
You've been added to the FBI's Ten Most Wanted List – how long will you survive? - RA_Fisher
http://statwonk.github.io/blog/2014/03/08/survival-analysis-of-running-from-the-law-the-fbis-most-wanted/
======
myth_drannon
For those who speak Python there is an excellent survival analysis package
called Lifelines
-[https://github.com/CamDavidsonPilon/lifelines](https://github.com/CamDavidsonPilon/lifelines)

Written by the same guy who brought you Bayesian Methods for Hackers -
[https://github.com/CamDavidsonPilon/Probabilistic-
Programmin...](https://github.com/CamDavidsonPilon/Probabilistic-Programming-
and-Bayesian-Methods-for-Hackers)

And if you are curious where to test your newly acquired knowledge try a
Kaggle competition called "Predict malfunctional components of ASUS notebooks"
which is a great example of survival analysis usage.
[http://www.kaggle.com/c/pakdd-cup-2014](http://www.kaggle.com/c/pakdd-
cup-2014)

~~~
RA_Fisher
Yes! I'm a huge fan of Cam's work. I bit the bullet and put down R to work
through the Bayesian Methods book with Python. Learning the language and
working through the book has been a lot of fun.

------
dmourati
I worked as a lawyer in Chicago in the late 1990s and represented a client who
was on the FBI top ten most wanted list. His name is Nate Hill. He was a
Chicago drug dealer.

He fled to Africa and was running a coffee business as a front. US Marshals
flew to Africa, found him, kidnapped him, and put him on a flight back to
O'Hare.

More details on his case:
[http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1999-05-25/news/990525017...](http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1999-05-25/news/9905250177_1_drug-
count-money-laundering-co-defendant)

~~~
RA_Fisher
Looks like he was actually on the Top 15 list of the U.S. Marshall's, not the
FBI Top Ten.
[http://www.usmarshals.gov/investigations/most_wanted/](http://www.usmarshals.gov/investigations/most_wanted/)

However, it'd be cool to apply this analysis to that list, too!

~~~
dmourati
Good find! I guess my memory from back then was a little off. Still, super
interesting case to work. I met Hill briefly in the MCC.

~~~
RA_Fisher
I can't imagine what it'd be like to work a case like that. Was he really
friendly to you?

~~~
dmourati
We spoke only for a few moments. I needed to visit him in the lockup to obtain
a signature for some legal document. He seemed dazed but upbeat.

------
logicallee
Based on everything we've learned recently about the government's own
capabilities, I would think that null hypothesis is that being added to the
list has no effect whatsoever. (Since the publication of the list is so much
weaker than the government's internal capabilities, and that it is the latter
that leads to arrest anyway, not some grocery clerk reporting in.)

The easiest way to see this would be to assume there's a fairly close race on
average between #10 and #11 in terms of wanted-ness, and so if we knew what
the shortlist was and compared the incarceration dates of the runners-up we
could figure out whether there's any effect at all to the publication proper.

~~~
RA_Fisher
I'd speculate the opposite way about the list. There have been a lot of crazy
stories about grocery clerks reporting fugitives. The experiment you propose
would be really cool to test a hypothesis with.

------
joshlegs
I was totally hoping this was a cool browser game

------
yukichan
> df$date_put_on_list <\- as.POSIXct(df$date_put_on_list, format = "%m/%d/%Y",
> tz = "EST")

It's a cool blog post but that code isn't near readable to me. Long lines in a
tiny rectangle hidden behind horizontal scroll don't make it any easier. It
looks like a box of arbitrary characters stuffed into as little space as
possible.

Although the raw link is a little easier on the eyes:

[https://gist.githubusercontent.com/statwonk/9448932/raw/84b9...](https://gist.githubusercontent.com/statwonk/9448932/raw/84b941b6411baa67e1d90f94c729109f4d0d4864/gistfile1.r)

Whoever named that method POSIXct needs to like leave the job of naming things
to other people maybe.

~~~
RA_Fisher
You're right. My pygments Octopress plugin died and I can't figure out how to
revive it, some kind of weird cache issue.

Also, I see that I forgot to add the data. You can find it here:
[https://github.com/statwonk/fbi_topten/blob/master/data.csv](https://github.com/statwonk/fbi_topten/blob/master/data.csv)

~~~
foobarqux
Where did you get the data?

~~~
RA_Fisher
I got the data from the FBI's website.

[http://www.fbi.gov/stats-services/publications/ten-most-
want...](http://www.fbi.gov/stats-services/publications/ten-most-wanted-
fugitives-60th-anniversary-1950-2010/chronological_listing)

I did a bit of cleaning here and there by literally Googling and finding old
articles like these:

[http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1310&dat=19780915&id=w...](http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1310&dat=19780915&id=w_lVAAAAIBAJ&sjid=CuIDAAAAIBAJ&pg=2278,4163503)

[http://www.lasvegassun.com/news/1998/feb/22/las-vegas-
slayin...](http://www.lasvegassun.com/news/1998/feb/22/las-vegas-slaying-
suspect-makes-fbis-most-wanted-l/)

[http://vicksburgdailynews.com/2012/05/11/bain-sisters-
found-...](http://vicksburgdailynews.com/2012/05/11/bain-sisters-found-alive-
mayes-dead/)

etc.

------
TrainedMonkey
While element of luck is involved, I hardly think getting caught is random. I
think a lot depends on preparations and profile you keep.

~~~
rhizome
If it was as simple as "preparation" and "profile," then how do _any_ of them
get caught? You'd think those protections would be relatively common
knowledge, at least among criminals.

~~~
6d0debc071
I don't think criminal society is that well integrated. Nor that the people
commonly a part of it are particularly 'with it' individuals.

After all - drawing left to right top to bottom, from the FBI most wanted list
as of shortly before this post - we have:

1) Kidnap and murder of a little girl

2) Beating and raping a woman in march 1998

\- Alleged beating, raping and murder of a second woman while out on bail

3) Alleged Shooting and killing an armoured car driver outside a movie theatre
and making off with the money.

4) 1987 escape from prison followed by a 1991 murder and subsequent escape
from prison in Mexico after being arrested for drug trafficking

5) Racketeering, conspiracy to launder money instruments, conspiracy to have
[assorted drugs]

6) Killing his wife and two children, then burning his house down.

These aren't exactly Mensa candidates.

~~~
rhizome
I'm guessing you've never been to jail. There is a pervasive subculture with a
long history there.

~~~
dfc
What does a pervasive subculture with a long history have to do with
intelligence and planning/executing? I do not think that the existence of a
"pervasive subculture with a long history" is meaningful/informative.

You have an isolated group of people: how surprising is it that a social
animal develops its own culture distinct from the larger population that they
are forcibly segregated from?

This social phenomena has persisted for a long time: Is the length of the
history indicative of some quality unique to members of the subculture or is
it one of the necessary byproducts of existence of a legal system?

~~~
rhizome
_What does a pervasive subculture with a long history have to do with
intelligence and planning /executing?_

Everything. The subculture is a mechanism by which an ethic of existence (or
survival in this case) is propagated. Techniques, warning signs, all of these
things. In this case, it is indeed unique to these people in that the
techniques may only be useful when you are on the lam.

In fact, the uniqueness of this situation seems to be exactly what you are
trying to handwave away as "it's own culture distinct," but you are ignoring
the word itself: subculture exists not separate from other cultures, but as a
part of them, and as a part of larger ones, such as the legal system. The
legal system itself has a multitude of cultures: correctional officers have an
interdependency with the judiciary, but you wouldn't say that they operate by
the same terms. Judges and court reporters don't usually go to the same
parties, and thus the culture of incarceration and evasion of the law also
operate on their own terms and by the terms of the legal system at large. As a
case in point, that is.

------
ds9
Interesting article - the title however is not only misleading but disturbing.
I clicked because it implied that the FBI had dispensed with the inconvenient
laws and judicial system and just started killing fugitives when it found
them.

I mean, they sometimes do, but that's not what the article is about. If the
author is reading, maybe change "will you survive" to "until you're found".

~~~
RA_Fisher
Thanks. Yeah, I worried it might be confusing. I use survival analysis and
speak about how statisticians use jargon and I wanted that to be in the title
somehow.

------
stox
Coincidentally, the one person I knew who made the list lasted for around 400
days. Interestingly enough, another person I knew, who was just short of the
list, lasted for 7 years before turning himself in.

