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  • Disparities in Police-Involved Shootings by City and County

    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 percentage Latino/Hispanic. The dataset includes every city/town where cops killed somebody between 2015-2019 and also every city above 100,000 population. I end up with 2,872 cases.

    I also looked at counties, which nobody has ever seem to have done before. If you live in a state like Maryland, Texas, California or Arizona, you probably know that county police of sheriff can be the major police department. Some of the counties are huge, and their very existence is seemingly noticed by research despite the fact that there are 88 county police departments that have jurisdictions of more than 100,000 people. The police departments of 20 counties police more than 500,000 people. County data is tricky. So take this with grain of salt. Population (the denominator is the rate) is based not on the entire county but on the population policed by the department. It could be wrong (corrections welcome). And I tried to exclude jail operations from cop population (by taking only sworn officers).

    LA County Sheriff’s Department kills an average of 12 people a year (2015-2019). That’s a lot. Their rate is 11 per million population (if my population figures are correct, which is tricky for county police and overlapping jurisdictions). The rate for Los Angeles City Police Department is 4.2. The national average is about 3. Riverside County and San Bernardino Counties also have very high rates. Riverside County is 32 per million, the highest in the nation. But that is only if Riverside County Sheriff’s Department polices but 180,000 people (which is the population of Riverside County minus the cities that have their own police department… but maybe that’s not a good way to figure it out; the population of Riverside County is 2.4 million). Either way, 1,795 cops killing 5.8 people a year over 5 years is a lot. That’s 1 killing for every 310 cops. In NYC, the comparable figure is 1 killing for every 4,605 cops.

    The Bernalillo County Sheriff’s department (Albuquerque) has a rate of nearly 20 (per million). Three-hundred Sheriff Deputies killed 10 people over 5 years. That’s a lot. Could be bad luck. Could be unfortunate but necessary shootings in cases for which there was no less-lethal alternative. But if the NYPD killed two people for every 300 cops, it would be over 200 police-involved shooting deaths a year in NYC. Last year in NYC police shot 15 people and killed 5.

    Other county sheriff departments in which there aren’t that many cops and kind of a lot of people killed are Spokane WA, Pierce WA, Clark WA, Volusia FL, and Lexington SC, King WA, and Greenville SC

    Riverside County CA and Bernalillo County NM are interesting because the largest city police departments in their county (Riverside City and Albuquerque, respectively) also shoot a lot of people (but not nearly at such a high rate). Here are the cities of over 100,000 population with the highest rate of people shot and killed by police.

    Every single city on this list is west of the Mississippi (or in Florida). Every single one. The mean rate for cities in eastern states is 3.8. If you take Florida out of the east, the mean goes down to 3.5. For cities in western states, the mean rate is 5.4. That’s a big difference. (The median is 3.2 and and 4.2.) And whatever real differences account for the arbitrary geographic difference, there are many department in cities over 100,000 that shot and killed few few people from 2015-2019, or at a rate less than the national average: Plano TX, Irvine CA, Fairfield CA, Grand Prarie TX, Pasadnia CA, Mesquite TX. Were they just lucky? Or were they doing something right. Or maybe both.

    Maybe population greater than 100,000 isn’t the right cut off. The top cities just make the greater than 100,000 list. The total n (for 5 years) is between 8 and 35. So a little good or bad luck can affect the rate a lot. But still, a lot of shooting goes on in cities of this size. Also, the murder rate is high in a lot of these cities… but not all of them. And the murder rate is also high in Birmingham, Baltimore, New Orleans, Jackson, and Detroit, and they’re not on the list. And a lot of cities that are on this list have very few black people (Las Cruces, Pueblo, Westminster, Billings, Albuquerque, Tucson, Spokane, Salt Lake City).

    Once you start getting into larger cities, I should look not only at places where cops shoot a lot, but also at places where cops shoot very little. Sure, since shootings are rare, at might just be luck. But it might be police departments are doing something right.

    Thirty-one cities have rates under 1 per million. All but 4 have fewer than 200,000 people. So maybe they’re lucky. Irvine California is on the list. But hey, Irvine is rich. But what about Hialeah FL? Or Lexington KY? Or Lubbock TX? Zero fatalities all. What about New York City? 8.5 million people. And a rate of 0.89, less than a third the national average? That’s not an accident. That’s policy, training, and leadership. Why not learn from the cities doing it right?

    Βetter cities (rate < 1.5 / million, half the national average) in the 200,000 to 300,000 range (n = 52), include Lubbock, Hialeah, and Greensboro. They aren’t rich. (Irvine, Oxnard, Glendale, Plano, and Jersey City are also on the good list.) In the most-shooting category (rate > 10 / million, 3 times the national average) are Orlando, Baton Rouge, Tacoma, Spokane, Salt Lake City, Birmingham AL, Richmond VA, and Modesto CA. These are mostly middle income places with a wide variety of racial demographics.

    In the 300,000 to 500,000 category (n=29), only Lexington KY and Raleigh NC stand out as better than average (rate < 2). Though Virginia Beach, Minneapolis, Pittsburgh have rates < 4. On the high end (rate > 10) are Miami, Bakersfield, Tulsa, and St. Louis. St. Louis tops the chart at a whopping rate of 22.2 / million. Though St. Louis has a terribly high murder rate of 60 (per 100,000). Though New Orleans has a high murder rate of 39,000 and a cop-involved killing rate of (just?) 4.5 per million. (The US murder rate is about 5 per 100,000.)

    Above half a million population, the range in rates of killed by police goes from above 8 in Albuquerque, Tucson, Denver, Mesa, Oklahoma City down to New York City with a rate of 0.89. Nothing comes close. Nashville, Philadelphia, Boston and San Diego have annual rates between 2 and 3 per million.

    (Note I’ve changed the scale from the above charts. The x axis went to 30. Now it’s 14.)

    Keep in mind there are hundreds of smaller cities and counties between Albuquerque and New York City. But the disparity between cities at the top and bottom of the list! It’s immense. And nobody sees to be able to look up from the latest outrage and ask, why?

    So let’s give credit where it is due. By my figuring these departments all have killing rates under 1 per million (and serve populations over 180,000. If my data is correct, which it may not be). Their success should be applauded and emulated:

    Travis County Sheriff’s Office
    Montgomery County Department of Police
    New Castle County Police Department
    Gwinnett County Police Department
    Loudoun County Sheriff’s Office
    Chesterfield County Police Department
    Prince William County Police Department
    Santa Clara County Sheriff’s Office
    Fairfax County Police Department
    Monroe County Sheriff’s Office
    Arlington County Police Department
    Macomb County Sheriff’s Office
    Oxnard Police Department
    New York City Police Department
    Lubbock Police Department
    Lexington Police Department

    For those who understand such things, I also ran this regression for cities > 100,000. Dependent variable being the rate of police killings and independent variables being median household income, percentage black, murder rate, cops per capita and Hispanic/Latino percentage. Income matters (not a surprise). So does murder rate (obviously). But the negative correlation with Black percentage is of note. I was not expecting the lack of correlation with Hispanic/Latino percentage. My knowledge of advanced statistics doesn’t get much advanced that this, alas.

    And this is all subject to errors and corrections. This a blog. Not a peer-review article. Leave a comment or better yet email me. Or twitter @petermoskos

    Methods and sources:

    Fatal Encounters. https://fatalencounters.org/
    Population and police numbers mostly from here: https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2018/crime-in-the-u.s.-2018/tables/table-78/table-78.xls/view.
    City murder number I mostly keep track of. But through 2018 from this kind of source: https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2016/crime-in-the-u.s.-2016/tables/table-6/table-6.xls/view
    Other number from wikipedia and police department websites.
    And here: https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/US/

    Killed by police data is from https://fatalencounters.org/. I gave $100; you should give few bucks, too. This is really important data, and it’s all the work of one guy. Plus he puts the format of the Washington Post’s gathering of similar data to shame.

    Then I filtered for intentional gun killings for each city, county, and police agency. From this I created a data set (one row) for each city, county, and/or agency. County data is tricky. Best I could, I figured out the population policed by large police agencies. But it’s not an exact science. (Basically take a county and subtract the cities and towns that have their own police.) There’s a lot of overlapping jurisdiction. There’s also the issue that a lot of sheriff department are responsible for jails, and I tried to exclude correctional officers (by leaving out non-sworn employees). But then in the end it turns out the number of cops per capita seems to not be that revealing, other than being correlated with murders per capita (yes, cities with more murders have more cops, presumable in that direction of causality).

    It’s also likely that some of the counties shouldn’t be included because their work is limited to courts and jails. Some of the police in these counties probably aren’t doing active policing, and hence shoot nobody. Also, murder data is probably accurate, because it comes from county departments reporting. And departments don’t generally claim other people’s murders. And some county department just don’t report any data. So some of the rates may be wrong. Long way of saying take county data with a grain of salt. But it’s still worth looking at.

    [Update] Here are the rates for every city in America with more than 200,00 people. Because somebody asked requested. This is the annual rate of people shot and killed by cops (2015-2019) in this city. Rate per million.

    Here’s county data. (Sorted by state, then city). Here I am including more data because I’m not confident about these rates. What is correct is the number of people killed by the agency in 5 years (Avg1yrKillAgcy). I’m not certain about the rate (KillMilAgcy) because I’m not certain about the population policed (Or the number of cops). If you know better, let me know.

    2020 caveat.

    Here’s some fancier statistical regression courtesy of Professor Gabriel Rossman. This is a work in progress.

    I think we get a few things from the Poisson:

    1. The satisfaction that it’s done right, or at least that it’s less wrong.
    2. Cops/1000 population is now significant. Given that the specification is technically better, as in the data better fit the model’s assumptions, you can probably trust this, or at least trust it at least as much as you could the OLS of rates
    3. You no longer need to worry about small n and zeroes biasing the models which means that even with a rare event you can include small cases. You no longer need to drop Mayberry from the dataset though obviously data cleaning is a pain with a bunch of small towns.

    12/7/2020 KillMilCity and KillMilAgcy are deaths as police homicides per million population.

    cops <- read_csv(file = "moskos_copshootings.csv")
    ## Parsed with column specification:
## cols(
##   .default = col_double(),
##   citystate = col_character(),
##   statecity = col_character(),
##   statecounty = col_character(),
##   state = col_character(),
##   agcy = col_character()
## )
    ## See spec(...) for full column specifications.
    glimpse(cops)
    ## Rows: 166
## Columns: 30
## $ citystate         <chr> "Kansas City KS", "Escondido CA", "Pomona CA", "S...
## $ statecity         <chr> "KS Kansas City", "CA Escondido", "CA Pomona", "M...
## $ murder1Avg        <dbl> 6.50, 4.50, 14.25, 15.00, 6.66, 1.25, 14.25, 4.00...
## $ statecounty       <chr> "KS Wyandotte", "CA San Diego", "CA Los Angeles",...
## $ FlagCityCounty    <dbl> 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0...
## $ spendCapita       <dbl> NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, N...
## $ Population        <dbl> 152958, 153073, 153496, 155179, 155503, 155637, 1...
## $ cop1K             <dbl> 2.4516534, 1.0125888, 0.9511649, 3.1511996, 1.929...
## $ Mur100K           <dbl> 4.2495326, 2.9397738, 9.2836295, 9.6662564, 4.282...
## $ BlkPer            <dbl> 23.5, 2.4, 6.0, 20.9, 18.0, 1.7, 24.1, 1.4, 1.3, ...
## $ HisPer            <dbl> 29.9, 51.9, 71.5, 44.7, 37.5, 17.3, 11.5, 23.1, 7...
## $ IncMedHouse       <dbl> 43573, 62319, 55115, 36730, 51917, 131791, 53007,...
## $ KillMilCity       <dbl> 9.152839, 1.306566, 5.211862, 0.000000, 3.858446,...
## $ KillMilAgcy       <dbl> 7.845291, 1.306566, 2.605931, 0.000000, 2.572298,...
## $ state             <chr> "KS", "CA", "CA", "MA", "FL", "CA", "TN", "CO", "...
## $ EastWest          <dbl> 2, 2, 2, 1, 1, 2, 1, 2, 2, 1, 1, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 1...
## $ agcy              <chr> "Kansas City Police Department", "Escondido Polic...
## $ Cops              <dbl> 375, 155, 146, 489, 300, 217, 278, 285, 151, 340,...
## $ countCity         <dbl> 7, 1, 4, 0, 3, 4, 3, 8, 2, 4, 1, 3, 6, 9, 1, 2, 1...
## $ killedByAgency5Yr <dbl> 6, 1, 2, 0, 2, 4, 2, 7, 2, 4, 2, 3, 4, 9, 0, 1, 1...
## $ CopsKill1Yr       <dbl> 0.003200000, 0.001290323, 0.002739726, 0.00000000...
## $ CopsKill20Yr      <dbl> 0.06400000, 0.02580645, 0.05479452, 0.00000000, 0...
## $ Murder4yrTotal    <dbl> 26, 18, 57, 60, NA, 5, 57, 16, 113, 244, 21, 32, ...
## $ LEO               <dbl> NA, 209, 269, NA, 394, 282, 342, 409, 204, NA, 40...
## $ Civs              <dbl> NA, 54, 123, NA, 94, 65, 64, 124, 53, 250, 88, 11...
## $ unique            <dbl> 26448, 19403, 24380, NA, 26303, 350, 25627, 27185...
## $ zip               <dbl> 66111, 92027, 91768, NA, 33024, 94089, 37042, 802...
## $ lat               <dbl> 39.11662, 33.14459, 34.05056, NA, 26.02650, 37.39...
## $ long              <dbl> -94.81942, -117.03364, -117.82068, NA, -80.22943,...
## $ `filter_$`        <dbl> 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0...

    Replicate post

    Reasonably good match for Moskos’s 7/5/2020 blog post but numbers aren’t exact. Perhaps it’s minimum population of 100,000 (blog) vs 150,000 (this notebook). Alternately may be a counties issue.

    summary(lm(data=cops,KillMilCity~IncMedHouse+ BlkPer + Mur100K + cop1K + HisPer))
    ## 
## Call:
## lm(formula = KillMilCity ~ IncMedHouse + BlkPer + Mur100K + cop1K + 
##     HisPer, data = cops)
## 
## Residuals:
##     Min      1Q  Median      3Q     Max 
## -6.3049 -1.6853 -0.1688  1.5078  9.7141 
## 
## Coefficients:
##               Estimate Std. Error t value Pr(>|t|)    
## (Intercept)  8.333e+00  1.347e+00   6.185 5.05e-09 ***
## IncMedHouse -4.975e-05  1.434e-05  -3.469 0.000673 ***
## BlkPer      -1.288e-01  2.242e-02  -5.742 4.61e-08 ***
## Mur100K      2.752e-01  3.707e-02   7.423 6.53e-12 ***
## cop1K       -2.078e-02  3.636e-01  -0.057 0.954492    
## HisPer      -1.659e-02  1.220e-02  -1.360 0.175703    
## ---
## Signif. codes:  0 '***' 0.001 '**' 0.01 '*' 0.05 '.' 0.1 ' ' 1
## 
## Residual standard error: 2.782 on 159 degrees of freedom
##   (1 observation deleted due to missingness)
## Multiple R-squared:  0.3511, Adjusted R-squared:  0.3307 
## F-statistic: 17.21 on 5 and 159 DF,  p-value: 1.368e-13
    cops %>% ggplot(aes(x=KillMilAgcy)) + geom_histogram() + labs(x='Police Homicides Per Million Population', caption='Agency, not city')
    ## `stat_bin()` using `bins = 30`. Pick better value with `binwidth`.
    cops %>% ggplot(aes(x=killedByAgency5Yr)) + geom_histogram() + labs(x='Police Homicides Over 5 Years, Raw Count', caption='Agency, not city')
    ## `stat_bin()` using `bins = 30`. Pick better value with `binwidth`.
    cops %>% ggplot((aes(x=cop1K,y=killedByAgency5Yr,size=Population))) + 
  geom_point() +
  labs(x='Number of Cops / 1000 Population',y='Police Homicides Over 5 Years, Raw Count')
    cops %>% ggplot((aes(x=Population,y=cop1K))) + 
  geom_point() +
  labs(x='Population',y='Number of Cops / 1000 Population')

    Poisson

    Because police homicides are events, they can be modeled with a count model. Assuming the events are independent net of observables, a Poisson is appropriate. This seems consistent with the histogram. If the histogram were much more right-skewed or if there were strong theoretical reasons to think police homicides were not independent, then a negative binomial could be appropriate.

    Because cities/ agency jurisdictions vary wildly in size, it’s best to include population as an offset to model the different exposure. That is, more people means more people at risk of getting shot by cops and the model accounts for that.

    Compared to the OLS analysis of rates, the Poisson analysis of counts is similar but now everything is significant, including number of cops and percent Latino, both of which are negatively associated with the counts of police homicides.

    summary(glm(killedByAgency5Yr~IncMedHouse+ BlkPer + Mur100K + cop1K + HisPer + offset(log(Population)),
            data=cops,family="poisson"))
    ## 
## Call:
## glm(formula = killedByAgency5Yr ~ IncMedHouse + BlkPer + Mur100K + 
##     cop1K + HisPer + offset(log(Population)), family = "poisson", 
##     data = cops)
## 
## Deviance Residuals: 
##     Min       1Q   Median       3Q      Max  
## -3.9061  -1.2174  -0.1628   0.9152   3.3863  
## 
## Coefficients:
##               Estimate Std. Error z value Pr(>|z|)    
## (Intercept) -9.609e+00  1.748e-01 -54.973  < 2e-16 ***
## IncMedHouse -1.068e-05  2.140e-06  -4.993 5.95e-07 ***
## BlkPer      -2.789e-02  3.018e-03  -9.242  < 2e-16 ***
## Mur100K      5.070e-02  3.583e-03  14.149  < 2e-16 ***
## cop1K       -2.050e-01  3.459e-02  -5.926 3.10e-09 ***
## HisPer      -5.088e-03  1.536e-03  -3.312 0.000925 ***
## ---
## Signif. codes:  0 '***' 0.001 '**' 0.01 '*' 0.05 '.' 0.1 ' ' 1
## 
## (Dispersion parameter for poisson family taken to be 1)
## 
##     Null deviance: 654.06  on 164  degrees of freedom
## Residual deviance: 369.63  on 159  degrees of freedom
##   (1 observation deleted due to missingness)
## AIC: 960.63
## 
## Number of Fisher Scoring iterations: 4

    Percent Black vs Murder Rate

    There is a 0.772 correlation between % black and the murder rate, which suggests possible collinearity. As such,

    Note that the murder only version has a lower AIC so if forced to choose that’s the better model. Also note that when only one at a time is included, murder remains positive and black remains negative. Whatever is driving the murder and black effects, it is not collinearity.

    cops %>% ggplot((aes(x=BlkPer,y=Mur100K,size=Population))) + 
  geom_point() +
    labs(x='Percent Black',y='Murders per 100,000')
    ## Warning: Removed 1 rows containing missing values (geom_point).
    cops %>% ggplot((aes(x=Mur100K,y=killedByAgency5Yr,size=Population))) + 
  geom_point() +
  labs(x='Murder Rate',y='Police Homicides, Raw Count')
    ## Warning: Removed 1 rows containing missing values (geom_point).
    cops %>% ggplot((aes(x=BlkPer,y=killedByAgency5Yr,size=Population))) + 
  geom_point() +
  labs(x='% Black',y='Police Homicides, Raw Count')
    summary(glm(killedByAgency5Yr~IncMedHouse+ Mur100K + cop1K + HisPer + offset(log(Population)),
            data=cops,family="poisson"))
    ## 
## Call:
## glm(formula = killedByAgency5Yr ~ IncMedHouse + Mur100K + cop1K + 
##     HisPer + offset(log(Population)), family = "poisson", data = cops)
## 
## Deviance Residuals: 
##    Min      1Q  Median      3Q     Max  
## -4.068  -1.450  -0.369   1.020   4.553  
## 
## Coefficients:
##               Estimate Std. Error z value Pr(>|z|)    
## (Intercept) -1.015e+01  1.696e-01 -59.874   <2e-16 ***
## IncMedHouse -5.010e-06  2.025e-06  -2.474   0.0134 *  
## Mur100K      3.071e-02  3.195e-03   9.612   <2e-16 ***
## cop1K       -3.397e-01  3.132e-02 -10.846   <2e-16 ***
## HisPer       1.663e-03  1.378e-03   1.207   0.2274    
## ---
## Signif. codes:  0 '***' 0.001 '**' 0.01 '*' 0.05 '.' 0.1 ' ' 1
## 
## (Dispersion parameter for poisson family taken to be 1)
## 
##     Null deviance: 654.06  on 164  degrees of freedom
## Residual deviance: 458.59  on 160  degrees of freedom
##   (1 observation deleted due to missingness)
## AIC: 1047.6
## 
## Number of Fisher Scoring iterations: 5
    summary(glm(killedByAgency5Yr~IncMedHouse+ BlkPer + cop1K + HisPer + offset(log(Population)),
            data=cops,family="poisson"))
    ## 
## Call:
## glm(formula = killedByAgency5Yr ~ IncMedHouse + BlkPer + cop1K + 
##     HisPer + offset(log(Population)), family = "poisson", data = cops)
## 
## Deviance Residuals: 
##     Min       1Q   Median       3Q      Max  
## -7.4545  -1.3608  -0.2578   1.0028   7.3989  
## 
## Coefficients:
##               Estimate Std. Error z value Pr(>|z|)    
## (Intercept) -9.177e+00  1.750e-01 -52.428  < 2e-16 ***
## IncMedHouse -1.642e-05  2.183e-06  -7.524 5.33e-14 ***
## BlkPer      -6.959e-03  2.518e-03  -2.764  0.00572 ** 
## cop1K       -1.973e-01  3.238e-02  -6.094 1.10e-09 ***
## HisPer      -4.604e-03  1.548e-03  -2.973  0.00295 ** 
## ---
## Signif. codes:  0 '***' 0.001 '**' 0.01 '*' 0.05 '.' 0.1 ' ' 1
## 
## (Dispersion parameter for poisson family taken to be 1)
## 
##     Null deviance: 654.55  on 165  degrees of freedom
## Residual deviance: 533.19  on 161  degrees of freedom
## AIC: 1125.7
## 
## Number of Fisher Scoring iterations: 5
  • Paterson police-involved shooting

    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 does not drop the gun. He raises the gun, not at first to a shooting position. He isn’t shot. Five seconds latter he lowers the gun barrel just a smidge. A cop fires. Then a barrage of gunfire is heard. That could be contagion shooting or in response to man seemingly trying to take a shooting stance. Many bullets strike him. He is dead.

    What makes this post-worthy is that there are at least 3 cellphone videos I’ve seen of the incident, and all of pretty good quality. Also, the area, despite the man who was shot being white, seems to be black.

    Here’s a transcript from the video that I put together:

    Man #1: I would have been shot, that nigga, man.

    Woman #1: Watch that bitch on side.

    Man #1: Hey, yo, kill that nigga.

    Woman #2: [exasperated] Come on.

    Man #1: If he was black I would’ve been shot, that nigga, man.

    Woman #1: They’d a-bin shot.

    Police: Drop it. I’m not fucking, drop the fucking gun.

    Woman #1: Oh, my god

    Police: Drop the gun. You gotta help me out.

    Woman #1: Drop the gun

    Man #1: Yo, if he was black, I would’ve been shot him, man.

    Man #2: He up that gun, they gonna shoot him.

    Man #1: He did up it already.

    Woman #2: They’re going to light his ass up, if he shoot.

    Man #2: Nigga still doing something.

    Man #1: Light his ass up!

    Man #2: Cause he not putting the gun down.

    Man #1: If he was black I would’ve been [unintelligible]

    Woman #2: But I’m saying, if he shoot.

    Man #2: He not putting the gun down.

    Man #1: But but but, I’m up top, nigga.

    Woman #2: Hell no, he ain’t putting it down. He had an opportunity the first fucking call.

    Man #1: Light his ass up.

    Woman #2: He like, “hell, no.”

    Man #2: They got all right to shoot him. He ain’t putting the gun down.

    Man #1: He standing his ground, man

    Man #2: Once he raises it they gonna shoot him.

    Woman #2: He raise it…

    Man #2: Once he raises it they gonna shoot him. They got all right to shoot.

    [GUNSHOTS]

    Others: Oh!

    Man #1: They done him!

    Others: Oh, my God.

    Man #1: BYE, BYE! BYE, BYE!

    Others: I told you they…

    The crowd’s combination of spectator sport, sporting commentary, fatalism, blood-lust (Man #1, below, makes me think of how crowds must have been like at death matches in the Roman Colosseum), and actually quite astute legal analysis on whether the shooting is legally justified before it happens. Man #2 says exactly when “They got all right to shoot him.”

    One person warns the to-be-shot guy about a cop approaching. Another person wants nobody shot. A third person wants him shot. A fourth is calling the shooting justified before it happens. It really does cover all the bases. And all this in one scene of less than 60 seconds.

    It’s worth watching the video just for the crowd
    commentary. Depends on what kind of neighborhood you live in, you might
    be surprised. One rarely gets this sense of scene (mise-en-scène, if I may)in post-shooting analysis. But here you have it. American 2020, in the midst of the Coronavirus.

     

    I do feel bad A) for cops who have to deal with and armed man and end up killing him and B) also for a man who was killed, probably while in state of mental crisis.

    But consider being a cop and having this running commentary in the background. Calling out the position of cops places everybody in greater danger. People shouting “shoot him” does not make the job easier nor the shooting less likely. Also, if gun shots are about to fly, sound advice is get out of the line of sight. But who am I to judge? Policing in this kind of neighborhood is different. So is living there. And people forget these facts.

    Of note: A woman officer jumps out of cover to tell an approaching motorist to back up. She may have saved a life. They were all brave. She should get a special medal just for that.

    The gun in the lowered position. At 0:57
    Gun is raised at 1:03

    The gun is in the raised position from 0:58 to 1:03 in the video. My Monday-morning-quarterbacking opinion is police should have shot him at 0:58, when he raised the gun. But I wasn’t there.At that moment no officer felt it was a threat. Maybe the barrel of the gun was pointed elsewhere as it was raised. Who am I to judge? Regardless of my opinion, police hold their fire for another 5 seconds.Kudos? Maybe. But I’m glad nobody else got shot. Given how this situation ended up being resolved, lethally, I see it as a dangerous delay, at least in hindsight. 

    When I first watched the video I thought, “how odd they didn’t shoot him when he raised his gun and then did shoot him 5 seconds later as he stood still.” Even I missed this: he didn’t stand still. Cops on the scene would see this. Bystanders and those watching the video in real time would not. 

    Because of the threat, tunnel vision and heightened senses kick in for the officers. At 1:03, the man lowers the barrel of the gun, just a bit (3A-3D, below). Only then is the first shot fired. (The first cop to shoot is off-screen to the left. You don’t see him in these pictures). Here is a frame-by-frame at the moment of shooting. 

    That little movement (3A-3D) is the difference between life and death. Both for him and, potentially, police officers. Because once that barrel points towards you, you could be dead. And as a police officer, I wouldn’t take that chance. And I won’t ask other to take it, either.

    1
    2
    3A
    3B
    3C
    3D
    4
    5
    6

    Then there is what sounds like the predictable contagion fire. Except notice the stance the guy takes after being shot (4). Whether this is a reflex reaction to being shot or his desire to take a few cops out, I don’t know. Either way it’s a shooting stance. And he gets lit up.

    Had the victim been black, given the video, this would be
    bigger news. So far this incident is just in the local press. And there
    it probably will remain. Which is fine. (And a pretty good account here;
    local press is often better than the Big Boys on police-involved
    shootings, because they report just what happened without running it
    through the politically-correct filter that fancy journalists seemed to have learned in “J-school”).

    Because the victim of the shooting is not black, by taking race
    out of the equation it makes it easier to analyze this
    shooting objectively. Not that the bystanders do. There’s something
    tragically ironic about one woman, right before the man is killed saying
    “Boy, if he was black…”. Turns out white people get shot by police, too.

    [Linguistically, not that you asked, I’m fascinating with this sentence from Man #1: “Yo, if he was black, I would’ve been shot him, man.” “Would have been shot him.” Is he saying “Were the guy black, he would have been shot” or “I would
    have shot him, if he were black”? It’s the “him” at the end that throws
    me. “…[were I] him” or “I would [shoot] him”? Sorry, I do think about
    things like this.]

    Update. This comment from twitterexpressed something I wanted to say but couldn’t figure out how to say:

    Another thing the video shows is the constant trauma in poorer communities. It shouldn’t be a thing where people are at a stand off and someone is video taping not worried about being shot. Or you don’t run or drop to the ground once shooting starts.

    Post Script: If you’re interested in this kind of deep description of policing, see my description of the 2016 fatal Chicago police-involved shooting of Paul O’Neal. I also wrote described in great detail the 2015 arrest of Sandra Bland. And, as always, there is my book about policing in Baltimore, Cop in the Hood.

  • 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 hear from academics right now about a Coronavirus death rate of 125 per 100,000 — the same ones who are dismissive of rising crime and murder in high-crime neighborhood — here’s what I don’t hear: “It’s just a blip. Don’t over-react. Besides, virus deaths are actually way down, compared to 1918.”

    There’s a certain irony because the Coronavirus really is a blip! And it really isn’t as bad as it was in 1918. And yet that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t react. Hell, even error on the side of over-reaction. Maybe understand there actually is a balance between civil liberties and public safety. After all, lives are at stake! Or maybe I should say our lives are at stake.



    Public-health professionals like to emphasize the virus-like transmission of violence. Violence isn’t a virus. Still, look how people will change their lives when they’re the ones at risk. But when other people, black people I need to point out, are victimized or murdered at similar rates, by criminals? Meh. A see a lot of white people at anti-police rallies shouting: “Depolice! Decolonize!” 

      

    But that fear you have of being a victim of the Coronavirus? The feeling of helplessness and despair and even death? What keeps you from leaving your house? For those who live in fear of crime, who those who live on the same block as violent criminals, that’s what life is like all the time.  

    Of course I need to point out that deaths from the virus are still happening, so the rate of death this year, at least in places hard hit, like where I live, will be very high. 

      

    We actually know so much more about violence than the virus. Violence, just
    from policing alone, is actually not that hard to reduce when there are resources and political will. 

    The
    virus will, presumably, at some point, be history. And violence will
    still be with us. But not all of us. Just some of us. And too many
    people, educated people, not only won’t care, but will advocate for policies and policing
    that make violence worse.

  • Murdered in the Park

    Murdered in the Park

    Just last month, I swear I told my class, “People won’t talk about crime until a cute white girl gets murdered.” Tessa Majors, unfortunately, is that woman. Would her murder be getting as much press if she had been black? I doubt it. But who knows? Turns out not a lot college students of any race get robbed and killed. But that’s not what I’m going to write about.

    Nor am I going to write about that the murder weapon seems to have been a 4-inch folding knife. Why do I point this out? Because this is the exact kind of knife that was made legal just last year, against the advice of law enforcement, and heralded by some as a “heroic” and “a massive victory for justice in New York.” Bravo.

    Nor will I go into what Majors might have been doing in the park. Nor the shameful conduct of the SBA (union) President, Ed Mullins, in publicly releasing details of an in-progress investigation to make political hay.

    Nor will I touch on the fact that the apparent robbers and murders are but kids, aged 13 and 14. “What can you do?” cops say, “Our hands our tied. They’re kids and weed isn’t enforceable anymore.” That’s bullshit, of course. They seem to have been causing trouble for quite a while. Cops could at least ask, “What are doing and where the hell is your guardian?” and take it from there. That’s where the attention and proactive help needs to be focused. The problem is coming from inside the house. I guarantee it. But if nobody else dares go there, why should I?

    Cops, at least in theory, might have prevented this murder with proactive policing. But in doing so they might have become a media sensation. And not in a good way. If you were a police officer and you suspected these kids of previous crimes, would you risk
    stopping them on reasonable suspicion? In a park? God forbid the kid is uncooperative and runs. Or puts up a fight. With indignant Columbia students pulling out their phones and calling you racist?

    For police, at least in terms of public relations — and this is a current and real problem — it’s probably better to have a poor woman murdered that risk the public indignant public and political pushback from stopping a 13-year-old black kid on suspicion of criminal activity.

    I’m not going to talk about any of that. Here’s where I do want to go: the numbers. I like data. And when I looked at them in New York City, I see these kinds of robbery/murders are rare. Really rare. Particularly for women. And then for white women? It basically doesn’t happen. But it did. and I guess that’s the definition of news.

    I took the UCR murder numbers [FBI Uniform Crime Reports] for New York City. I excluded “unknowns” for all the variables I’m looking at. That is not a moderate cut, particularly with regards to “offender 1 circumstance” and “victim 1 relation to offender 1.” How much it matters? I don’t know. But it does matter. But perhaps not so much to my main point, which is that this type of crime really is rare.

    In the past 20 years — since 2000 — only 2(!) women under 20 have been murdered by strangers in a robbery. It’s the not young who are at risk, but the old. Most women victims are over 50. Five of the 20 women victims were over 80 years old, which seems particularly bad. The last time a white woman of any age was killed by a stranger in robbery was 2015. Before that was 2011 and 2009. All three of the victims were senior citizens. The robber/killers were all in the 30s. One was white, one was black, one was hispanic.

    Since 2012, there have been but 30 people murdered by strangers in robberies in New York City. Total. Last year just one person in New York was murdered in a robbery by a stranger. One. A 66-year-old Asian man. In 2017? Four. All men. Same in 2016. There haven’t been more than 10 such murders a year in nearly a decade and not more than 20 such murders in a year since 2002. But in 1988, there there were 124 such victims! It really was a different city.

    Since 1992 — arguably when New York City started becoming safe — there have been 28 murders of women (and 287 of men) by strangers in robberies. Yes. Total. Since 1992. In 8 different years since 1990, the number of women killed in robbery has been zero.

    As to race, it seems that Asians are disproportionately targeted and victimized. But with that notable exception, victims or robbery/murders seem to reflect the demographics of New York City, at least generally. Offenders are disproportionately (but not exclusively) black men. For the women victims since 1992, 17 were white, 8 black, 2 Asian (1 unknown). Of their robber/killers, 17 were black, 10 white (1 unknown). Two women were murdered by women.

    Note the scale of the y-axis is much more magnified on the second picture.

    My point is that this type of crime — a woman being killed by stranger in a robbery — is rare in New York City. No, not just for white women. And not just for women. So when something like this does happen, it should be news. No, not cause for alarm and the ever-feared (at least in criminal justice circles) “over reaction.” But no, this shouldn’t be swept under the rug. Because we don’t want to go back to the days when the public lived in fear and people were literally being murdered by strangers in robberies gone wrong on a near daily basis.

    Rest in peace, Tessa Majors.

  • Violent, mentally ill, on the street: We need to do better than this

    My op-ed in the Daily News:

    Police officer Lesly Lafontant emerged form a coma yesterday after a bystander, Kwesi Ashun, somehow deemed it appropriate to beat Lafontant with a metal chair while Lafontant was trying to arrest Dewayne Hawkes, wanted on a warrant, after Hawkes had urinated on the floor on a nail salon.

    Ashun was shot and killed by police. His death, not the beating a police officer, received the attention of a City councilwoman, who tweeted, ”My condolences to the victim and their family.” She wasn’t talking about the cop. Later, she talked of working “to bridge the divides.” As if when a man beats a cop nearly to death, the police are partly to blame.

    Ashun had a record, including violent dealings with police. He was arrested for slashing a cop in 2004. Recently his family tried to get him help. “My brother was having a mental episode. He was very angry. He was spiraling [out of control]. They said he wasn’t a danger.” Eleven days before the recent attack, a city Health Department “mobile crisis team” concluded Ashun wasn’t a threat to himself or others. His sister was told to call 911 but refused: “I wasn’t comfortable with dialing 911 on an ill black man. It was too dangerous. So I didn’t call.”

    The man who relieved himself in the salon, Dewayne Hawkes? Despite starting this mess, being wanted on a warrant, resisting arrest, and instigating a series of events that led to a cop in a coma and Ashun being killed, he was released on “supervised probation” without bail. What message does that give to police? Or to the people in the nail salon?

    All serious mentally ill people need help; only a few are at risk of committing serious violence. The problem is New York City has hundreds of thousands of mentally ill and no way to treat them, particularly against their will. They bounce between hospitals, jails and homeless shelters. Some, like Ashun, end up dead. Others, like Randy Santos, will be in prison for the rest of their lives.

    Santos had a long history of violence and strange behavior before being bailed out of Rikers by a bail-reform advocacy group; he now stands accused of having murdered four homeless people, a crime to which he has confessed. Santos’s mother tried to get her son help, but he chose to decline treatment. Perhaps that’s a choice that he shouldn’t have been allowed to make.

    It’s actually not that hard to identify some of the people who need help. If your family tries to get you committed, perhaps you need be committed. Sure, we’d want an independent medical or psychiatric determination to make sure it’s not your family that is crazy, but it should be possible.

    This part isn’t about bail reform; it’s not about police use of force; it’s not about affordable housing for the homeless. This is about people being hurt because families are unable to get help for their loved ones.

    But there is a link to bail and criminal justice reform. And it’s not just a right-wing overreaction. Basically a few hundred people — a few hundred repeat offenders we can red-flag — are going to destroy the worthy gains of reform because we have no system to deal with them.

    The plan to close Rikers Island calls for a 60% reduction from current low levels, and some of those 60% will be violent and mentally ill. They need help, and they’re not going to get it.

    It behooves reformers and legislators to solve problems that are both inevitable and, if unaddressed, will doom reform efforts. The MTA is currently prohibited from banning repeat criminal offenders from the subway, even the few who push people onto subway tracks. New York judges are legally prohibited from considering a person’s “danger to the public” when setting bail. Public peace of mind requires it.

    Current reform will further limit judges’ ability to hold people and, by design, restrict police officers’ authority to arrest. On Jan. 1, almost all misdemeanors and some felonies, including some robberies and burglaries, will become not-detainable offenses. Offenders are to be given an “appearance ticket” that requires pre-trial release.

    We know that most of those are detained on low level crimes aren’t mentally ill or violent. But some of them are. If we won’t or can’t detain criminals and treat the violent mentally ill before they do harm, what is Plan B?

    The severely mentally ill do not belong in jail. But they also don’t belong on the street. They need help for their sake and for ours.

    Moskos, author of “Cop in the Hood,” is a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice.

  • FOP Report: “Mismanagement of the BPD and its Impact on Public Safety”

    I’ve read this so you don’t have to. But you should. This is
    put out by Baltimore City FOP #3. So sure, take it with a grain of salt. But FOP #3
    isn’t like some other unions that tweet ill-advised statements that hurt the
    image of policing and their members. [cough NYPD’s PBA SBA!]

    In 2012 FOP #3 released “Blueprint for Improving
    Policing.” It was far more right than wrong. It was ignored. Had it been
    followed, perhaps the 2015 riots wouldn’t have happened. Then Baltimore would
    still be seeing declining crime and an influx of people.

    In 2015 FOP #3 released an “After Action
    Review” of the riots that, again, was basically correct. As the Baltimore
    Sun put it: “If what the FOP reported is wrong, the Mayor and Commissioner
    need to prove it.” Needless to say, they didn‘t. 

    So in the context that this is not an ideological screeds
    but a union perspective put together by a consulting team (that’s OK, even
    encouraged) consider some of the points in the FOP #3 report about the
    Mismanagement of the Baltimore City Police Department.

    This is not a crime plan. (But it least it doesn’t pretend
    to be.) The consent decree isn’t a crime plan nor are reformers’ proposals to
    reduce police violence crime plans. We need a crime plan. But this is about
    fixing the organization. The first step.

    There is still a leadership problem: Officers fear proactive
    policing because of unjustified criminal prosecution by the state’s attorney. This isn’t just “we don’t want to be held accountable” griping. See, eg, this.

    As to the consent decree, “police have not been informed or
    training in following the consent decree.” But the major issue right now is
    probably staffing, and that results in overtime which costs money and, when
    mandatory, low morale.

    Hire people to fill vacancies instead of paying overtime. As
    to recruitment: train recruiters in how to recruit, conduct exit interviews,
    recognize exemplary employees, and pay past due recruitment bonus. Seems like
    common decency, much less common sense.

    There is currently budgeted funding for 470 more police
    officer positions, plus 100 civilians. Standards should be higher. And pay and
    benefits at a level to attract good candidates.

    There are currently only 634 officers assigned to patrol.
    That is just 70 officers for each of 9 districts! (And may include sergeants,
    light duty, medical, etc.) This is probably less than half of what it used to
    be. I read this and said, “can it be?” It can.

    Back in 2001, just one district (of nine total)–my
    district, the Eastern District–had 265 total assigned sworn police officers.
    We had 130(!) working patrol officers for 3 shifts. And I’m just talking
    officers (not sgt’s and LTs or light duty or medical). Violence went down.

    Officer numbers are down because BPD has replaced only 80%
    of losses since 2001, for a decline of 850 police officers (to 2,480). This is
    25%(!) reduction in numbers. And the trend has worsened since 2014.

    And when numbers are down, you can’t take officers from HQ
    or consent decree compliance or specialized units or the mayor’s detail or the
    academy. So you pillage patrol, the so-called “backbone” of any
    police department. And that is what has happened. BPD needs a
    backbone.

  • Murder down for whites but not blacks

    The 2018 murder rate is down from the previous two years, but higher than we’ve seen in 6 of the past 10 years. Last year’s murder rate is the same as 2015. And 2009! And yet I keep hearing every year that violence is down. So what’s this trend? And sort of related, why do some people insist on the “violence is down” message year after year, even when it’s not true?

    Yes, violence is lower than it was in 1991. Violence will hopefully always be lower than 1991. But that doesn’t mean violence is trending down year after year. If we keep starting the graph around 1991, violence will always look downward trending.

    The murder rate in the US actually peaked in 1980 at 10.2 (per 100K). And then there was the lesser but better-known crack-trade-related murder peak of 1991 (9.8 per 100K). So we’re down from there, no doubt.

    Violence plummeted in America between 1994 and 1999. It might be worth pointing out that is right after the Biden-supported and now maligned crime bill. I don’t actually think that’s why crime went down, but it does correlate. And it didn’t hurt. It might have helped.

    Whatever the causes — and I do think better policing (along with changes in drug dealing) was a huge part of the solution — many lives were saved between 1994 and 1999. Of course, as always, there were racial disparities. Blacks benefited most from the decline in violence. From 1994 to 1999 the number of black murder victims dropped from about 12,000 to 7,000 per year! White murder victims declined, too (but less so, from 11,000 to 8,000). This brings us to 1999.

    Since 1999, the murder rate for whites has dropped even more, another 20%. Great news! But not for blacks. In absolute numbers, more blacks were murdered in 2018 than in 17 of the past 20 years. That’s not a good trend.For African Americans, murder has been up and down over the past 20 years. But the murder rate is no better in 2018 than it was in 1999.

    Image

     

    What bother me is some of my friends who insist “violence is down” are well intentioned white people who live in safe neighborhoods, hashtag#BLM, and believe those who advocate less policing in other people’s neighborhoods. (Neighborhoods they won’t set foot in, mind you.)

     

    Yes, violence is down compared to 1991. But is it a sustained “trend”? Not really. Not if you start the clock in 2000. And not for non-whites. Not for young black men in particular. So when people say violent crime is down, ask “For whom?”

     

  • Rest in Peace, NYPD Detective Brian Mulkeen

    Brian Mulkeen was a Fordham grad and worked at Merrill Lynch till he quit his job and joined the NYPD. Apparently Mulkeen was killed by “friendly fire” while wrestling with an armed suspect.

    There’s a nice 1 minute video on twitter. I was mostly just sad and dry eyed till “Country Roads” kicked in. Because he’s not just a cop; he’s a person. RIP, Brian Mulkeen.

  • “Stop the car or I’ll step in front of it”

    “Stop the car or I’ll step in front of it”

    This was not a good shooting. And cringe-worthy from an officer’s perspective. From the suspect’s perspective, well, he’s dead.

    I’m quoted in this article.

    The background is the car popped up on a stolen car list (I think from an automated license plate reader). The officer is told to investigate. The car is in a parking lot. There is no car stop. There was no fleeing that preceded this.

    The first problem is Officer Starks stops his car in front of the stolen car. That in itself isn’t bad, if you don’t care about your police car. But he does so in such a way that he has to get out of the police car in front of the suspect’s car. You don’t do that by choice.

    The second problem is the officer doesn’t wait for backup and the third problem is he exits the car with his gun drawn (or immediately does so after exiting the car). If you feel the need to approach the car with your gun drawn (which is fine but not required for a car that comes back stolen), shouldn’t you also feel the need to wait for backup? Either there’s a potential threat or there isn’t. And if there isn’t, he shouldn’t have had his gun out. And if there is, he should have waited for backup.

    There was no good reason to think the driver of the car, later identified as Bradley Blackshire, was armed. Though indeed he might have been. But he wasn’t. (Though in an odd but irrelevant twist the passenger later tells cops on the scene that Blackshire “has a gun,” even though he doesn’t; no gun is found. Turns out she got of jail that day. She asks to get her jacket back, because, you know, it’s cold. She’s bizarrely calm and compliant after all this.)

    But the fourth problem is the biggie. The driver, Blackshire, starts to slowly drive away after not getting out of the car, and the officer shoots and kills. When the car starts moving, Officer Starks is on the driver’s side of the car. The car is brushing against him, but it is not going to hit him. There is no threat. Just a dude slowly driving away at gunpoint. Yes, the driver could have complied. Should have, even. But non-compliance is not the issue. Non-compliance is pretty common. More to this point, non-compliance is not a lethal threat. The officer shot four times and killed Blackshire over being in a car reported stolen (it’s not clear it ever was) and “failure to obey a lawful order.” That’s unacceptable. Also likely a convictable criminal offense.

    And then, to make matters worse — who knows, perhaps Blackshire would still be alive if Starks had left well enough alone, but no — Officer Starks chooses to nominate himself for a Darwin Award. He steps in front of a moving vehicle.

    Sure, sometimes police officers end up in a chaotic situation where they find themselves in front of a moving vehicle. Shit does happen. But you don’t choose to put yourself in front of a moving vehicle. Especially not if you just shot and incapacitated the driver.

    As I say in the newspaper article: “It’s just shocking to see. Not getting in front of a car is the rare case where general orders, common sense and officer safety coincide.”

    It looks like the driver does indeed hit the brakes when Starks steps in front of the car. But then, if I had to guess — which I don’t, but I will — Blackshire can’t keep his foot on the brake, perhaps because, you know, he’s been shot and is dying. So the car, as cars do, idles forward. At this point Starks goes up on the hood of the car and fires another 11 rounds.

    The car hits and stops against dumpster or something, and then there’s the predictable period of curse-filled verbal commands being shouted at a dead or dying man. Blackshire seems to have enough life left in him to raise his hands, until he doesn’t.

    What makes this situation unusual is that the officer was actually in control of setting the stage for this interaction. Officer Starks chose how to approach, and he chose wrong. And then Officer Starks shot when there was no imminent threat, and then he placed himself in danger and shot again. There never even was a split-second decision that had to be made.

    I’d bet this isn’t the first time Officer Starks made unwise aggressive decisions in his career. And if I have to bet — and I don’t, but I will — this time will be his last.

    [Update: In January 2020, A judge ruled that firing the officer was unjust.] 

  • Quality Policing Episode 25

    There’s a new episode of quality policing. And with a new cohost. Click through and listen here. https://qualitypolicing.com/episode-25-peter-moskos-and-introducing-leon-taylor/

    Download the mp3 file here:

    https://api.spreaker.com/v2/episodes/17113983/download.mp3