Justin Fenton on solving homicides in the Sun: A couple of decades ago — the last time the city saw so much killing — Baltimore’s homicide unit closed more than 70 percent of its cases. Veterans talk of returning to the office from a crime scene to find a fistful of tips waiting for them. [Former Commissioner Thomas Frazier broke…
Tag: rising crime
The Ferguson Effect
Another good piece by Leon Neyfakh at Slate.com. This one on the “Ferguson Effect.”
Liberals eating themselves
In the Comey story, in which a seemingly liberal FBI director discusses crime, police, race, and history and get pilloried by the left, the New York Times takes the cake. In some Bizarro World I’m not part of, The Grey Lady deemed Comey’s comments “incendiary” and playing “into the right-wing view that holding the police to constitutional standards endangers the…
Three Cheers for FBI Director Comey
It’s kind of funny to watch the Left completely freak out at the mere suggestion from Comey that viral videos might have an impact on police on crime. See thisand this and this: "But he acknowledged that there is so far no data to back up his assertion…" https://t.co/ShhyMlv50H — Christopher Hayes (@chrislhayes) October 23, 2015 And this: Mr. Comey’s remarks…
Believe the hype: Murder is going up
A few months ago I warned people not to believe the hype (at least in NYC). But all signs do now indicate the murders are up. The numbers below come from “The Brainroom” at Fox News. They compiled publically released data from city police departments. There are some cities where murder isn’t up, of course, but fewer and fewer. The…
Crime is/isn’t up!
Jarret Murphy over at City Limitspoints out that crime has increased plenty of times in NYC in the past 15 years. And nobody really raised an alarm. This year it’s not even clear that crime is up, despite news accounts saying so. So there’s this a narrative of crime being out of control: Murders are up 5 percent!!! (Maybe a…
Post-Riot Baltimore: Arrests Down and Gun Crimes Up
Total arrests per day are in orange. Firearms crimes per day are the lower lines, in blue. (Click to embiggen) The bottom axis represents the numbered day of year. 1 is Jan 1. 178 is June 27th. The riot was on April 27, day 117. This was partly inspired by a frustrating discussion on the radio yesterday in which one…
Problems are the reason for your job
But still, this is getting a little crazy. Click to embiggen. Before the riots, there were 0.58 homicides per day in Charm City. Since April 27, there have been 1.44 homicides per day. That’s an increase of 150 percent! (148%, to be precise) And the increase happened literally overnight. I don’t think that has happened before. Anywhere. Ever. Well, “it’s…
Is there a new crime wave?
“Don’t bet on it,” say Frank Zimring in the NY Daily News. I could not have said it better myself: At their current rate, killings in New York City would end 2015 as either the third or fourth lowest year in the city’s modern history. “Ferguson Effect”? Doesn’t look like it. … To a student of crime data, this sounds…
How about telling cops what they should do rather than what they shouldn’t do?
Here’s my piece in today’s New York Times: Critics of police — and there have been a lot this past year — are too focused on what we don’t want police to do: don’t make so many arrests; don’t stop, question and frisk innocent people; don’t harass people; don’t shoot so many people, and for God’s sake don’t do any…