The creators of StreetCredrecently brought their work to my attention. They like data. So do I. They’re trying to flesh out the situations when police kill an unarmed person. Unarmed does not automatically mean a person isn’t a threat. It’s interesting that the majority of these cases are not officer initiated but involve police response to a call for service…
Category: Police
Murder in Baltimore Post Riot
Here’s the latest in terms of Baltimore homicides, pre and post riot. The downward slope is a slight silver lining in a homicide rate the doubled overnight.
Believe the hype: Murder is going up
A few months ago I warned people not to believe the hype (at least in NYC). But all signs do now indicate the murders are up. The numbers below come from “The Brainroom” at Fox News. They compiled publically released data from city police departments. There are some cities where murder isn’t up, of course, but fewer and fewer. The…
Butt dials 30% of mobile calls to 911 in S.F.
The BBC: When the researchers [in San Francisco] sat by the call handlers and noted down what was happening – they found 30% of calls coming in from mobiles were accidental butt-dials, also known as pocket-dials. As well as being time-consuming taking the call, the impact of butt-dials doesn’t stop there. Each one requires further attention – after all, the…
It’s more dangerous to be black than to be a cop
I heard this somewhere recently and it made me go, really? So I thought I would double check. Indeed, one is more at risk to be murdered as a black person in America than as a police officer. For 2013 and 2014 I get an average of about 80 officers killed on duty per year (this excludes correctional officers, traffic…
“And they made a chart with no Y-axis!”
I’m a stickler for the honest presentation of data. Too many people, it seems me, just don’t care. I mean, it is easier to just make numbers up and share a picture on facebook if it supports your ideological position. When it comes to data analysis, I didn’t expect to find an ally in late-night TV. So check this out.…
Schoolcraft gets $600K
Adrian Schoolcraft wanted money and he got it, according to the Post. Schoolcraft wasn’t the first to point out that the NYPD was under intense (and illegal) quota pressure. He’s just, as I wrote. The only one, in my humble opinion, who has tried to martyr himself and turn number fudging into a tidy personal $50 million profit. He and…
The War on Drug does create prisoners
In the New York Times David Brooks repeats John Pfaff’s argument in Slate that the war on drugs isn’t responsible for our crazy high prison population. Brooks vouches for Pfaff as “wonderfully objective, nonideological and data-driven.” That might all be true. Pfaff is probably a swell guy and kind to animals, too. There’s something to be said for talking to…
Why did crime plummet in the US?
Over at Vox there’s a fair and brief look for and against all the theories of the crime drop. 1. There’s about half as much violent crime in the US as there was 25 years ago 2. The theory: putting more people in prison helped reduce crime 3. The theory: putting more police on the streets prevented crime 4. The…
Violent crime steady in 2014
As I suspected (and hoped) crime was not up last year. Of course it was up some places (and thus down in others). What a country we live in: we can send a man to the moon and don’t know how many people were murdered in 2014 until late September, 2015. When the 2015 figures come out in a year…