Inspired by some twitter threads — mostly this onewith Gary Cordner and this onewith Andrew Wheeler — I thought I’d look more at the cops getting killed as a factor in cops killing people. I like presenting this stage of research. In part because coming up with ideas and hypotheses and basic number crunching is what I like doing most.…
Pushing the Ideological Narrative
I updated the Brennan Center’s crime report from 2016, to update it for 2018. I still have this urge to show how goofy their methods are. Why? Because, the authors are still cited by reputable journalists as experts, despite never acknowledging or correcting their past efforts to intentionally mislead journalists and the public. It’s advocacy data-analysis. It’s unethical, wrong, and…
State variation in police-involved shootings
Welcome to 2019! I’ve compiled the past four years of Washington Post data on those shot and killed by police. Four years gives us a reasonable amount of data. The first thing that jumps out is that the number of people killed by police has remained strikingly constant each and every year for which we have data (from the Washington…
Progressive Misbelief
For well over a century, “progressives” have a proud tradition of not only exposing what is best for other people (often correctly, I might add) but also thinking they know what other people believe (often incorrectly). There’s a paternalism inherent to the progressive movement that can come awfully close to racism (or at least a white-savior complex) when it comes…
Van Dyke Guilty in Chicago
Former Chicago Police Officer Jason Van Dyke was convicted of second-degree murder in the shooting of Laquan McDonald. This isn’t surprising. I think Van Dyke was found guilty because, get this, he was. I wrote this in 2015: The video is out. Finally. After long attempts to sweep it under the rugfailed. … It’s a bad shooting…. The officer who…
Why they carry illegal guns in Chicago
There an interesting studyby the Urban Institute on young men carrying guns in Chicago. This has already been misrepresented in the Chicago Sun-Timesas “1 in 3 young people surveyed in four Chicago neighborhoods say they carry a gun.” Factually true… but meaningless because they’re trying to survey people who carry a gun. 100% is the goal. It’s not trying to…
NYPD prostitution scandal
When ever corruption scandals breaks, I always notice two things: 1) The “blue was of silence” is more fiction than fact. Sure, cops in collusion won’t talk, at first. But that’s hardly a blue wall. I mean, given people’s natural inclination not to snitch on their friends and family, cops snitch on other cops quite regularly. Probably more so than…
Michael Wood Jr. took money from veterans
Michael Wood Jr, a former Baltimore cop, confessed many of his sins a few year ago. Because of that, he became a darling of the anti-cop left who mistook his confessing for whistle blowing. Pretty much everybody who ever worked with the guy has stories about him, and not favorable ones. I never met the guy, but I think he…
Every four or five years…
Just a brief note to commemorate the semi-decennial NYPD drug sweep at the Queensbridge Houses. I keep track of these things. (I live nearby.) 9 raids. 22 arrests. 4 handguns. Last time this happened was 2013. And that was preceded by similar raids in 2009 and 2005. Sometimes police get disparaged for conducting wack-a-mole policing. (In fact, sometimes *I’ve* disparaged…
Nassau County Police Commissioner Patrick Ryder
Over on our Quality Policing podcast, Nick Selby and I hit the road and interview Nassau County Police Commissioner Patrick Ryder Nassau County, if you don’t know, is the closer of two counties on Long Island outside of New York City. It’s largely a low-crime suburban community but has been in the news lately because of MS-13 and also a…