Puerto Rico's politicians are corrupt... Puerto Rico's Police are Corrupt... Are they really? These are common statements you can expect to hear in backyard (or beach side) discussions in Puerto Rico. Everyone talks about it like it is pretty much common knowledge.
Transparency International creates a Corruption Index each year. In 2008, Puerto Rico was included in the stats. Puerto Rico ranked 36th (best), tied with Botswana and Malta, one step below the United Arab Emirates. United States came in at 18th tied with Belgium and Japan, and Denmark taking the #1 spot.
This is from a ranking of 180 different countries. However, before celebrating, we should realize that the stats must be taken with a grain of salt here. They are certainly not as quantitative as murder statistics, where you can simply count the death certificates filed as homicides. It's possible Puerto Rico's position relative to other countries could be either better or worse. It's not easy to determine for certain using CPI alone.
Basically, this index is calculated by polling public officials themselves and asking them how corrupt they think their own country is. That opens up a whole new can of worms when you consider that citizens of any particular nation/culture may have very different ideas about how to answer. In fact, you certainly might expect someone from the United States to be more openly critical than one from say China.
If you knew or believed your government was corrupt, would you trust filling our your survey, or answering questions via the phone? Would it be worth the risk? It likely depends very much on where in the world you live.
Therefore, while the CPI is not the best indicator in the world, at least it gives us something to start with. One thing that is interesting to note is that Puerto Rico has a "reasonable" CPI score comparatively speaking, but has a significant difference with the United States. Ties between the political systems are not enough to bring them closer together in the ranking.
Question: What are some other methods of measuring corruption (in any country)?
Surely a country does not get colored with the perception of being corrupt just because of high profile cases like ex-Puerto Rico governor Anibal Acevedo Vila? Or does it? Well - it's certainly a powerful symbolic event, and in cases like these, I would wager that a smart marketer can beat a smart statistician hands down... in the contest of who can control public opinion.
Let's do a very light analysis. In fact, it's going to be so light, let's call it an "exercise" instead, so as to not overstate it's value. While not statistically important, it can create a bit of enlightenment.
Let's compare the "data" on the Internet of Puerto Rico corruption in the two main areas:
- Political Corruption, and
- Police Corruption
If you are not an advanced Google user, here is a search query that is a little bit more advanced than you may commonly use. These are "Web results" NOT Google News results, although there is certainly some overlap.
intitle:"puerto rico" intitle:corruption intitle:police
You can enter that into the search box, or just click this link to get the results. With this search, we do the following:
- We are forcing our search to return only pages that contain "Puerto Rico", "corruption", and "police" in the title.
- We use the title to help increase the relevancy. If all these terms occur in the title, the web page is very likely to be about actual "Police corruption in Puerto Rico".
- Focusing on the title ensures that we ignore the many non-relevant results that would occur where the terms all show up in the same page, coincidentally or as part of some other topic.
I find 54 results. Keep in mind that we are searching for English terms only. It would be a great follow up exercise to repeat the same process using the equivalent Spanish terms. Only 2 of the 54 are from the last 12 months.
Now let's try another search query that focuses on general corruption, ignoring the ones specific to the police:
intitle:"puerto rico" intitle:corruption -intitle:police
This turns up 135 results, which excludes all the previous matches that were more specific to police corruption.
If you get rid of any pages that have "governor" anywhere on the page, you still get 112 results (with only 3 form the last year).
Note: You should be aware this is not a strong test since something like "Police File Charges for Puerto Rico Governor" would show up in the police corruption list, but would in fact be correctly filed in the general or political category.
So the score is 135 to 54, General Corruption Versus Police Corruption in Google Results. I'll consider general corruption as Political for the purposes of the comparison.
Before we conclude that the politicians here are more corrupt than the police, or that anyone is corrupt at all, keep in mind that the best possible info you can get from this exercise is to simply scan through ALL the results and make sure you are aware of all the accusations of corruption that are listed. You might be surprised by some. You might even find that there are so many duplicates, that not that many corruption reports occur at all, in the ENGLISH articles on the Web.
Please check out the National Public Radio podcast. Click the "Listen" button to listen to the full report on how police corruption is hindering the war on drugs. It is an interview with Frances Robles, a report for the Miami Herald who reports on Puerto Rico and the Caribbean.
You can find more articles and interesting reading from the Puerto Rico focused journalist Frances Robles here.
If you want a stinging analysis of the political situation in Puerto Rico, check out Gil the Jenius, author of Puerto Rico's Best Blog.
The Insider
Sources:
