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Tag: for academics

  • Value Over Replacement Cop

    This was gonna be my idea! “Bobbies and Baseball Players: Evaluating Patrol Officer Productivity Using Sabermetrics.” So kudos to Luke Bonkiewicz because he actually researched and wrote the article and I didn’t. Here’s the abstract from the current issue of Police Quarterly (2015, Vol. 18(1) 55–78):

    Police officer productivity is an understudied topic in police research. Prior studies on productivity have primarily relied on rudimentary statistics, such as calls for service and arrests. A more advanced method for evaluating productivity should (a) account for the diverse activities of patrol officers, (b) weight different productivity outputs, (c) evaluate officers in terms of available minutes for self-initiated activities (productive time), and (d) offer agencies the flexibility to select, prioritize, and weight patrol activities most relevant to their jurisdictions. Borrowing from a baseball sabermetric called Value Over Replacement Player, we create and test an innovative statistic called Value Over Replacement Cop. This metric analyzes 12 patrol activities and generates a single number by which to quantify and evaluate a patrol officer’s productivity. Using data from a midsize U.S. Police Department (325 sworn officers), we find strong support for the validity of this new metric.

    This is a good start. But the problem is that this measure doesn’t take into account crime, the prevention of which is the primary purpose of police. Crime needs to be the main variable, not indicators of police officer “productivity” (which aren’t unimportant, but still).

  • What’s your C.O.P. score?

    You know, “Crimes prevented Over rePlacement.” (Or maybe just “C-POR.”) Like WAR, wins above replacement, but for cops.

    The idea is to break crime down by beat/post and looking at it over time (a long time, like years). Wouldn’t it be nice to know if there actually was less crime on your post while you were policing. Of course would give incentive to under report crime. Still, it would be nice to know. And it’s not like we have anything better.

  • Rates help us compare

    This is the second of two postson basic math.

    Use rates when you want compare something in groups of different sizes.

    Say New York City has 400 homicides a year. Say Baltimore City has 300 homicides. Is New York more dangerous than Baltimore because New York has more homicides. No. Because New York is much larger. But the homicide numbers don’t tell us that. Rates take different population sizes into account.

    A rate in criminal justice is how often something happens per 100,000 people. (Rates don’t have to be per 100,000, but in criminal justice statistics, they almost always are.)

    If Baltimore had 300 homicides and a population of 1,000,000 people (in reality both numbers are smaller, but I want to keep the math easy), the rate tells us how many homicides there are per 100,000 people. 100,000 is one-tenth of one million. So the homicide rate will be one-tenth the homicide number. You should be able to do that in your head, but on a calculator, divide 100,000 by 1,000,000. You get 0.1. So to convert Baltimore’s homicide numbers to a homicide rate, you multiply the homicide numbers by 0.1 (the same as dividing by 10). Baltimore’s homicide rate (per 100,000) would be 30.

    New York City is larger. Much larger. About eight million people. In figuring out the homicide rate, we’re asking a hypothetical question about how many homicides New York would have if it had a population of 100,000. Then we can compare it Baltimore’s rate.

    To do this in your head, if the numbers are nice are round, figure how many times 100,000 goes into the population 8,000,000. The answer is 80. And since we’re saying New York has 400 homicides a year, we would divide the number of homicides 400 by 80, which gives us a homicide rate of 5.

    Same thing a different way, on your calculator. Take 100,000 and divide by 8,000,000. This gives you 0.0125. Multiply 0.0125 by the number of homicides, 400. This gives you a homicide rate or 5.

    New York City has a homicide rate of 5; Baltimore’s homicide rate is 30, or 6 times higher than New York’s, even though New York has more murders.

    And here’s one way to check your work. The rate is per 100,000. So if the population is less than 100,000, the rate will be greater than the number (a town with 50,000 people and 2 homicides has a homicide rate of 4 per 100,000). If the population is greater than 100,000, the rate will be less than the number (a town of 200,000 people has 8 homicides, the homicide rate is 4 per 100,000).

  • After a 200-percent decrease in basic math skills…

    As promised, here is how to determine basic percentages. Too many of my college students don’t understand basic percentages. Clearly GTF has the same problem. So here is how it works — in words — with no math symbols. I’m totally serious. It’s never too late to learn. And not knowing how to relate “doubled” and “100% increase” is the mathematically equivalent of being functionally illiterate.

    To say how many times something increased, simply divide the second number by the first: There were 10 arrests; now there are 30. 30 divided by 10 is 3. Arrests tripled.

    To figure out a percent increase or decrease, subtract the first (earlier) number from the second (later) number and then divide the result by the first number (multiply by 100 — move the decimal place over two to the right — to get a percentage).

    30 minus 10 is 20; 20 divided by 10 is 2; 2 times 100 is 200. So 30 arrests is a 200 percent increase compared to 10. A 100 percent increase would be the same as saying something doubled.

    Going the other way, from 30 to 10 arrests would be one-third as many arrests or a two-thirds decrease or a decrease of 67 percent.

    And nothing, not even math skills, can decrease more than 100 percent.

    Next I’m going to talk about rates.

  • The Real Peel

    One of the reasons I like NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton is that he is prone to quoting Robert Peel, the man who invented police as we know them back in 1829 London.

    Bratton has reprinted “Peel’s” principles online. Those nine principles are an excellent philosophical base for policing, they’re just not Robert Peel’s. And now the New York Times — the Grey Lady, the paper of record — has perpetuated this error. Not once but twice. (They don’t even seem to “regret the error.”)

    What are known as “Peel’s Nine Principles of Policing” do not come from Robert Peel. They come from a 1948 book on British Policing. Does this matter? I don’t know, but I do like to get my facts straight. Mind you, Peel might not disagree with the nine principles attributed to him, they’re just not his. (I’ve written about this before). And if you want a handy one-page easy-to-print pdf that I give to my students, here you go.

    So what are Peel’s actual principles? Based on the original 1829 Patrol Guide, I see five:

    1) The purpose of police is to prevent crime.

    2) Know your beat; patrol your beat.

    3) Maintain order.

    4) Use common sense and discretion.

    5) Be polite and control your temper (it may save your ass).

    Those aren’t bad rules to live by

  • Laments of the Qualitative Researcher

    I don’t apply for many grants, in part because they’re so hard for a qualitative researcher to get. Ethnographic work and qualitative research isn’t taken seriously in a generally quantitative field. My research doesn’t follow the standard “theory, hypothesis, experiment, verify” model of hard science. Nor should it. But it’s hard to get grants or get published in Criminology if you don’t. (The quantitative/qualitative ratio leading journals is roughly a depressing 90%/10%.) So why is this work not valued in research grants and journal publications? I do my research the old-fashioned way: I talk to people. Perhaps it’s worthless research, but professors do assign my books to students. But why is the worth of qualitative research only recognized after the fact?

    [If you look at Amazon’s list of “best sociology,” you have to get to number seventy-six before you find one written by an actual sociologist! I would see this is a crisis of the field (even given issues with how Amazon classifies sociology).]

    So here’s my next book idea: I’m going to research and write an oral history of the Great New York City Crime Drop. Why? Because crime went down more than anybody thought possible, and there is still no academic consensus about what actually happened. It’s one thing to talk about Broken Windows and Compstat in theory. But I want to explain the crime drop from the perspective of the NYPD officers who were actually there. What police have to say may be profound. And nobody ever talks to the lowly beat cop. At least what they have to say will be revealing. And if nothing else, it should be a very good read.

    The grant rejections (I wanted money to pay for transcribers) were check-the-box, so I don’t want to read too much into specifics. And the single most important reason may be: “Proposal needs stronger organization or writing.” Had they just left it at that, I would said, gosh, maybe they’re right. That’s a good reason for rejection. I could have spent more time writing it. (But then, in a catch-22, I didn’t want to waste more than a few days writing a grant application that would probably be rejected…)

    It’s the other specific reasons that I have issues with, such as:

    • Proposal does not clearly state a testable hypothesis, goal or aesthetic vision

    Well of course there’s no clearly stated testable hypothesis because I’m not testing a hypothesis. It’s called Grounded Theory, if you want to get fancy (I don’t). I’m going to talk to people to listen to them and try and understand what they have to say. There’s no shame in that (nor, apparently, grant money).

    • Research methodology is underdeveloped

    I’m going to interview a lot of cops who worked the streets from the late 1980s to the mid 1990s. And then I’m going to write a book about it. Just because you don’t like that plan doesn’t mean it’s underdeveloped.

    • Proposal fails to convince reviewers of scholarly significance

    Murders in NYC decreased eighty-some percent and we, the so-called “experts” in the field, still can’t agree on a theory that has any practical use. If explaining the crime drop doesn’t have scholarly significance, I don’t know what does!

    • Proposal does not demonstrate sufficient understanding of the state of the discipline or field

    Really? This is my field, and I don’t think I’m an idiot. I guess we’ll just have to agree to disagree.

    I’ve done some pretty good research in my day. I’ve written good books and social science. But because I choose not to follow the hard-science model of methods and writing, I still feel like an idiot when my grant applications are rejected. It’s not so much the rejection that hurts (don’t “poor baby” me; I have thick skin). This wasn’t a large grant. And I’m good at research on the cheap. Still, it’s the stated reasons for rejection that make me throw up my hands in frustration.

  • Crime is up no wait down: NCVS

    There are two main clearinghouses for crime stats in this country, the UCR (The Uniform Crime Report) and the NCVS (National Crime Victimization Survey). The former is collected from police departments and thus only includes reported crime as recorded by the police. The latter is conducted by surveys and sampling and asks people (160,000 per year) if they were a victim of crime. They both can be useful in different situations, though I’m much more partial to the UCR.

    Now here’s the thing: The UCR says violent crime in 2012 is down 3% compared to 2010.

    The NCVS says violent crime is up 39% in the past two years.

    They can’t both be right.

    And I seriously suspect the NCVS is wrong.

    Update:

    I believe in 2015 the NCVS surveyed but a *total* of 260 black male crime victims. For a national sample. (From 20,837 “black only” sampled.) Just 100 black male victims 35 or under? That seems problematic. Weighting is about 2,700 per individual.

    Also, blacks are 11% of respondents, undercounts population approx 17%. (whites are overcounted at +5%) And there’s no reason to assume non-respondents/missing data are random. I would assume non-respondents have higher rates of being victims.

  • IRB: The Censorship You’ve Never Heard Of

    Unless you’re an academic, of course. From Commentary and worth reading in its entirely (if you care about this sort of thing):

    Since the 1970s, the government has overseen the establishment of bodies called Institutional Review Boards, and these “IRBs” have suppressed vast amounts of talking, printing, and publishing—even mere reading and analyzing—for hundreds of thousands of Americans. This is utterly unconstitutional, and in stifling research and its publication, it has proved deadly.

    [thanks to the Institutional Review Blog]

  • Institutional Review Board advice

    What can universities do to improve the IRB? Zachary Schrag, Professor of History at George Mason University and the author of, Ethical Imperialism: Institutional Review Boards and the Social Sciences, 1965-2009, summarizes what your school can do (in ten easy steps).

  • Don’t buy this essay!

    Wow. You can buy an essay about my book, In Defense of Flogging.

    But it’s not very good. Really. It’s surprisingly crappy. Mostly because it’s not about me book. I would expect more for my money. On the other hand, this does appear to be free.