Police-involved shootings in Chicago are way down. From heyjackass.com This is great news for advocates of police reform. Chicago in 2016 will probably see police shoot just 15 or so people (based quite sketchily on January through March figures). This compares to 45 people shot in 2014. The decrease is without doubt due in part to those who keep a…
Stephen Morgan, my grad-school colleague, released his Baltimore report (co-authored with Joel Pally) that looks at crime and arrests pre- and post-riot. [The Harvard sociology cohort of 1995 always turned to Morgan as the quant guy when we needed help with stats class, which was often. So rather than blame my own limitations and laziness, I prefer to entirely and…
In New York City not only has the number of homicides being going down, but the percentage of homicides committed with a gun has been decreasing. Put another way, there were about 309 people shot and killed in 2011 in NYC (for UCR reasons we’re talking incidents, so this is a bit of an undercount). In 2013: 188. That’s a…
Apparently there’s still no need to worry. Here is what I think matters: 2015 will almost assuredly see (we don’t the numbers for sure yet) a double digit in increase in homicide. See this Washington Post piece for a clue. And yet, if you listen to Ames Grawert and James Cullen, there’s no need to worry: Rather than stoking unfounded…
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…
Denying the Ferguson Effect and any link between policing and crime has become almost a cottage industry in some circles. It’s sort of the liberal equivalent of conservatives denying climate change and, er, on the small chance it is changing, any link between global warming and human activity. Sure, the world may be warmer. But God works in mysterious ways.…
I’d like to double down on the 2015 homicide increase. I’ve made a habit of offering a $100 bet to anybody says “we don’t know if homicides are up.” What’s odd is that nobody has taken my bet. Some insist that crime can’t really be up till the data is formally compiled and tell us it is. That’s an odd…
The latest Brennan Center report projects the 30 largest cities will see a 14.6 percent increase in homicide this year. You know the last time the nation saw a 15 percent annual increase in the homicide rate? Never. Remain Calm. All is well. But don’t worry, they say in their best “you are getting sleepy” voice. There’s no reason to…
No. (Update: Actually, turns out a more people did than I thought. See the comments.) But lot’s of people are refuting the claim, nevertheless. Fivethirtyeight.com says: Scare Headlines Exaggerated The U.S. Crime Wave: If you’ve read reports of a U.S. crime wave this year and wondered how many cities it was really affecting, you’re not alone. Which headlines are these?…
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…