the data on death and
accidents.  Indeed, the numbers engaged in those practices are shrinking
with the economy.

So, let's have a way of assigning priorities to the public records requests
so that someone who controls public data, say, on accidents along Alligator
Alley in Florida, knows that the costs of withholding data from objective,
reliable and valid analyses are not something they need to contemplate wrt
human body counts.

Similarly, when a government agency is caught dumping illegally, especially
when the material being dumped is toxic, the need for that agency to release
the data on how many truckloads and what concentrations needs to be
considered a high priority, even if the toxic materials were dumped mostly
in minority neighborhoods, neighborhoods with high infant death rates.

Dwight Hines, Ph.D.
IndyMedia
in Maine for a wonderful summer.
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