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Tag: homicide

  • Bang Bang, My Baby Shot Me Down

    More murders in Chicago. Fewer in NYC. Clearly something is going on. But generally you’ll hear nothing but crickets (or winter winds) blow through the ivory towers. It’s a real shame. These days, most academics will (almost reluctantly) concede that effective policing may play a roll in reducing homicide. And yet still very few academics would dare consider the hypothesis that aggressive — yes sometimes even unpleasant — policing may actually prevent homicides. (And, yes, you can and should be polite and respect the law and state and federal Constitutions at the same time as policing effectively and aggressively. Police work is harder and more dangerous when police go out of the their way to piss off people).

    As some academics may be afraid of digging deeper because they’re afraid of what they’ll uncover. Better to round up the usual suspects of poverty, gangs, racism, drugs, etc. But the NYPD does itself no favors by not giving a damn what people think: “Everything is under control. No need to look here. Keep moving.” But academics and the NYPD need each other. Certainly they do if any lessons are to be learned from the NYPD and applied elsewhere.

    You can’t just “do it like they do in New York” because we don’t know what about what they do in New York works. Is it Compstat? Stop and frisk? Broken Windows? Foot patrol? Zero Tolerance? College-educated police officers? Community policing (whatever that means)? Hot spots (actually, we do know that this works)? Better public housing? Mandatory prison time for illegal gun possession? Decreased incarceration? More immigrants? More eyes on the street? Getting rid of lead? Who knows? But let’s say that one thing the NYPD does pretty well these days in keep homicide numbers low. Well one thing academics do pretty very well is test theories and break things down into parts. There’s a lot going on here. It would be nice to systematically figure out what works. We need to understand these parts so that effective police tactics and strategies can spread to other cities.

    In the meantime, it’s like we’re swinging at a piñata, blindfolded. We took a few swings and feel some contact. But in the end all we see is candy in the floor. So we scoop some up and forget about what we actually did.

  • Bang Bang, That Awful Sound

    Chicago’s 2012 murder total was 532. NYC’s total number for 2012 was 417. Even in absolute numbers this is significantly lower than Chicago! Amazing. The comparable homicide rates for NYC and Chicago are 5 and 20 per 100,000.

    Homicides in New York City declined 19 percent from 2011 (just to remember: in 1990 2,245 people were killed in NYC). To get such a substantial drop on such a low (by US standards) homicide number needs some explaining. Chicago saw a 23 percent increase from 2011.

    Had the New York numbers gone up and the Chicago numbers gone down, you’d hear sage mumblings from chin stroking academics about regression to the mean (which, of course, assumes there is a mean (average) homicide rate toward which to regress… but I digress). I’ll tell you what the answer isn’t: people in New York just loved each other more; while clearly hate was on the rise in Chicago.

    [More tomorrow]

  • Bang Bang, He Shot Me Down

    Eleven people were shot in Chicagoearly New Year’s Day.

    Nine were shot New Year’s morning in New York City.

    Happy New Year.

    Meanwhile, best I can tell, nobody was shot in Baltimore! The Baltimore Sun gives a crude but useful breakdown of basic homicide demographics for the 217 killings in Charm City in 2012. Of note:

    A low Baltimore clearance rate of 47%. Yes, this does mean that more than half of murderers get away with murder (at least for a while). The real clearance rate for the year — if you remove the cases from prior years closed this year — is even lower, 35 percent. The actually odds of getting convicted for homicide in Baltimore? I don’t know. But it’s low.

    As for the victims and killers, the numbers are typical. More than 4 in 5 killed with a handgun. 90% are men. 94% are black and 5% white (Baltimore is about 65% African American). A promising sign is that Baltimore is now about 5% hispanic, and yet only 1 homicide victim was hispanic.

    One-third of victims (more than I would have suspected) were over 35 years old.

    83% of victims had criminal records. 24% were on parole or probation at time of death (this is why some people actually do live longer in prison). 38% of victims had been previously arrested for a gun crime. Of known suspects, 45% had gun-related priors for gun crimes.

  • While I’m out…

    Check out this lengthy piece (and well worth reading the whole thing) by David Simon about murders, stats, the BPD, the state’s attorney’s office, and the need for main-stream media. (And thanks to an anonymous comment for cluing me in.)

    The Stat:

    In 2011, the Baltimore Police Department charged 70 defendants with murder or manslaughter.

    Yet in 2010, the department charged 130 defendants with such crimes.

    …

    What is happening?

    Are Baltimore’s killers showing more cunning, are murders becoming
    harder to solve?  No indication of that from any quarter.  Did the
    homicide unit lose a ton of veteran talent?  Nope.  Not between 2010 and
    2011 at any rate.  No, the dramatic collapse of the department’s
    investigative response to murder is the result of a quiet, backroom
    policy change that has created a bureaucratic disincentive to charge
    people in homicides.

    Also, and unrelated, McCarthy in Chicago says police don’t have to answer stupid 911 calls for service anymore. It might seem minor, but this could have a huge impact on policing (as Chapter Six of Cop in the Hood — “911 is a Joke” — describes in breath-taking page-turning detail). McCarthy is talking about “beat integrity” and says he’s willing to face the political flack for fewer police responses. He also wants to give powers of where police go to police bosses (instead of giving all the power to the dispatcher). This is all good. (Maybe in Baltimore they’ll actually bring a box back to put call in!) From the Sun-Times:

    McCarthy replied that the change was
    already under way, with the goal of creating, what he called “beat
    integrity.” That means leaving police officers to patrol their assigned
    beats, instead of chasing their tails by running from one 911 call to
    another at the behest of dispatchers. …

    “Previously, the dispatcher would direct
    the resources, while the sergeants in the field would basically just be
    receiving them. [Now], sergeants in the field are in charge of
    dispatching resources if they don’t like the way [dispatch] is doing it. …

    [Dispatch] has also abandoned what McCarthy called the “clean screen concept” at the 911 center.

    “They would dispatch a car from one end
    of the district to the other end of a district to simply get the job off
    the screen. That’s the clean screen concept,” he said.

    “What we’re now doing is maintaining
    beat integrity. … If a job comes in in a neighboring beat and it’s not
    an emergency call for service, that job will actually get stacked until
    that beat is available to handle it. That’s what beat integrity is all
    about. Same officers in the same beat every single day. Those officers
    are not only accountable for what’s happening on the beat, they also
    know who the good kids are from the bad kids. They’re not stopping
    everybody. They’re stopping the right people because they know who they
    are.”

    McCarthy said a more dramatic change is
    coming soon, when the Chicago Police Department determines “which jobs
    we’re not gonna respond to” anymore.

    “That’s a call that I’m going to make — and there’s going to be some wrankling about that,” he said.

    “We don’t need to respond to calls for
    service because, ‘My children are fighting over the remote control.’ We
    don’t need to respond to calls for service because, ‘My son won’t eat
    his dinner.’ Unfortunately, believe it or not, those are calls we
    actually respond to today.”

     And the political flack will come when one of the my children are fighting over the remote calls turns into a homicide. But you can’t dedicate half the police department to every idiot who can pick up a phone.

  • Homicide: Toronto vs. Chicago

    I’ve written about this before, but it’s worth a second telling. Besides, how many of you read footnote #14 to the Epilogue of Cop in the Hood?

    Chicago and Toronto are similar sized cities. Chicago is having a record low number of murders; Toronto is having a record high number of murders. Chicago is patting itself on the back; Toronto is in crisis mode. And the numbers:

    Chicago: 450 murders a year.

    Toronto: 60 murders a year.

    Here’s The Crime Report’s summary and the full report from Chicago’s WBEZ.

    And if you think Canada is some homogenous lily-white country, I’d like to point out–because once again it shows that immigrants do not equal crime–that Toronto is half the residents are half foreign-born. Bet you didn’t know that. That has got to be the highest percentage in the world for any big city. And I would also guess that New York City, with about 30% of residents being from another country, is number two.

  • The Racial Reality

    Using the Baltimore Sun’sfun interactive homicide chart, these are the sad and politically incorrect totals for 2010:

    223 homicides: 202 black (91%), 13 white, 5 Hispanic, 1 Asian, 2 unknown(?).

    Overall, the 2009 population of Baltimore is estimated to be 63% African American and 33% white. So roughly, the black homicide rate (50) is eight times the white homicide rate (6.2 — which isn’t that much higher than the national average of 5.4 per 100,000).

    Is there a moral? I don’t know, but certainly we can do better. It’s also clear you can’t talk about this homicide problem without talking about race, and people don’t want to talk about race. Merely broaching the subject can get you labeled as racist. Who wants that? And hell, why should you care? It’s just “them” killing each other, right? And maybe you, no matter your race, moved out of the city a long time ago precisely to get away from this problem. It’s certainly an understandable reaction. But it’s not part of the solution.

    Unless we do something major in terms of changing our drug policy, investing in police, and yes, even spending money on job creation, the killings will continue. These are choices we make. And mostly we choose to do nothing. So the killings continue.

    This isn’t a local problem; it’s a national disgrace.

  • Murders down again in NYC

    Murders down again in NYC

    Illustrating once again that crime and the economy are not inherently linked. The storyin the New York Times.

  • Immigrants and Violence

    In my gut I know that immigrants make neighborhoods safer (at least in this country). I also happen to live in and love a county where 46% of everybody is born in another country. That figure always amazes me… and when you consider the kids of immigrant parents, well, there’s just not too much else left.

    I get kind of patriotic and sentimental when I think of immigrants and America. My mom is an immigrant as were my dad’s parents. Immigrants, past and present, are what makes New York City great and what’s made America great. Compared to other countries (the Netherlands included), this is something the US does right. Relatively open borders, a laissez-faire attitude toward immigrants after they’re here, and a constitutional right to citizenship for anybody born here (a response to white racism after the Civil War) seem to work pretty damn well, Nativist protests notwithstanding.

    The latest issue of Homicide Studies is dedicated to immigration and the evidence, at least judging from this abstract and this one, too, if pretty clear. Immigrants do indeed make neighborhoods safer.

  • John Jay College student’s killer get life without parole

    “Brooklyn Supreme Court Justice Abraham Gerges called Littlejohn, 44, an unrepentant ‘predator’ who should never taste freedom again.”

    The story in the Daily News

  • Homicides and Race

    The New York Times has a nice map of homicides in the city. You can select by various variables, but unfortunately not more than one at a time.

    The Baltimore Sun has a similar but better map.

    I’m always a bit surprised by just how few white homicide victims there are. Or, conversely, how many of the victims are minority. In NYC since 2003 there are about 43 white homicide victims per year out of a population of about 3,700,000. That’s a very low homicide rate of 1.16 per 100,000. That’s a lower rate than Canada!

    Among blacks in NYC, there are about 329 homicide victims a year and 2,240,000 people. That’s a homicide rate of 14.7.

    Meanwhile in Baltimore, in 2007, there were 14 white homicide victims (a rate of about 7) and 252 black victims (a rate of about 60).

    Update: I crunched a few more numbers because, well, I’m curious.

    Overall in the U.S. rate is about 5.6 per 100,000. It’s about 3.3 for whites and 20 for blacks.

    Many other countries have homicide rates under 1. Most civilized countries have rates under 2. We don’t even come close. But America has always been a violent place. I guess the real question is why is white New York City so non-homicidal?

    And in talking about race and crime, I feel compelled to mention gender and crime. Murder really is a guy thing. In NYC just 8% of murderers (and 17% of victims) are women. And most of those are domestic situations. What is it about men? Can’t we all just get along?