Topic: Criminology

A look back at the 1990s "super predator" scare illustrates how social scientists and criminologists can misinterpret data to create damaging public alarms. The segment suggests that the same "ivory tower" academics who got the youth violence wave wrong are now crafting the propaganda found in modern museums. This serves as a cautionary tale about trusting academic narratives that claim to be based on objective data.

Political scientist John Diulio and criminologist James Fox are identified as the architects of the "super predator" theory based on flawed statistical models from the mid-1990s. These predictions of a "bloodball of teenage violence" are compared to modern COVID-19 modeling, noting how small errors in data input lead to massive policy shifts.