[See my previous post on Ed Flynn.] Flynn isn’t new at this. A few years back, Flynn was answering questions about a controversial police-involved shooting. At a community meeting, some criticized him for being “disrespectful,” because he was on his phone. His response is well worth watching. The cop involved in that shooting was later fired. Officers voted Flynn a…
Tag: causes of crime
Milwaukee Police Chief Edward Flynn: “We’ve got to get beyond the finger pointing that does nothing except to depolice at risk communities”
Milwaukee Police Chief Edward Flynn is smarter than your average flatfoot. Generally considered a progressive in the police world, he’s the type of chief who should at least be embraced by the political left. But Milwaukee is one of the latest police department to be sued by the ACLU for racially disparate policing. But Flynn refuses to de-police the city’s…
The Curious Case of Poverty and Crime
When I’m charming people at a cocktail parties with talk of rising crime and the role of police, the good people I talk to, rather than even considering the possibility that police matter and post-Ferguson protests might matter (in a negative way), inevitably try and shift the discussion to greater social issues: poverty, racism, and inequality, the so called “root…
Continuing with the “Ferguson Effect”
The other week I wrote about the so-called “Ferguson Effect.” Alex Elkins has some more thoughts on this issue, over on his blog: The main “take-away,” the one the authors hope the media will pick up and run with, namely, that the Ferguson Effect, as construed by conservatives and certain media outlets, is “spurious.” This is too strident, in my…
Swamy Pete says…
Swamy Pete, the gypsy scryer, looks into his crystal ball. With eerie music in the background and an echoey voice, Swamie Pete makes a bold prediction: In the future, in fact tomorrow at exactly 19:00 hours eastern time, crime will not happen. The crystal ball says that for maybe three hours, somehow people will manage to have fewer problems. The…
“The enduring commitment of antipolice progressives to the ‘root causes’ theory of crime”
This op-ed by Heather Mac Donald is the one I wanted to write. But I didn’t. And she did. The point, one could say rather simply, is that police matter as a force for crime prevention. That simple concept is why I decided to study policing and then became a cop. In the mid 1990s I got into this gig…
Meanwhile, roughly 1 in every 250 young black men was shot in Eastern District. Last month!
Maybe you were too busy blocking traffic into the city to notice, but this past weekend 32 people were shot in Baltimore. Nine were killed. (as usual, click to embiggen) This past weekend. In Charm City. With just over 620,000 people. Meanwhile, from April 25 to May 23, this past month, 122 people were shot or killed in Mobtown. Last…
“So what’s the big deal?”
What’s weird, at least to me, is that many (mostly from the political left) seem to dismiss the never-before-seen increase in homicides in Baltimore as just some random uptick. “You know,” I’ve been told (and more than once), “violent crime is up in New York City, too.” Are you fucking crazy?! Homicide in Baltimore is up 250 percent over-fucking-night! And…
“We also gave those who wished to destroy space for that as well”
You sure did, Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake. I cannot believe that the mayor of Baltimore said this yesterday. Unbelievable. You think that may encourage people to loot and burn? The full context in case you were wondering (I was) is: I’ve made it very clear that I work with police and instructed them to do everything that they could to…
Crime up in NYC (this time for real)
Compared to last year, shootings and homicides in NYC are up 20 percent. Twenty percent is a real increase. Here’s the compstat page and also a link to last week’s summary (no matter when you click the link). I don’t know why crime is up. But… I can’t help but think it’s part of (or some combination of) everything that…