This is particularly notable because economists are, at heart, statisticians.
Plans were announced to replace its 150 researchers, statisticians and analysts with "robopolling" and online surveys.
The statisticians wanted to know how many prostitutes were needed for a club to be viable.
Instead, BJS activated a kind of sleeper network of crime statisticians in almost every state across the country, who harvested data from police departments but also from coroners' offices and other sources.
The statisticians said the increase in the number of recorded rapes and in sexual offences to 53,559, the highest level recorded, "is thought to reflect a greater willingness of victims to come forward to report such crimes" as well improvements in recording practices.
Hey come in, all you redundant politicians, businessmen, scientists, (particularly forensic, because we all love CSI), bankers, soldiers, statisticians, boiler-makers, dog-trainers, customs officers and police superintendents, and teach classes of 30-plus.
Statisticians at BJS and elsewhere hope that a revolution in crime data collection is now at hand.
The scathing take on the FBI numbers came about as a result of an attempt by statisticians within BJS to evaluate what was worth salvaging in the bureau's arrest-related deaths program.
A National Academy of Sciences panel is studying how to modernize crime statistics, new cooperation has been detected between FBI statisticians and BJS statisticians – and then there was that eyebrow-raising speech at Georgetown by Comey, the FBI director.
It also raises issues over how government statisticians treat targets over which a coalition government has sharp disagreements.
Such people are also likely to be spread over different roles, such as statisticians, bio-chemists, programmers, computer scientists and business analysts.
