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Tag: rising crime

  • The “Freddie Gray Era”

    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 up that homicide squad to increase diversity in its ranks. He accomplished his goal; the homicide clearance rate plummeted.]

    But the widening gulf between police and the community since then has made witness cooperation a rarity.

    Forensic science has advanced, and surveillance cameras have grown common in the city. But detectives say witnesses remain the most important element in successfully bringing charges against a suspect.

    The challenges are not exclusive to Baltimore, but are being felt here more acutely. Among similar-sized cities in 2014, the average for cases closed — through arrest or other means, such as the death of the suspect — was 56 percent.

    In Baltimore, it was 45 percent. This year, it has fallen to 31 percent.

    …

    Detectives say they have suspects in as many as three-quarters of cases, but in many instances they lack the evidence to move forward or can’t convince prosecutors, who in recent years have wielded more authority over detectives’ ability to charge.

    You want cause and effect between politicians’ rhetoric, a narrative that says police can’t be trusted, and less trust in police? There you go. And prosecutors are spending their precious resources putting six cops on trial. It’s all just the perfect shit storm. And as a result people are literally getting away with murder. There is no justice and indeed, no peace.

  • 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 public. … His formulation implies that for the police to do their jobs, they need to have free rein to be abusive.”

    No, he doesn’t say that or even imply it. Where do they get this from?! It seems like they first wrote an unfair headline about Comey, and then exploded in outrage over their own bad reporting. Classy.

    From a liberal perspective, Comey shows an amazing understanding of the problem. Given what he is actually saying, Comey will have a much greater problem with maintaining credibility with the conservative right, ie: most cops.

    Comey said so much. I know from personal experience that the Times might call someone, say, a “denier of reality” not because of anything actually said but because of a 2nd-hand out-of-context misquote they were pointed to in a conservative rag. So perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised that because Comey said one thing — something any cop will tell you — because Comey veered ever so slightly from the Party Line by suggesting the possibility that viral videos might be [gasp] having some impact on policing, the Times concludes that Comey, “hasn’t begun to grasp the nature of the problem.” Did they even listen to what he said? I kind of doubt it.

  • 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:

    And this:

    Mr. Comey’s remarks caught officials by surprise at the Justice Department, where his views are not shared at the top levels. Holding the police accountable for civil rights violations has been a top priority at the department in recent years, and some senior officials do not believe that scrutiny of police officers has led to an increase in crime. While the department had no immediate comment on Friday, several officials privately fumed at Mr. Comey’s suggestion.

    Here’s a speech he gaveon Oct 15. It’s worth listening to (it’s just 6 minutes).

    This is a thoughtful and intelligent guy. And most of his comments are far too liberal for the police world. I mean, check out what he said yesterday: Cops can learn from #blacklivesmatter. Shocking, I tell you. Shocking.

    More people are being killed. And Comey is thinking. And he’s saying we need more and better data. And yeah, maybe viral videos and political fall-out have an effect on policing. Uh, of course they have an effect on policing. So let’s talk.

    You can read the text of his more recent speech here.

    As no great person ever said, “The clairvoyance of injustice is dogmatic in its complexity.” (Thanks to @AyeRishPirate)

  • 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 list isn’t a random sample, but it does includes all the biggies.

    All stats are 2015 year-to-date % increases versus the same time period last year.

    • Austin, TX: +83.3% (22 murders versus 12, through Aug. 31)

    • Denver: +75% (28 murders versus 16, through July 31)

    • Milwaukee, WI: +68.3% (101 murders versus 60, through Sept. 28)

    • Baltimore, MD: +54.5% (255 murders versus 165, through Oct. 3)

    • St. Louis: +51.5% (153 murders versus 101, through Aug. 31)

    • Washington, DC: +46.3% (120 murders versus 82, through Oct. 6)

    • Houston: +34.4% (168 murders versus 125, through July 31)

    • Chicago: +21.3% (359 murders versus 296, Sept. 27)

    • New Orleans: +13.8% (131 murders versus 115, through Oct. 6)

    • Los Angeles: +12.2% (221 murders versus 197, through Oct. 3)

    • Atlanta: +9.2% (71 murders versus 65, through Sept. 26)

    • New York: +7.1% (257 murders versus 240, through Sept. 27)

    • Philadelphia: +6.6% (209 murders versus 196, through Oct. 6)

    The New York Timesadds Kansas City, Mo and Dallas to the list:

    KC is up from 45 to 54. Dallas from 71 to 83.

    In these cities you have a total 25 percent increase in killings. It’s hard to imagine decreases elsewhere that would compensate for this. A nationwide 10 percent increases needs an additional 1,400 murders. What we have here, extrapolating a bit, is a year end total of maybe 770 more killings in 15 cities.

    Why is this? Who knows? Anti-police ideologues will insist on the same tried and failed theories of the past. Call me crazy, but it seems to me the only really relevant variable in the past year has been all the police-related events of the past year.

    From the Washington Post (worth reading):

    “We have allowed our police department to get fetal and it is having a direct consequence,” Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel told Lynch. “They have pulled back from the ability to interdict … they don’t want to be a news story themselves, they don’t want their career ended early, and it’s having an impact.”

  • 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 bit more after a bloody weekend.) But 5 percent is pretty statistically minor. And we are coming off a record low year.

    Do you remember the bloody year of 1999? I don’t. But the FBI says the number of murders in New York City rose 6 percent that year. How about scary 2006, when the number of killings jumped 10.6 percent? Do you recall the fear with which we all tiptoed through 2008, when the city saw a 5 percent rise in slayings? Don’t get that mixed up with 2010, when the city reported a 14 percent increase in murders.

    Somehow, “Bloody Ninety-Nine” didn’t smudge Rudy Giuliani’s reputation as America’s greatest crimefighter. Nor did the four increases in the annual murder count during Michael Bloomberg’s 12 years in office dent his image as a cool and competent manager. In fact, none of these significant spikes in bloodshed triggered the kind of public concern about crime now gripping columnists and some elected officials.

    …

    Indeed, if de Blasio is guilty of politicizing the actual crime statistics, it’s mainly because his opponents are guilty of politicizing the imaginary crime stats they derive from news headlines, gut instinct and their pre-written narrative that de Blasio is really just John Lindsay standing on his tip-toes.

    Maybe it’s good we’ve become less tolerant of crime increases. And maybe the sky will start to fall. But it’s not falling yet.

  • Post-Riot Baltimore: Arrests Down and Gun Crimes Up

    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 person was trying to assert that Baltimore hasn’t seen any increase in violent crime related to the riot and its aftermath. What world is he living in?”It was up before the riots.” Yeah, a bit. “It’s seasonal. Shootings go up in warmer weather.” Not this much, they don’t! (And shootings were actually down in June compared to cooler May). But then the same guy also insisted there was no riot. (It was, of course, a “rebellion.”) Methinks his ideology may be trumping reason.

    I like to think that facts matter, especially when lives are ending. So here we ago again….

    I’ve already looked at the massive increase in homicides (one more person each day is being killed in Baltimore post-April 27). This time I thought I’d look at gun crimes, which correlate very well with homicides, just to get a bigger N (more cases). And I excluded outlier arrests numbers from April 27 and 28 (which were 178 and 143, respectively).

    These data go up to June 27, 2015. Before the riots, there were 3.4 recorded gun crimes per day (those classified as shootings, homicides, and aggravated assault with firearms) and 87 arrests. (Back in in the 2000s, there were roughly 275 arrests per day, which is worth noting.)

    After the riots, there were 7.7 daily gun crimes and 60 arrests. That actually less of a decline in arrests than I suspected. But it’s still a one-third decrease. Gun crimes are up 118% post riot.

    The good news, limited though it is, is the current trend. Arrests are inching up back up to “normal” and gun crimes are declining. While of course correlation doesn’t automatically mean causation, I beg anybody to offer an alternative hypothesis here. This social scientist is willing to assert cause and effect.

    Here are the number this year compared to last year:

    2014 pre-April 27: 3.4 gun crimes per day and 114 arrests.

    2014 post-April 27: 4.9 gun crimes per day and 117 arrests.

    2015 pre-April 27: 3.4 gun crimes/day (identical to 2014), 87 arrests.

    2015 post-April 27: 7.7 gun crimes per day and 60 arrests.

    So we might have expected a 40 percent increase in gun crimes after April 27 as a seasonal factor. We saw a 126 percent increase.

    (It’s worth pointing out that I’m not saying arrests are good just for their own sake, but they can be a good indicator — a proxy — for more general discretionary crime-preventative proactive policing.)

    [see future post: The Freddie Gray Effect in Baltimore]

    Source: Baltimore Open Crime data.

  • Problems are the reason for your job

    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 a gang war,” says the police commissioner. No, it’s not. “There’s enough narcotics on the streets of Baltimore to keep it intoxicated for a year,” says the police commissioner. If only!

    It’s summer. Shootings always goes up in the summer. Well, that is true. But that’s not the problem, either.

    According to BPD data, in the 28 days from May 10 to June 6, there were 127 shootings and homicides in 2015. Last year same time? 50. Robberies of convenience stores and gas stations? Up from 5 to 21. (Robberies overall are up “only” 32 percent compared to last year (28 days) and 12 percent year to date. But I do wonder if street robberies, the largest category, are less likely to be reported to police as of late.)

    Police matter. Leadership matter. And I don’t see things getting better in the police department until we see better leadership.

  • 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 much more like white noise than a blaring siren.

    …

    There are real increases in violence in Baltimore, Maryland in recent weeks and perhaps in St. Louis, but making that into a national crime wave deserves an Olympic medal for jumping to conclusions.

    Why Mac Donald’s fearful haste?

    On the subject on Zimring, I always show this 9-minute Vera talk on why crime went down in the 1990s. It’s the best 9 minutes you’ll ever hear on the subject.

  • 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 of it in a racially biased way.

    Those are worthy goals all, but none of this tells police what they *should* do. Some critics of police seem to forget that the job of police and crime prevention involves dealing with actual criminals.

    It’s a perfectly fine short piece. I do want to move the discussion away from what police shouldn’t do to what police should do. But I find the whole New York Times “room for debate” concept a bit disingenuous. Because there’s no debate. As a writer, I don’t know who else is writing or what they are going to say. It really would be nice to respond to other points and flesh out the issues. Instead “room for debate” is a collection of 300-400 word op-eds. Perhaps that is what it should called: “Room for too-short opinion pieces from people willing to write for free just to get a Times byline.” Doesn’t really roll of the tongue, admittedly.

    (On principle, in solidarity with free-lance writers everywhere, I try not to write for free, especially to for-profit businesses. Writing is work. And workers should be paid. A proper 800-1,000 word op-ed published in the print edition of the Times or the Washington Post or the Daily News or with CNN.com generally pays $200 – $300. A dollar figure that has actually decreased for some publication. Now the $300 I get from CNN is not a lot of money, mind you. But it really is the principle… and the money. And yet once again I wrote for the Times for free because it’s the Times. So much for principles. Or money. But it is pretty easy for me to hammer out 300 words.)