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Tag: homicide

  • A Cloak of Silence After a South Bronx Killing

    A Cloak of Silence After a South Bronx Killing

    Benjamin Mueller and Al Baker in the New York Times describe one homicide in the Bronx. “To understand why killings persist in an era of historically low crime, The New York Times is reporting this year on each murder in the 40th Precinct.” This is the kind of in-depth story that informs.

    If we’re going to improve things, where do we start? Sure, the Collazos need help. But then so do my students who grow up as his neighbors. While Fredo is selling drugs and smoking weed in the lobby — and non-residents complain that “non-violent drug offenders” like Fredo are being harassed by police — my students have to get by him and his crew to get to my class. Some people manage to make better life decisions and finish high school and get jobs and graduate college and get better jobs. In a world of limited resources, who do we help? And how many red flags do there need to be?

    A “broken window” in action. Cause nothing says respect to your neighbors like “RIP Fredo” burned into the ceiling of the hallway.

    Here’s a name and a face and a life. 20-year-old Freddy Collazo:

    Mr. Collazo’s father, who was addicted to heroin, served nearly two years in state prison for drug sales. His parents separated when he was in his early teens.

    …

    Mr. Collazo’s … slashing in May 2012; his wounds — including cuts to his head, ear, left elbow and right middle finger — were recorded by the police, despite his refusing to talk to officers at a hospital.

    …

    He got a .32-caliber Smith & Wesson revolver after the 2012 slashing — a requisite precaution, friends and relatives said.

    …

    But Mr. Collazo was coy, even with close friends, about why people wanted to hurt him. When Ms. Soto asked how she could help, her son acknowledged being in trouble but insisted, “No questions.”

    When he was sent to jail on Rikers Island, his father, whose name is also Alfredo Collazo, was already there, having been locked up four days earlier on drug charges.

    …

    He had expensive tastes in clothes, favoring name-brand polo shirts.

    He popped prescription pills, including Percocet, smoked marijuana in the lobby of his apartment building and sold drugs, sometimes under the banner of Forest Over Everything but just as often on his own.

    …

    Mr. Collazo dropped out of Herbert H. Lehman High School in the 11th grade.

    …

    Mr. Collazo was arrested again in April 2014, this time for marijuana, but he only had to pay a fine. He walked around as if he were invincible, friends said, relying on his crew for protection as his street feuds piled up.

    His ability to keep avoiding prison time created suspicions among his crew.

    Last May, Mr. Collazo entered a residential drug-treatment program in Brooklyn.

    His anxiety ran so deep that Mr. Collazo once badgered a new student who he thought had been looking at him too much.

    …

    In late February a hooded gunman crept up behind Mr. Collazo. The first bullet severed Mr. Collazo’s spine and blew through his heart, killing him before he hit the pavement. His cousin, Luis Cruz, ran.

    Then the gunman stood over Mr. Collazo, 58 days past his 20th birthday, and with a .45-caliber pistol pumped at least six more bullets into his body, leaving a total of 10 entry and exit wounds.

    Sgt. Michael J. LoPuzzo, the commander of the 40th Precinct detective squad, said Mr. Collazo was “assassinated.”

    But Mr. Cruz has told Mr. Collazo’s mother that he will not say who the killer is.

    “I told him, ‘Please, you was there, go to the cops and tell them what you know,’” Mr. Collazo’s mother, Glenda Lee Soto, said. “He told me he’s not going to do it. He’s not going to go down for a snitch. He’s not going to rat nobody.”

    Chief Boyce said people’s reluctance to speak with investigators “doesn’t mean we stop — it just means our task is all the more difficult.”

    …

    At his funeral the next Sunday, two young men were handcuffed by the police as they entered the funeral home parking lot; the police said they had arrested one person, for having stolen license plates.

    …

    Friends scrawled tributes on the wall — “F.O.E.,” “For you we gon bang bang,” “Ima put them under dirt” — and raised their lighters to the ceiling to burn “RIP FREDO” into the beige paint.

    The lobby became choked with marijuana smoke. Mr. Collazo’s raps blared from his friends’ cellphones and echoed off the walls. The group scattered when two officers arrived, responding to a neighbor’s complaint.

    But slowly they returned.

    And some people? Out of all this? Of all they could criticize? They would find fault with police for maintaining order in the lobby of a public housing building. Nothing but police harassing innocent children of color as they mourn the untimely death of their friend.

  • Happy New Year

  • Baltimore Equals New York City in Homicides

    I often joked about this, but I really never thought this day would happen.

    On August 16, both New York and Baltimore had 208 murders. Baltimore has added another 8 since then. I’m not certain about NYC. New York City has 7.5 million more residents than Charm City.

  • Homicides down in Baltimore (but still up)

    You know how all them criminal justice “experts” say it’s inevitable that homicides go up in the summer? Well for at least the second year in a row, homicides in Baltimore are down, June compared to May.

    After the riot, homicides more than doubled.

    Pre-April 27, 2015: 0.58 homicides a day.

    April 28 – May 31, 2015: 1.44 homicides a day.

    June 1 – 29, 2015: 1.0 homicide a day.

    Before the riots, homicides were up in Baltimore about 30 percent compared to 2014.

    Post-riot, Balto homicides are up about 75 percent compared to the same time last year. Shootings even more so.

    42 people were killed this year in May, but no, “regression to the mean” is not inevitable when it comes to people killing each other. Not included a body or two dropped tonight, the good news, I suppose, is we’re down to just 1 murder each and every day.

    Of the 144 people killed so far this year in Baltimore: 131 are male, 127 are black, 122 were shot. 104 victims, 72 percent of the total, win the trifecta by being all three.

  • Deadliest month in Baltimore. Ever.

    The Sun reported that this month has been the fifth deadliest in 40 years.

    Actually, by rate, since Baltimore has fewer people than it used to have, May has been the most deadly month ever.

    In number of dead, the deadliest months have been:

    Aug 1972: 45

    Dec 1971: 44

    Aug 1990: 42

    Aug 1996: 39

    May 2015: 42

    But the homicide rate (per 100,000) for these months are, in rank order:

    May 2015: 6.7

    Aug 1990: 5.7

    Aug 1996: 5.7

    Aug 1972: 5.0

    Dec 1971: 4.8

    And it’s worth pointing out that May isn’t over yet. (Also, May isn’t August, the usual deadliest month.)

    Also, those homicides rates are for one month and still higher than the yearly national rate. Put another way, even if no other people had been murdered in Baltimore before May, and even if no more people were killed from today until 2016, Baltimore would still have an above average annual homicide rate just based on the May killings.

    Population figures are here.

    UPDATED June 4, 2015

  • Life and Death in Baltimore’s Eastern (and Western) District

    See Update for more current data

    More than ten percent of black men in Baltimore’s Eastern District are murdered! Why is this not known? Why is this not discussed with urgency? Why has this been going on for decades?

    This is from my book, Cop in the Hood. I can’t find it anywhere online. It should be. I’m still honestly hoping there is some major error in my math. But if there is, nobody has brought it to my attention. This stats comes from 2000-2006. Though it may have changed slightly, I have no reason to think it’s changed significantly. And to be clear, the “men” I’m talking about are black men:

    The risk of death is astoundingly high. For some of those “in the [drug] game,” the risk of death may be as high as 7 percent annually.* Each year in Baltimore’s Eastern District approximately one in every 160 men aged fifteen to thirty-four is murdered. At this rate, more than 10 percent of men in Baltimore’s Eastern District are murdered before the age of thirty-five.** As shocking as this is, the percentage would be drastically higher if it excluded those who aren’t “in the game” and at risk because of their association with the drug trade. (p. 73)

    And here is the fine print, the dirty details, the footnotes from pages 219-220:

    * Levitt and Venkatesh (Levitt, Steven D., and Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh. 2000. “An Economic Analysis of a Drug- Selling Gang’s Finances.” Quarterly Journal of Economics 115 (3):755–89) show an annual 7 percent death rate for those actively involved in street-level drug dealing. A Baltimore City police officer entering the force in 1982 and retiring in 2007 would have had, roughly, a 0.7 percent chance being killed on duty during those twenty-five years.

    ** More than 11.6 percent of men in the Eastern District are murdered. This is based on homicide and census data. The 2000 Eastern District population for age 15 to 34 is 5,641 (derived from 2000 block-level U.S. Census data). The official U.S. Census citywide undercount for Baltimore was 1.8 percent. I arbitrarily doubled this figure for the Eastern District. Adding 3.6 percent raises the sample population to 5,844. The Eastern District lost 3 percent of its population annually between 1990 and 2000. Following this trend (it may have even accelerated give the massive expansion of Johns Hopkins Hospital), the 2006 population would be 4,867. I keep the 2000 population figure to be more conservative with my estimation of the homicide rate. Daily migration is not taken into account. I do not think this accounts for a large bias in either direction. All homicide victims in the Eastern District are assumed to reside in the district. Likewise no victims outside the Eastern District are assumed to come from the district. Homicide deaths in the Eastern District between 2000 and 2006 (excluding 2003, when I could not acquire data) are, respectively: 59, 38, 61, 55, 35, and 43. The mean is 48.5 murders per year. The demographic characteristics of homicide victims in the Eastern District are estimated from citywide, African American sex and age data. Of the city’s 179 black homicide victims in 2000 age 15 to 34, 168, or 93.9 percent, were men. 78.9 percent of all black male Baltimore homicide victims are 15 to 34 (FBI UCR 2000 Homicide Supplement). Based on these data, the average annual homicide rate for men 15 to 35 is 615 per 100,000. To put it another way, for these men, the odds of being murdered in a single year are 1 in 163. Based on the survival rate function 1 − (1 − r)^x, (r = death rate and x = number of years), 11.6 percent of men are murdered during a twenty-year period.

    Source: Peter Moskos. 2009. Cop in the Hood. Princeton University Press.

  • 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 were black, 63 percent were white). Again, how you want to use or misuse that statistic is up to you. And you need to take it with a large grain of salt. Either at least one person a day needs to be shot to protect somebody from getting killed or seriously hurt. Well, either that or police are cold blooded murderers who fill a one-body-a-day quota in the murder department. I’m more partial to the former explanation…

    But it might be worth mentioning that the combined total for deaths from police shootings in Japan and Britain was… zero. Germany had eight.

    Now ask yourself this: are police-involved killings in the US going up or down. That’s tomorrow’s fact.

    And now, for the nerdy set, some numbers:

    In 2012, police killed a total of 426 people. Of those:

    white men: 267

    black men: 128

    white women: 6

    black women: 4

    “Asian or Pacific Islanders”: 9

    “American Indian or Alaskan Native”: 5

    The rates of justifiable police homicide, are roughly (per 100,000):

    black: 0.33

    Indian/Native American: 0.17

    white: 0.12

    Asian: 0.06

    To put these numbers in some perspective, there were 13,063 total homicides in 2012.

    white men: 4,332

    black men: 5,745

    white women: 1,651

    black women: 858

    Asian men: 160

    Asian women: 82

    Native/Indian men: 72

    Native/Indian women: 22

    The 2012 US homicide rates (per 100,000, and again, roughly):

    black: 16.5

    white: 2.7

    Asian: 1.6

    Indian/Native: 3.2

    One other interesting tidbit, if you’re still with me, is if one looks only at murders in which the killer is known to be a “stranger” (which is just 15 percent of all homicides… and this does not include the larger category of “relationship not determined”). Then the numbers plummet:

    white men: 912

    black men: 812

    white women: 112

    black women: 90

    Asian men: 45

    Asian women: 9

    Native/Indian men: 15

    Native/Indian women: 1

    I mention this because fear and public policy is built so much around the concept of people (I’ll say it: white women) being killed at home or in a robbery by some stranger (I’ll say it again: a black man). And yet there were just 32 such victims in 2012. And 2012 was a high year. 2011 saw just 25 white women killed by black strangers.

    The odds of being killed by a stranger, especially if you’re a woman, are almost infinitesimally small. Though to be fair, they’re still greater than the chance of being killed by lighting or attacked by a shark.

    [Rates are based on these population numbers (which are not cut and dried): white 224 million; black 40 million; Asian 15 million; Native/Indian 3 million. Homicides from the 2012 UCR homicide supplement.]

  • A tale of two cities

    Murder in Baltimore is at a four-year high.

    Murder in New York City is at a record low.

    Meanwhile, from Justin Fenton’s Baltimore Sun article, in other cities:

    Homicides across the country

    Oakland, Calif. — down 25 percent (as of Dec. 12)

    Philadelphia — down 24 percent (as of Dec. 16)

    Flint, Mich. — down 22 percent (as of Dec. 18)

    New Orleans — down 22 percent (as of Nov. 14)

    Chicago — down 19 percent (as of Dec. 8)

    Detroit — down 14.6 percent (as of Dec. 18)

    Baltimore — up 8 percent (as of Dec. 24)

    Newark, N.J. — up 19 percent (as of Dec. 1)

    Washington — up 26 percent (as of Dec. 18)

  • Zimmerman Trial (2): Justice vs. Stand Your Ground

    I received this interesting and thought-provoking email from my friend Alan (bold added):

    It seems to me that if Zimmerman is convicted of a felony, then the Florida laws are apparently defensible. Sure, a guy is allowed to shoot someone in certain circumstances; in this case such circumstances did not present and so he’s going to jail. The laws did not apply and the state justly punishes the perpetrator.

    On the other hand, if the prosecution fails and the court acquits, now we can assert the Florida laws have accommodated the brutal slaying (since you can’t call it “murder”!) of an unarmed youth, and now we can more easily make a case that the FL laws are ridiculous.

    In other words, as liberal pacifists who appreciate the state’s monopoly on armed force, a guilty verdict serves us poorly. It has the welcome effect of obtaining immediate justice for Trayvon Martin’s death (since repealing the laws presumably wouldn’t remove Zimmerman’s protections that applied at the time), but Florida civilians can continue to walk around with concealed weapons and use them with impunity. The long play here is to pull for an acquittal.

    I prefer the short-play here and would like to see the killer of Martin convicted. But I think the Florida stand-your-ground law is so broad (and poorly written) that I can see a legal case for Zimmerman’s acquittal (though not a moral one).

  • Hospital care and gunshot wounds

    A contributing factor to declining homicide. Some more details about what’s gotten better about medical treatment over the past decade. In the BBC.