Fact 5: Black officers are disproportionately more likely than white police to kill black people. But this should come as little surprise since black officers are much more likely to work in black areas and in cities where there are more blacks. Again, given the bad data, take all this with a huge grain of salt, but according to the…
Category: Police
Race and justifiable police homicides (IV): On the increase
Fact 4: Police-involved killings are going up. This one surprised me. Because police-involved shootings are generally correlated with overall homicides. But homicides are more or less steady right now, and down 10,000 since 1998 (14,000 in 1998, 13,000 in 2012). The trend is about five more killings a year, for the past 15 years. Keep in mind this is based…
Race and justifiable police homicides (III): one a day
[Update: Using better data, the number is more like three a day.] Fact 3: UCR data on justified police-homicides are notorious incomplete. These numbers are an undercount. But given the data we have, as reported (or not) to the DOJ by local police departments, police kill at least one person a day (426 in 2012, to be exact, 30 percent…
Race and justifiable police homicides (II): white and black
Fact 2: Blacks are more likely than whites to be shot and killed by police, but probably less so than you’d suspect. 34 percent of those killed by police are African American. But put another way, 62 percent of those killed by police are white. (Actual numbers provided in next post.) What you want to make of these data probably…
Race and justifiable police homicides (I): Over time
Back in 2008 I posted about what I called the “Al Sharpton effect”: cops shooting white people doesn’t generally make the news. That post has gotten a lot of hits recently (roughly 2,000 page views a day, when normally my whole blog gets about 700). So I’ve re-crunched these numbers, both to make them more current and to look at…
Is the silence deafening?
That’s because I’m out of town, in New Mexico (“not really new and not really Mexico”), and only have my phone to type on. I’ll be back home and posting in about two weeks.
How to arrest a very large man who doesn’t want to go
Telling officers what not to do doesn’t tell them what they should do. And it’s never going to look pretty. That doesn’t make it wrong. Here’s my op-ed in today’s New York Daily News: If you’re a cop, how do you cuff a 6-foot-tall, 350-pound man who doesn’t want to go to jail? Most arrests happen without a problem. Police…
I stand corrected
The medical examiner’s office says Eric Garner was murdered. To wit: “compression of neck (chokehold), compression of chest and prone positioning during physical restraint by police.” Asthma, heart disease, diabetes, and obesity were contributing factors. His death has been ruled a homicide, and presumably we’re going to be in for a Staten Island trial with Daniel Pantaleo and perhaps other…
Gun Rights
This recent decision in DC saying there is right to carryis actually bigger news than you’d think. Why? Because up till now you did not have that right. This decision asserts constitutional rights beyond what the Supreme Court has ever ruled. The Court said that the government cannot prevent you from having a gun in your home for protections. But…
Looking up to police officers
I just learned that cops in Greece have to be at least 5’7″ (170 cm) tall. Male and female. That’s crazy. Hell, I’m just barely over the cutoff. …which is the highest minimum in Europe, along with Malta, Romania and Serbia. At 152cm, Belgium has the lowest height requirement. Female applicants in Greece must also be 170cm tall, making them…