This is Part Two. Part One is here. Jill Lepore has an article in the New Yorker about the invention of police that somehow manages to sidestep every thing I know about the history of police. I know a little about the history police history. Much more, I suspect, than Jill Lepore. I discussed a key problem of Lepore’s perspective…
This is Part One of Two. There’s so much Jill Lepore gets wrong in her New Yorker article “The Invention of the Police.” The spoiler is in the subtitle: “Why did American policing get so big, so fast? The answer, mainly, is slavery.” She seems to ignores the actual history of police in America, but I’ll get to that in…
[Warning, this is a whole lot of nothing-burger in the end. But still, for those interesting in crime data, it might be worth reading.] Shootings are up so much in NYC that social scientists are left accusing the NYPD of “juking” the stats. Now I’ve been using NYPD data for a long time and compared to, well, every other source…
Betteridge’s law of headlines states: “Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.” I hope I’m wrong and Betteridge is right. This piece of mine was in the Daily News. Violence in New York is up. If you ask the NYPD, the 30-year New York City crime decline is over. Police have been…
I just want to put this out here so *I* don’t forget. I somehow hadn’t heard of Tony Timba until like two weeks ago. This is an egregious Floyd like case of a man killed by cops. But only Floyd, here there was also a cover up and there was no accountability. Cops did nothing wrong, they say. I disagree.
In some ways this is yet another too typical police-involved shooting (not that police-involved shootings are typical — these kind of calls get handled in the thousands “without incident”). But it’s all here: a man with a gun, mentally disturbed, confronted by police. And not for the first time. The man is black, unlike the previous one I wrote about,…
So I’ve done a little work using the data from FatalEncounters.org on people shot and killed by police. Fatal Encounters is like the Washington Post database, but for adults. I combined/merged this with a city or police department’s population, number of cops, average number of murders in the jurisdiction (over 4 or 3 years), median household income, percentage Black, and…