++Retailers would rather complain about shoplifting than invest in fighting it. +
++Jonathan wants me to guess how often retail workers see someone steal. It’s a challenge he likes to make to friends, who always underestimate it. “It’s multiple times a day, maybe as often as once an hour. And that’s the stuff you can see, like the really blatant ones,” he says. “A lot of people picture a scared kid with a candy bar under their jacket, and you get that, but the majority of it is seasoned shoplifters going out with carts full of beer and liquor and hygiene products and electronics and laundry detergent, etc.” +
++He recently quit his job at a major retail pharmacy chain over the issue. (Jonathan is not his real name, and he spoke with me on the condition that he be granted anonymity and the company not publicly named. All of the workers I spoke to for this story were given pseudonyms and/or anonymity.) His frustration isn’t so much with the thieves, per se, but instead with how his former company has dealt with them. +
+ ++Corporate ignored employees’ requests to put booze in locked cases because the liquor aisle is an area of the store that attracts some especially “sketchy” characters. It also blew them off when they warned of camera blind spots that shoplifters were aware of. “The company didn’t really seem that interested in solving the problem, they seemed more interested in, I don’t know, complaining,” he says. The cops weren’t much help, either. They’d show up hours after being called and ask whether the perpetrators were still there (they obviously weren’t) and which way they’d gone (what does it matter if it was six hours ago?). +
++Retail theft is a problem, albeit one that can be difficult to unpack. Some people overstate the spike in shoplifting, others underplay it. Part of the matter is there just isn’t great data out there on what’s going on. +
++Figuring out what to do about it all was above Jonathan’s pay grade. He’s got some ideas, like increasing staffing and, really, locking up the liquor, which would mean more work for employees but would also have increased safety. But these solutions would all cost money the company was apparently not willing to dole out. +
++I interviewed more than a dozen workers in retail and loss prevention — and two retail thieves — about what the country’s supposed shoplifting epidemic looks and feels like on the ground. In conversation after conversation, one thing became clear: While many corporations are frustrated by retail theft, they’re not doing enough to try to solve it. +
++As David Rey, the author of Larceny on 34th Street: An In-Depth Look at Professional Shoplifting in One of the World’s Largest Stores – A Memoir, explained to Vox in an interview, “Most retailers really don’t spend [money] when it comes to asset protection, when it comes to the resources needed to protect themselves from shoplifting … because there’s no return on the investment.” +
++Slowing down stealing isn’t free +
++Some amount of shoplifting is always going to happen. “Shrink” — retail-speak for missing inventory that may have been stolen by outside parties or its own workers, damaged, or just plain lost — is inevitable. According to the National Retail Federation, the average shrink rate increased from 1.4 percent in 2021 to 1.6 percent in 2022. Taken as a percentage of sales, that translates to an increase from $93.9 billion to $112.1 billion in losses. That’s a big number — it’s also one that companies could take more steps to bring down, workers say. +
++Last year, the Walmart that Riley worked at outside of Baltimore was well above the NRF average. It lost nearly 3 percent in sales to shrink — he says it’s a number that wouldn’t have been acceptable a few years ago but is now par for the course. Still, Riley, who worked in asset protection, says there are plenty of steps the company could have taken to make things better that it just didn’t, like hiring and retaining more associates. “If they had better sales coverage, a lot of this stuff wouldn’t happen, or if they didn’t have such high turnover,” he says. +
++He recalls watching a security video of a man cutting into a merchandise case, looking around as he committed the crime and seemingly noticing there was nobody in the department around to see him. He says new cashiers often fall for scams with gift cards at the register because they haven’t been properly trained, and self-checkout aisles go woefully underwatched because the store doesn’t have the labor budget to staff them. “Walmart’s really going heavy on the technology side of it right now, but all the upgraded tracking systems and computers in the world can’t make as much of a difference as having somebody actually in each aisle, or even in each department,” he says. +
++One former manager at Ulta Beauty in Illinois recalled seeing the same handful of men coming into the store over and over, loading up on fragrances, and walking out the door. It spooked workers and customers alike. Reporting the thefts, doing inventory, and restocking added to her workload, not to mention the extra time on talking to police and even going to court. Having a security guard at the door — even if the guard couldn’t really do anything — did make some difference, but the company wasn’t always willing to pay for it. The same goes for extra payroll. “It was just a cycle,” she says. +
++A worker at OfficeMax says she finds empty ink cartridge packages lying around almost every shift, their contents having been lifted. She and her coworkers get lectured over it, but what are they supposed to do? She can’t go past aisle 5 while still keeping an eye on the register. “We’re stretched so thin,” she says. +
++“All these companies that are screaming about theft, they’re kind of complicit in it because they keep reducing staff,” says Steven Rowland, the host of The Retail Warzone podcast and a former retail store manager. “From an hourly standpoint, a lot of these folks feel like they’re not paid enough to care anyway. And then you have store managers who are bleeding out, basically, because they have a lack of payroll, they don’t have enough staff just to get their basic functions done.” +
++Nobody wants retail workers to be acting as vigilantes — indeed, employers actively encourage them not to be, as situations can turn dangerous and even deadly. In mid-October, a GameStop employee shot and killed a man who attempted to steal five boxes of Pokemon cards. Months earlier in April, a shoplifter shot and killed a Home Depot employee who tried to stop her. +
++Mark, a loss prevention specialist who has worked for companies such as Walmart, Lowe’s, and Home Depot, says sometimes the issue is firms aren’t even sure what exactly they want to focus on. “Are you guys focused on theft? Or are you guys focused on shrink? Because there’s a big difference between the two,” he says. “One is more glamorous and more showy, while the other, focusing on shrink, you’re attacking your business model and your operational spend.” +
++Companies can be quick to blame shrink on external theft, but it might be employees who are stealing, or merchandise that’s lost in transit. Say it’s a hardware store and 10 $400 leaf blowers are supposed to come in a pallet and nine show up, or one is a $200 model but nobody checks. “It’s extra time and extra money to look into something like that,” he says. +
++It’s difficult to estimate exactly how much it would cost companies to really go after the shoplifting problem. Many retailers say that they are spending more to combat retail theft than they have in the past. In its 2022 annual report, Home Depot made note that combating shrink and theft and keeping stores safe requires “operational changes” that could increase costs and make the store experience worse for customers and associates alike. (Nobody likes the whole unlock-the-box-to-buy song and dance.) +
++It’s not even clear exactly how much money is being spent to fight theft right now, explains Jeff Prusan, a security and loss prevention consultant to the retail industry. Retailers don’t generally disclose the data, payroll increases vary by retailer and job purpose (employee versus loss prevention specialist versus private security guard), and the amortization of long-term security solutions, such as cameras and alarms, can be complicated to factor in. “There are so many variables in these situations that it is difficult to quantify,” he says. +
++There’s no strong consensus about what would really work, investment-wise. And loss prevention doesn’t bring in revenue, it’s just an expense. “Corporate offices want to see profit. Marketing brings profits, the buyers bring in profits. Loss prevention, in and of itself, does not bring any profits. We just try to deter loss,” says one loss prevention agent who works at a corporate office for a national retailer. “Loss prevention, typically, is the most underfunded department of any company.” +
++The financial incentives around retail theft make it a toughie +
++I’m not going to litigate the size and scope of shoplifting in America, offer opinions over whether it’s really a “victimless” crime to steal makeup from a multibillion-dollar corporation, or question if retailers are overplaying their hands by blaming so many of their problems on shoplifting. I’m not getting into public policy questions, either, on whether bail reform or the amount at which a state considers theft a felony impacts shoplifting rates. But I do think it’s important to acknowledge that this is a tough nut to crack. At the core of retail theft are all sorts of financial incentives on multiple sides that contribute to the problem. +
++Companies can and do try to crack down on theft by locking items up, but unless they really have enough workers to unlock everything, it’s a pickle, business-wise, not to mention an annoyance for customers. “Lock up your whole store and you’ll never lose anything. You’ll also never sell anything,” says Joshua Jacobson, a loss prevention professional in California. “Sales are more important to a company than shopping theft.” +
++Organized retail crime operations made up of boosters — people who steal the goods — and fences — those who purchase or receive and resell the merchandise — do actually exist, and they are difficult to combat. Stores and police departments can and do build up cases against them and make arrests, but it can be a bit of a game of whack-a-mole. +
++Most workers say that even when they catch boosters in the act, they blow right past them, and they’re often not allowed to say anything at all for safety reasons. That includes security staff, many of whom aren’t permitted to make physical contact with thieves (some say they want to be allowed to be “hands on,” though you can see where this could start to become a problem on multiple fronts, from liability to safety). Stolen products wind up sold in the open on the street or online on platforms like Amazon and Facebook. In June, the INFORM Consumers Act became law at the federal level, which requires online marketplaces to verify and disclose information on “high-volume third-party sellers” in an attempt to crack down on organized retail crime. It’s not yet clear how much of an impact it’s making. +
++I found someone on Facebook Marketplace recently selling deodorant and a variety of hygiene products in Brooklyn for well under the price I’d find at a store. When I asked where they got them from, they replied, “On clearance.” I have my doubts. +
++One former booster told me he got into retail theft on a “massive scale” to support a drug habit. (He’s now been sober for over three months and has a regular job.) He described going to Home Depot and Lowe’s dressed relatively nicely — with a collared shirt, maybe a Bluetooth piece in his ear — and asking workers to get him generators or tools down from shelves. He’d put them on a cart, walk out the door, sometimes with a manufactured receipt in his hand, and get into an Uber or Lyft he’d ordered. “The times I was stopped, I never would acknowledge the fact that I’d just been caught,” he says. “If it’s already on the cart, I’m committed.” He’d then sell the items to a local pawnbroker or even to a foreman on a construction site. They had to have figured out what he was up to, handing over a brand-new generator for a fraction of the cost, but they didn’t ask. “They’ve got to be pretty stupid not to know.” +
++Asked whether he thought there was anything that would have stopped him, he says maybe customer service — where retail employees approach and sort of ask what’s up, if someone needs help, even acknowledge what’s going on — might have been a deterrent. He also notes the undercover loss-prevention people were often easy to spot, walking around aisles endlessly and picking up random items at random. “I go with my gut a lot,” he says. “At that point, I feel like they might know that I’m up to something and I’m not going to do it.” +
++Another booster in Hawaii described getting “orders” from fencing operations for a variety of items — Tide pods, baby formula, Spam. She and a friend stole Christmas lights for a woman who worked at a local clinic. After they dropped them off and were paid, the woman told them her coworkers had orders for them, too. “People aren’t going to ask, ‘How did you get this? Is this stolen?’” she says. “It’s a don’t ask, don’t tell kind of thing. They know it’s stolen, but it’s a better deal.” +
++Shoplifting isn’t her favorite — it’s a high risk for small amounts of money — but it’s something she’s done when she needs to for cash. (She told me her “passion” is credit card fraud.) As to what might stop her, it’s a hard question to answer. “People are going to do what they want to do regardless,” she says. She tries not to take anything from mom-and-pop stores, only big chain retailers. The Ross in her area regularly throws out a lot of its inventory in dumpsters behind the store to replace it with new. “We could wait until stuff goes in the dumpster, but why?” +
++“The professionals, unfortunately, are rarely deterred, and the biggest deterrent to them is having off-duty law enforcement, which is very expensive,” says Prusan, the security and loss prevention consultant. “You can’t catch everybody, no matter who you are.” +
++In certain progressive circles, there can be a bit of a “who cares” attitude around retail theft, especially when it hits big companies like Walmart and Home Depot. There’s also often skepticism about just how much stuff is being shoplifted, an assumption that companies are overstating the losses. Target recently blamed theft for its decision to close multiple locations even as other locations opened. While there may be some exaggeration (Walgreens has admitted it maybe “cried too much” over retail theft), publicly traded companies get into trouble when they lie to investors, so they’re probably not making this all up. +
++Most of the workers I spoke to weren’t agonizing over their employers losing merchandise to theft, but they weren’t unbothered by its effects. They wondered about hours and staffing being cut even further to try to make up for losses. They worried about their safety. They figured some of what’s going on may eventually lead to higher prices. They often asked why their companies weren’t at least trying to do more about it — having someone at the door, more people on the floor, just listening to their feedback — even if that was going to cost them a little more. +
++One night, Jonathan, who worked at the retail pharmacy chain, was about to close with just one other worker on staff when a man walked in with a gun. The guy told them to empty the store’s safe — he wasn’t interested in their personal belongings — and at one point suggested Jonathan check on his coworker to make sure she was okay. “That kind of stuck with me,” he says, “because the robber actually showed more concern for our well-being than my manager or the police did.” +
++We live in a world that’s constantly trying to sucker us and trick us, where we’re always surrounded by scams big and small. It can feel impossible to navigate. Each month, join Emily Stewart to look at all the little ways our economic systems control and manipulate the average person. Welcome to The Big Squeeze. +
++Sign up to get this column in your inbox. +
++Have ideas for a future column or thoughts on this one? Email emily.stewart@vox.com. +
++Why Palestinians in Gaza have suffered for decades. +
++On October 7, Hamas, a militant group based in the Gaza Strip, launched a deadly attack on Israel, killing more than 1,400 Israelis and kidnapping more than 200. In retaliation, Israeli airstrikes had killed more than 7,000 Palestinians when this video was published on October 27, and thousands more have been killed since in Gaza, where Palestinians have lived for decades under an occupation and blockade. +
++Since 1967, Israel has imposed tight restrictions on travel and essential goods such as food, fuel, medicine, and water in its occupied territories. In 2007, those restrictions became even tighter in Gaza after Hamas seized power there. Since then, it has been nearly impossible for Palestinians to leave Gaza or to access an adequate supply of essential goods. +
++Today, the Gaza Strip, with a population of over 2 million Palestinians, is a victim of what many call “collective punishment” as Israel bombards its population, shuts off access to the internet, power, food, water, and medicine, forces them to leave their homes, and prepares for a ground invasion. +
++This latest episode of Vox Atlas explains how the experience of Palestinians in Gaza got to this point, and what’s behind Israel’s occupation and its blockade of Gaza. +
++Sources and readings: +
++Thank you for watching! We know we couldn’t cover everything about the Gaza Strip, this was just a start. Below are a few of sources and readings you might find helpful to learn more. +
+-
+
- +Gisha, an Israeli nonprofit that works to protect freedom of movement for Palestinians, has done so much research on the closure of Gaza and how it impacts Palestinians there. + +
- +Visualizing Palestine, a nonprofit that uses data and research to make visuals, and B’Tselem, an Israeli human rights organization, have useful databases that track fatalities over time in the Gaza Strip, Israel, and the West Bank. + +
- +This United Nations document database helped us understand infrastructural destruction in past conflicts with Israel. + +
- +The Biggest Prison on Earth: A History of the Occupied Territories by Ilan Pappé, professor of history at the University of Exeter + +
- +The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017 by Rashid Khalidi, professor of modern Arab studies at Columbia University + +
- +The Gaza Strip: The Political Economy of De-development by Sara Roy, senior research scholar at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University + +
+You can find the video above and the entire library of Vox’s videos on YouTube. +
++
++Real-time fatality counts from conflict zones like Gaza are almost never right. Pay attention to them anyway. +
++At a press conference on October 25, PBS Newshour reporter Laura Barrón-López asked US President Joe Biden a stark question. More than 6,000 Palestinian deaths had been reported in Gaza since October 7, she said. Did this suggest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was ignoring Biden’s message to avoid civilian deaths? +
++In his response, Biden questioned whether the fatality numbers, which came from the Hamas-controlled Gaza Ministry of Health, accurately captured the reality on the ground. “I have no notion that the Palestinians are telling the truth about how many people are killed,” he said. +
++Biden’s remarks were met with intense anger by some commentators who found them overly dismissive of death and suffering; others noted Biden’s own administration has been relying on those figures internally throughout and before the conflict. +
++Two days later, in an unusual move this early in a conflict and seemingly in response to Biden’s remarks, Gaza’s Ministry of Health released a list containing the names and identity numbers of the nearly 7,000 people it says have died in the conflict so far. +
++Historically, the Gaza Health Ministry’s figures have been found largely accurate. News organizations, human rights groups, and international governments and bodies (including the United Nations) cite them in the moment; and human rights groups that have worked to verify the ministry’s data in previous conflicts have found it generally reliable. Vox reports these figures, as it reports the Israeli government’s stated death tolls. +
++For those occupying a grim corner at the intersection of political science and epidemiology, lists like these are just the beginning. “When we’re in the midst of something, it’s really, really hard to know” exactly how many have been killed, said Therese Pettersson, a senior analyst and research coordinator at the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP), a Swedish organization that has been gathering and publishing verified data on conflict-related fatalities for 40 years and is seen as one of the world’s most reliable sources on these types of figures. “As time passes, information will become better.” +
++She says the reality is that in the early days of a conflict, fatality numbers are incredibly important, incredibly politically powerful — and, unfortunately, incredibly hard to get right. Gazan health officials, for example, have cautioned that death tolls will likely grow, given the number of people trapped under rubble. +
++Pettersson and other experts in this space urge people to try to balance a few truths when it comes to fatality figures reported during conflicts: Early figures are often inaccurate, and can be exaggerated for political reasons. At the same time, they give us a crucial sense of the devastating scale of loss. In previous conflicts, for instance, the UN has found Gazan health officials’ toll accurate within 4 percentage points. And while a more precise understanding of a violent conflict’s true death toll will emerge in time, one thing is already clear: There is widespread death and suffering in Gaza as a result of the bombardment and fighting. +
++Although the Gaza Health Ministry’s numbers may historically be reliable, experts still view them as preliminary +
++Biden didn’t explain why he questioned the Gaza Health Ministry’s estimate of the conflict’s death toll, although it’s possible his remarks were related to what happened after an explosion at the al-Ahli Hospital on October 17. Even if it was not directly related to Biden’s comments, the incident at least shows how easy — and consequential — it is to make erroneous estimates and attributions around deaths related to individual incidents in the midst of a war. +
++In the hours following that event, news outlets worldwide reported that Israel was responsible for the blast and that it had killed more than 500 people, attributing the information to Gaza’s health ministry. But in a matter of hours, that became hotly disputed. Israel released new evidence alleging that an errant rocket from Hamas-aligned terrorist organization Palestine Islamic Jihad had caused the disaster. A rare US statement on intelligence-gathering sided with Israel; in the days since, news organizations have cast doubt on at least some of the evidence and continued to scrutinize the cause of the explosion. +
++Meanwhile, US estimates — although low-confidence — suggested the death toll from the hospital explosion was between 100 and 300. The health ministry’s revised final death toll was 471. The episode has been cited as a potential outlier in the health ministry’s general reliability. +
++But as investigative journalist David Zweig reported in a recent edition of his newsletter, the “500 deaths” figure is actually a misquotation of the health ministry and the likely result of some mistranslated Arabic and a game of journalistic telephone. +
++This is all to say: There were a lot of sources of uncertainty during this incident. +
++Omar Shakir of Human Rights Watch, which has been monitoring human rights abuses in Gaza for three decades, told the Guardian the group has “generally found the data that comes out of the ministry of health to be reliable.” +
++As one of the parties involved in the conflict, Hamas would arguably be incentivized to claim a large number of civilian casualties due to Israeli strikes (more on that below). However, the group has less control over Gaza’s Ministry of Health than it does over political and security agencies in Gaza, according to an Associated Press report. Health ministry employees come from a mix of factions, including Hamas but also the secular nationalist Fatah party, and some are independent. Hamas does not pay their salaries, nor, they say, does it influence the casualty figures they report. +
++Pettersson said that, historically, the UCDP has trusted Gazan authorities — “but we have also been able to verify their reports with, for example, reports from [the human rights information organization] B’tselem or other types of news reports.” But at the moment, there’s scant news media coverage happening within Gaza due to low electricity supplies and communications services, as well as the danger of working in the area. While there is limited cross-referencing from independent media, what does exist confirms widespread suffering. AP reporters, for instance, have “viewed large numbers of bodies at the sites of airstrikes, morgues and funerals.” +
++Notably, Israeli fatalities due to this conflict have been covered to an extraordinarily fine degree of detail by many different media outlets, making its casualty numbers much easier to corroborate, said Pettersson. The imbalance of information may be due in part to the imbalance in functioning communication infrastructure — Israel’s is still working, while Gaza’s has been fragile or, at times, completely out (a 34-hour communications blackout last weekend was blamed on a shutdown of phone and communication by Israel). It may also be related to the fact that while active violence leading to death has for the most part stopped in Israel, it remains ongoing in Gaza. An additional factor: Working as a journalist in Gaza is both currently and historically more dangerous than it is in Israel, due to frequent air attacks and Hamas’s history of harassing and using violence against journalists who attempt to report on its activities. At least 30 journalists have been killed in Gaza since this most recent conflict began, many in Israeli airstrikes. +
++Whatever the reasons, the result is that Israel’s casualties have been easier to verify down to the individual than Gaza’s. +
++There are good reasons to be skeptical of fatality numbers that emerge during conflict +
++Fatality numbers released early in the course of violent conflict are often inaccurate, said a number of experts who spoke with Vox. That’s partly because they’re hard to get. Violent conflict often destroys much of the infrastructure that would normally make it possible to reliably count deaths, said Paul Spiegel, a physician and director of the Center for Humanitarian Health at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Morgues and health care facilities, generally important sources of reliable casualty information, may be understaffed or too physically damaged to keep good records (although AP reporters spoke with hospital administrators in Gaza who said they record identifying information on every wounded person occupying a bed and every dead body arriving at a morgue, which feeds into a central database). +
++Additionally, active or impending conflict often prevents human rights organizations’ field staff — the people who would typically verify the numbers and identities of the dead in a disaster setting — from being safely able to do their work. +
++There’s another important reason that early figures are worth double-checking: They’re liable to be exaggerated, either upward or downward, by parties whose political aims may be aided by death counts that skew one way or another. +
++“Warring parties themselves have some interest in portraying the conflict in a certain way,” said Pettersson. In most conflicts, parties benefit from minimizing publicly reported deaths of their own fighters, while maximizing publicly reported deaths of their civilians. “I’m not saying that [Hamas] is exaggerating — we don’t know that really, it’s hard to know anything. But there is an interest to do that, to make it sort of fit into the narrative of Israel being the aggressors and Hamas and Gaza’s civilians being the victims,” she said. +
++The Israeli side would have this incentive too. “Each side will have reasons, usually political in nature, to either minimize or overemphasize,” Spiegel said. +
++Historically — in conflicts in 2008, 2014, and 2021 — the health ministry’s fatality numbers closely matched death tolls resulting from independent research by United Nations humanitarian agencies. The current conflict is far more complex than those prior conflicts were, and far fewer nongovernmental agencies are currently able to do that independent verification work in Gaza. However, it is reasonable to expect that when organizations like B’tselem verify deaths in the future, they will find numbers similar to what the ministry is now releasing — if not higher, given how many people remain unaccounted for. +
++Meanwhile, combatant fatalities, if publicized instantaneously, provide information that can be used by an opposing side to determine whether they are correctly targeting battle stations, said Pettersson. +
++The list published by the Gaza Ministry of Health did not distinguish between combatants and civilians, though it has previously stated that nearly two-thirds of those killed are women and children. +
++The interest warring parties have in manipulating real-time fatality data is not unique to this conflict. In the ongoing war between Ukraine and Russia, something very similar has often played out, said Pettersson. But the dynamic capitalizes on the way we try to understand these kinds of complex events. “That’s also how our brains work,” she said. “Who’s the bad guy and who’s the good one?” +
++Early fatality numbers can have important political consequences +
++Public opinion that gets mobilized by early conflict-related casualty data can have real and significant impact on how the conflict itself plays out, said Lawrence Gostin, who directs the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law at Georgetown Law. +
++“Public opinion in Berlin, London, Paris, and Washington matters a lot in terms of what political leaders will do,” whether that’s sending aid or other assistance to the region, or voting for certain actions that affect the conflict in the United Nations Security Council. +
++The series of events that followed the al-Ahli Hospital explosion may be one of the best recent examples of how public opinion about fatalities in a conflict can change the course of that conflict. The explosion took place hours before President Biden was set to arrive in the region to meet with Israeli and Arab leaders. But public protests against Israel erupted worldwide; citing anger at Israel’s supposed role in the blast, Arab leaders canceled their planned summit. That meant delaying important conversations about the logistics of delivering humanitarian aid to Gaza and, potentially, about paths toward peace in the region. +
++To capitalize on the dynamic at work in episodes like this one, people with strong allegiances to warring parties may share data about their casualties before it has been confirmed. That’s why it’s so important, when news breaks of a fresh wave of violence in a larger conflict, to be aware that early numbers may be colored by bias — especially when they’re not corroborated by other, independent media sources. +
++Even imperfect fatality figures can be helpful +
++Over time, Pettersson says, the exact details of a conflict’s lethality come to light. But when can the general public feel confident that has happened? +
++In the early days of a conflict, the UCDP begins gathering fatality data from open-source materials, including news media, nongovernmental agencies, Telegram, and whatever Twitter is going by. It publishes these on the 20th of each month as “candidate event datasets.” +
++The UCDP isn’t usually able to verify that data until much later — generally a month or more after events have taken place, said Pettersson. Typically, they’ll work to verify the deaths by going back to the primary source that reported each death, whether that’s a journalist, a warring party, or a witness. +
++Often, this verification takes place in partnership with organizations that are verifying deaths with primary sources on the ground in the conflict area. In Gaza, the UCDP often works with B’tselem — which maintains a database of conflict-related deaths — to complement and triangulate data. But it uses data from other sources, too, including Reuters, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, Crisis Group, and a range of smaller organizations. +
++The end result is a list of verified organized violence-related fatalities differentiated by combatants and civilians. Because its definitions are rather strict, the list inevitably underestimates deaths attributable to any given conflict. The UCDP publishes this data annually. +
++(Importantly, UCDP doesn’t count deaths that result indirectly from the conflict, like deaths due to conflict-related famine or sanitation problems. Not because they’re not relevant, said Petterson — it’s just not what her organization does.) +
++There’s some debate over whether feverish media coverage of early fatality estimates is ultimately helpful to people suffering from violent conflict. +
++On one hand, these numbers help us get a sense of the scale of the tragedy unfolding in a war-torn region. We don’t need precise figures to know that when many people are dying, many more are suffering. Early casualty numbers are “at the top of the pyramid,” said Gostin: When a conflict kills a large number of people early on, that signifies a much larger number of people who are extraordinarily vulnerable and need immediate humanitarian aid. Right now, over 1.4 million people are displaced in Gaza, according to the UN. +
++Indeed, these figures may be important for determining how much help an area needs. Some guidelines for providing humanitarian aid use estimates of early mortality in certain age groups to determine the urgency of the response needed, said Spiegel. +
++Still, it’s not always clear that ceaseless, real-time media coverage of evolving conflicts best serves individuals in war zones. “It’s not always good to have this instant sort of information flow,” especially if that information isn’t verified, said Pettersson. “We don’t know how true it is — and then we react on it.” +