Just last month, I swear I told my class, “People won’t talk about crime until a cute white girl gets murdered.” Tessa Majors, unfortunately, is that woman. Would her murder be getting as much press if she had been black? I doubt it. But who knows? Turns out not a lot college students of any race get robbed and killed.…
The 2018 murder rate is down from the previous two years, but higher than we’ve seen in 6 of the past 10 years. Last year’s murder rate is the same as 2015. And 2009! And yet I keep hearing every year that violence is down. So what’s this trend? And sort of related, why do some people insist on the…
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.…
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…
Recently I came across a breathless headline in Salon: “Number of fatal shootings by police is expected to reach 1,000 for third year.” That’s an odd way to put it because A) it implies the number has been at a record high the past three years when B) this is only the third of three years the Washington Post has…
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…
There’s an article in Criminology & Public Policy by Justin Nix, Bradley Campbell, Edward Byers, and Geoffrey Alpert that has gotten some press: “A Bird’s Eye View of Civilians Killed by Police in 2015: Further Evidence of Implicit Bias” Although we could not determine whether officers were quicker or more likely to fire their weapon at minority suspects, we argue…
My previous post was supposed to be about this article by Frank Zimring from 42 years ago. But then I got caught up in the false data put out by the Brennan Center. A friend sent me this fascinating article (“A Tale of Two Cities,” Franklin Zimring, December 20, 1974, Wall Street Journal, p.14) because some of it regarding “the…
Two days ago in the Bronx, an NYPD sergeant shot and killed Deborah Danner, a 66-year-old with schizophrenia armed with a baseball bat. Deborah Danner’s death is a tragedy. It is a failure of the system. But almost immediately, the officer who shot was stripped of his badge and gun and denounced by the mayor and police commissioner. DeBlasio —…
For the life of me, I can’t figure what Yourse is going to be charged with. Even with the game rigged in cops’ favor, I don’t see a crime. Yourse is under arrest after 9:10 when the officer doesn’t take kindly to Yourse invited his friends over. I can understand why the officer doesn’t want a posse of friends showing…