Funding things with PERA, building our house upon sand? The Sun screws up the basics of science. The benefits of eliminating the DNA testing backlog.
Funding things with PERA strikes me as the proverbial man who built his house upon sand.
The sun article linked below details a novel way that lawmakers (in the last legislative session) chose to fund Proposition 130.
A quote from the story helps set the stage (and the embedded link will help you if you need a reminder):
"When Colorado voters passed Proposition 130, requiring the state to spend $350 million to support law enforcement, they didn’t give the General Assembly any direction on how the state was supposed to pay for it."
Screenshot 1, from the bill's fiscal note, gives you how PERA comes in to play helping to fund the requirements of Prop 130. I also expanded the screenshot to include how funding now and in the future affects our state's general fund reserve (savings account) just in case you were curious.
In plainer language, they'll take money, park in in PERA's accounts where it earns interest and then siphon off the interest to beef up the fund created in the bill (the fund which pays out claims etc. under Prop 130).
Novel approach. The possible upsides and downsides (at least the ones the reporter thought noteworthy) are in the article if you'd like to read them.
For my part, I have to say that I'm not an expert, but I trust the financial moves PERA makes about as far as I can hoist and throw any randomly-chosen PERA board member. PERA has been crumping for some time now. If they do it without outside money, money we are going to say is to help the families of slain police officers, that strikes me as taking things to a whole new level: whole new vistas of economic damage can be done to entirely new groups!
This is not a gamble, but it sure carries that savor. "I can take the company payroll and double it at the craps table!"
For something as important as retirement obligations and/or payments to help police or their surviving families, I think I'd rather play it safe.
https://coloradosun.com/2025/06/04/pera-colorado-law-enforcement-funding-deal-proposition-130/
The Sun screws up the basics of science
I want to return to the Sun article from the previous post one more time. It's linked first below for convenience.
There is a quote in that article near the top which I want to touch on. It's attached as screenshot 1. I highlight the part I mean with red underlining and, because you can't click a picture, I put the link to the study from the story second below.
First, I want to address an ambiguity in the language. I emailed the reporter to ask whether or not it was him or "lawmakers" (whoever that is, the story didn't offer direct quotes by any individual or group) saying that social services is a "proven crime fighter". I also asked whether it was him or "lawmakers" that put up the study as a link.
I heard back and he told me that it was his words and he was the one who chose the study to link to. Just so you are aware, there is an extensive body of work on this topic (as well as something I've touched on by way of media bias in the past -- see the third link below).
Returning to the study and the claim, I won't go into tremendous detail on the misuse of the word "proven" here by the reporter, save to say that proof and association are two different things.
What the study he links to actually shows, what all the studies I've seen on the topic show, is an association: that is, the likelihood that you will observe a change in one variable when you see a change in another variable. This is not anymore proof that one thing can stop or increase another than saying that the presence of a stone in your front yard keeps tigers from attacking you on the way to your mailbox.
Proof, a causal link is only demonstrable by experiment, experiment with controls (and no, gun violence prevention people, not "synthetic" controls). This is basic science.
The main reason for going into depth on this topic was to highlight another and subtler fault in trying to apply research to the real world. It gives me a chance to share an example with you so you know what to watch for.
One of the things you should ask yourself about any particular bit of research is to ask what was measured and how that measurement affects the relevance of the results.
In looking at the particular study the reporter chose to help demonstrate his point, you note that what the link offers is (quoting the abstract) "9 references useful for understanding the potential of crime prevention through social development [which the authors define as "...interventions designed to remedy criminogenic social conditions such as poverty, inadequate housing, and unhealthy family influences]."
Again, hardly "proof", but nonetheless, what the authors have on offer is spelled out in more detail in screenshot 2 attached, a copy of the entire abstract.
Look at what I boxed in red. I am not sure if all 9 references are from international studies, but it seems a goodly amount of what the authors base their claims on are from international studies from countries like Japan, Canada, France.
This, as long as you remember to stay within the boundaries of knowing what an association can tell you, is not necessarily a problem in and of itself.
It becomes a problem when you try to expand from those populations into others. Research, social science research in particular, is quite specific. The conclusions you can make are bound by which populations or groups or situations you choose to measure. Think about it: simply going from one culture to another can introduce a wholly unknown (and unaccounted for) set of variables into the equation.
To give a more concrete example, imagine that I found that there was an association between eating pork and breast cancer in middle-aged women (there isn't, this is a hypothetical). The more pork a middle aged woman consumes, the greater her risk for breast cancer.
It would be preposterous for me to then turn around and say that eating pork is a "proven" cause of cancer for Americans. That's jumping well beyond the specific measurement made in the study.
This is what the reporter here does: he uses foreign associations to make conclusions about America. It may indeed be that having social services can reduce crime (I suspect that it may help, can't hurt), but the reporter here is making multiple errors in the basics of science and research in his claim.
If you see big claims made by anyone, you should be skeptical. The first thing to do when this happens is to ask for the research to back the claim. When you have it, ask what is measured and look specifically at the population or situation studied. Ask whether or not the claim made would fit within that population or situation.
If it does not, the claim is not valid on its face.
https://coloradosun.com/2025/06/04/pera-colorado-law-enforcement-funding-deal-proposition-130/
The benefits of eliminating the DNA testing backlog.
I once read something about an economist who worked for RAND. His job was to tally up the deaths from a nuclear exchange with what was then the Soviet Union. I've not seen the full details of the calculation, but from some of the terms used to describe the work, I gather it was a typical modeling scenario in which various estimated parameters ("clobber factor" being one which put a number to estimate the probability that any given bomber would hit a mountain on its way in to its target) are used to calculate a result.**
The reason for starting in such a roundabout way in a post that will (eventually) be about a DNA backlog on rape kits in Colorado, is because the Common Sense Institutes' study (linked below) struck me as similar, albeit far less ghoulish.
What I mean is that it is the techniques of economics applied to something where decisions are not made on a purely rational basis.
The study itself looks at the current state of the DNA testing backlog our state has. The numbers of kits awaiting testing are graphed and I put a copy of that graph at the head of this post. My God. I don't think I realized we were that far behind.
The authors go on to estimate a cost (and a savings we'd realize) by knocking down this backlog. I don't doubt that this is the case.
I'm not saying that either the authors or anyone at CSI feels this way, but my own thoughts are that regardless of the cost (or economic benefits) we have a moral obligation to clear this backlog as soon as possible.
Beyond dollars and cents, we have an obligation to potential victims, to justice, and to the actual victims to get offenders caught and put in jail.
Let's hope that the Colorado Bureau of Investigation puts the money they got in this last legislative session to good use and makes solid DNA evidence to get offenders off the street.
**The scale of the deaths was big enough that the researcher coined a new term. In order to keep the number of dead friendlier, he coined the term "Megadeath" meaning one million deaths. If you're familiar, this was also the inspiration for the name of the heavy metal band Megadeth.
I've seen some pea-under-the-cup shell games in my time, but this scheme to use PERA as a crutch to technically fund the $350 million Proposition 130 by assuming PERA is a reliable grab bag of ever-increasing asset value takes the cake. PERA's cute multi-colored benefit warning stoplight instituted for the easy comprehension by its retirees should be blinking brilliant red! If I were a state employee or retiree somebody is after your retirement security and their hide-out is at 200 East Colfax Avenue in Denver, Colorado.
And, by the way, building a house founded on sand is far preferable to building it on swelling clay which the state legislature is doing with the PERA trust fund. If this proposition 130 scheme appears to temporarily work, PERA will likely be tabbed to help fund other progressive social dreams.