The recent crime numbers in NYC will soon come out, and they’re not good. Homicides this week are way up compared to last year. Of course that’s just one week… till it’s not. Shootings are up in NYC. Not Baltimore up. But up. People are dying. It is time to ring the alarm. Maybe not the crazy 5-alarm fire for…
Month: May 2015
David Simon and the Code
This interview with David Simonis well worth reading in its entirety. Does he get some things wrong? Sure. Is he a little too believing that cops with the best stories are representative of the entire police department? Sure. (Among other things, drug-free zones were never used to arrest people. Too much paperwork. But that change the horrible concept of a…
Too many? Too few? Or just right?
Arrests are way down in Baltimore. But not just this month (though they are) but over many years. There were 40,000 arrests in 2014 (3,300 a month). In 2003 there were 114,000 arrests. Like I said, arrests are way down. This is worth repeating because it goes against a narrative that the riots were somehow the inevitable result of overaggressive…
Deadliest month in Baltimore. Ever.
The Sun reported that this month has been the fifth deadliest in 40 years. Actually, by rate, since Baltimore has fewer people than it used to have, May has been the most deadly month ever. In number of dead, the deadliest months have been: Aug 1972: 45 Dec 1971: 44 Aug 1990: 42 Aug 1996: 39 May 2015: 42 But…
Meanwhile, roughly 1 in every 250 young black men was shot in Eastern District. Last month!
Maybe you were too busy blocking traffic into the city to notice, but this past weekend 32 people were shot in Baltimore. Nine were killed. (as usual, click to embiggen) This past weekend. In Charm City. With just over 620,000 people. Meanwhile, from April 25 to May 23, this past month, 122 people were shot or killed in Mobtown. Last…
“So what’s the big deal?”
What’s weird, at least to me, is that many (mostly from the political left) seem to dismiss the never-before-seen increase in homicides in Baltimore as just some random uptick. “You know,” I’ve been told (and more than once), “violent crime is up in New York City, too.” Are you fucking crazy?! Homicide in Baltimore is up 250 percent over-fucking-night! And…
Aiming for the legs
Right or wrong, American policing are taught to shoot center mass. And only center mass. The goal is not to kill, though the outcome of center-mass shot is usually death. The goal is to shoot to stop or incapacitate the threat. Once the there is no threat (which often happens before the suspect is killed), you stop shooting. This is…
Murder in Baltimore
With murdered doubled post-riot, you’d think more people would care. I don’t mean people in high-crime neighborhoods in Baltimore, they do care. It’s all those other people who so righteously saw police as the biggest problem in the hood. Where are they, now that the murder rate has doubled? Oh, and how did that “gang truce” work out? Well that…
Baltimore Homicides, pre- and post- riot
After the riots, the daily number of homicides in Baltimore more than doubled from 0.58 to 1.41. That’s a lot more dead people. 0.8 per day. (For those of you not too good with math, that’s almost one a day. And yes, Gotti, I’m looking at you.) Click to embiggen. The trendlines, pre- and post-riots, are in red. [Updated May…
Taking a break
This will be my last post for close to three weeks. I’m heading out of the country (hiking in Greece). The late-breaking news is that six BPD officers have been criminally charged. That’s a lot. This will be a very tough case for the prosecutor to win. The most serious charges need intent (said a law professor I was just…