Joel Best is a Professor Of Sociology And Criminal Justice At The University Of Delaware. His writing focuses on understanding how and why we become concerned with particular issues at particular moments in time–why we find ourselves worried about road rage one year, and identity theft a year or so later. He’s written about the ways bad statistics creep into public debates, and about dubious fears, such as the mistaken belief that poisoned Halloween candy poses a serious threat to our kids. Check out his books Damned Lies and Statistics, More Damned Lies and Statistics, Stat-Spotting.
Episode Description
The costumes are ready and the annual opportunity to go out and harass your neighbors to get candy is once again upon us. Yes, it's time for Halloween. And along with Halloween comes the worry, the concern the fear that in fact, someone will be poisoning my kid’s candy. This is something that has lived with us for decades and we have someone today that will help us investigate this mystery on this episode of Stats and Short Stories with guest Joel Best.
+Full Transcript
John Bailer
The costumes are ready and the annual opportunity to go and harass your neighbors to get candy is once again upon us. Yes, it's time for Halloween. And along with Halloween comes the worry, the concern the fear that in fact someone will be poisoning my kids candy. This is something that has lived with us for decades. I don't know if I remember it in my life but certainly I remember hearing about it when my kids were trick or treating. That is a mystery that has continued. And we have someone today that will help us investigate this mystery. But first, I'm John Bailer. Stats and stories a production of Miami universities, departments of statistics, media, journalism and film as well as the American Statistical Association. And joining me is panelist Rosemary Pennington of the Department of media journalism and film. Our guest today is Joel Best. Best is a professor of sociology and Criminal Justice at the University of Delaware. His writing focuses on understanding how and why we become concerned with particular issues at particular moments in time. And he's written about ways that bad statistics creep into public debates. He's the author of several books on this topic, including damned lies and statistics, untangling numbers from the media, politicians and activists, and stat spotting a field guide to dubious data. Joel, thank you so much for being with us today. So Joel, I, you know, I set it up with the idea of what's gonna go what's gonna be in my kid's bag, you know, am I going to find the poison in their in, you know, in their Pop Tarts? Am I going to find the razor blades that will be in their Snickers bars? How do you know this story? Surfaces all the time. So help us understand when you first encountered this story, and why it keeps popping up every year?
Joel Best
Well, when I was in graduate school, I thought I was going to study deviant behavior. And, you know, one of the things I wound up doing was reading a lot of autobiographies of thieves and drug addicts and so on. And you realize when you read these things, that these people always have reasons. You know, they may not seem like good reasons to you, but they can explain why they did something. And this was at the same time we were getting all these stories, the early 70s was really when this started to take off in the late 60s, early 70s, about contaminated treats. And I found myself talking to friends saying, you know, I don't think that this is real. And they were just outraged. Of course, it's real, you know. And so I, you know, I got through graduate school, and I, you know, sometimes bring this up in class when I was teaching and, you know, I'd say, I don't think this is real, my students would just go berserk. You know, of course, it's real. Everybody knows it's real. And, you know, I thought, how do you prove this? Because you can't prove a negative right. And I eventually settled on a plan. I looked at newspaper coverage in basically the New York Times, The Chicago Tribune in Washington and the Los Angeles Times. And those were the three biggest papers in those days, and in the three biggest markets. And this is, of course, way before the internet. I mean, this is way back. And the New York Times had a terrific index. And no other paper had nearly as good an index. So I wound up actually getting microfilm and I would look at the entire Chicago Tribune and the entire Los Angeles Times for November 1, second and third, going back 25 years, which at that point was I went back to 1958. Okay, and I was looking for cases of reports of contaminated treats. And, you know, I defined a case as it, it told me, where it was like it named a town Miami, Ohio, and it specified what the contamination was, razorblade, Napal something like that. And what you discover is, first of all, there aren't very many of these reports. Okay. Second thing is, nobody got hurt. Okay. There was no case of a child who was killed or seriously injured this way. And I started off now there was a case there, there have been cases of deaths that had been reported. And, there was a guy in Texas, who I think, assuming that he could commit the perfect crime, you know, he was assuming that people were poisoning little kids all the time on Halloween. He took out a life insurance policy on his son, gave His Son poisoned candy, encouraged the kid to eat the candy, and the child died. Okay. He then called the police. And the police blocked this story completely. They said, Oh, my goodness, you know, and they started looking around. And after a couple of days, they realized that nobody else had poison candy. Okay, nobody else had died. The guy had taken out the life insurance policy on his son a couple months earlier. And he had, they had some record of him purchasing poison. And so he was arrested, tried, convicted in this being Texas, he was executed. Okay. Now, you know, a couple things. That story was on the front page or near the front page of, you know, the New York Times, The Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times. So it was a big news story, which was, is a sort of a test if this happened, you know, we'd know about it. And,
you know, but I don't count that because, you know, that's, you know, what are you saying? You don't, you don't worry about whether you're going to poison your kit, you're worried about whether the maniac down the street is going to do it. And there have been a couple of other deaths that have been reported. And then you know, and this would often be toward the front of the paper. And then at the back of the paper on page 83, three days later, would be the news that, no, we discovered that actually, this kid got into his uncle's heroin stash or, you know, something like that. So I can't find any evidence, I couldn't find any evidence. And I have been updating this research every year, since I did in 1983. So each year, I take a few hours, and I now can go on the internet happily, and search for this stuff. And, you know, the answer is still the same. I've got something I don't know. Now, the total is 100. Or some cases of this, I can't find any evidence that you know, anybody's ever killed a child this way. This is a contemporary legend. So I don't have anything to add to that story.
Rosemary Pennington So, if there's no, if there's really no evidence? Of This happening why does it keep being reported on year after year?
Best
Well, it doesn't get reported as something that's happening. Okay. Now, I will tell you that what has really happened is, I mean, the world is changing. And one way it's changing is I've been giving interviews about this since 1985, you know, and the number of interviews has been going down and down and down. And that's because of the reporting staff, and newspapers, it used to be that this was kind of a feature story, Halloween safety, you know, etc. And you know, that reporter would go to LexisNexis. And they discover that I get quoted in all these stories, so they call me up and I give the same interview I've been giving since 1985. That's, that's really toned down these days, would you ever websites, and they just quote me, and they haven't talked to me. They just, they just quote me. The other thing that's happening is that increasingly, the reports of this are on Facebook, you know, because you know, it's very easy to take a candy bar, you stick a nail in it, you take a picture of it with your cell phone, and you say, Look what I found in my treats. And this happened in a I know, it's about 10 miles from here, a little town in Pennsylvania, a few years ago. And, you know, the police got very excited about this. And then they went over and grilled the kids and the kids said, now we faked it. You know, it's, it's it, you know, this is always bogus. So, you know, this, this just isn't isn't a thing. Okay? I don't I can't say I cannot prove a negative. I cannot say that this has never ever happened. But I can say that I can't find any evidence that it's ever happened.
Bailer
Well, that sounds like a good place to bring this to a close. So thank you again, Joel. Stats and Stories is a partnership between Miami University’s Departments of Statistics, and Media, Journalism and Film, and the American Statistical Association. You can follow us on Twitter, Apple podcasts, or other places you can find podcasts. If you’d like to share your thoughts on the program send your email to statsandstories@miamioh.edu or check us out at statsandstories.net, and be sure to listen for future editions of Stats and Stories, where we discuss the statistics behind the stories and the stories behind the statistics.