Police

Tony Timba

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.

police-involved shootings

Police-Involved Shooting, Baltimore July 1, 2020

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,…

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Police, police-involved shootings

Disparities in Police-Involved Shootings by City and County

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…

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Police

Paterson police-involved shooting

In some ways this is a very typical police-involved shooting, not that police-involved shootings are are typical. But it’s all here: a man with a gun, probably mentally disturbed, confronted by police. And not for the first time. The man is white. You hear cops saying, “We can help you.” You also hear the de rigueur,”Drop the fucking gun!” He…

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Police

When fear of being a victim hits home

I saw some tweets from a certain kind of professorial class saying: “COVID fatality rate is now about 125/100K in NYC. So why do people over-react to small rises in the murder rate, which is just 5/100K.”  In high-crime neighborhoods, such as Baltimore’s Eastern and Western Districts, the murder rate is 125 per 100,000 EVERY DAMN year. What I don’t…

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