I don’t normally go around asking for stats. I’ll take a good anecdote over a slippery statistics any day. And yet… I feel like an old operator at times saying, “Number, please.” Last night I was writing and had a very simple question: how many US prisoners are in solitary confinement? Seems like a simple and important question since this…
Tag: stats
A felony just ain’t what it used to be!
Lost in all the talk about the NYPD juking the stats is the simple fact that each and every year, the value of felony theft (“grand larceny” in NY State) goes down with inflation. New York State defines felony grand larceny (§155.30) as over $1,000. And this is where it’s been for the past 25 years. This makes the 64%…
Those Slippery Stats
Somebody tried to do to me what I tried to do to the Heritage Foundation. I was accused of playing fast and loose the numbers in my Washington Post op-ed. In the old days I could have just challenged him to a duel. I’d feel pretty confident going into that battle! Instead I have to defend my honor with a…
Sentence Length [or lies from the Heritage Foundation]
In a Heritage Foundation foundation report by Charles Stimson and Andrew Grossman, I learned a very surprising fact: Convicted persons in the United States actually served less time in prison, on average, than the world average and the European average. Among the 35 countries surveyed on this question in 1998, the average time actually served in prison was 32.62 months.…
Baltimore Crime Stats
Peter Hermann writes about playing with the numbers and the problem of accurate reporting. “I would suspect this goes on in most police departments,” Busnuk told me. “Others don’t have the crime problem that we do and don’t have the political pressure. But this kind of reporting is built into the DNA of the police system.” Kind of like how…
Cooking the books?
Anonymous posted a comment on the previous post: I can’t wait for the fudged numbers of the NYPD Comp-stat to be exposed…” Boy, there sure is a lot of chatter about the fudged numbers in the NYPD (and I’m talking about chatter from NYPD officers). I didn’t hear this nearly so much even just a few years ago. It seems…
Cooking the books
In 2007, the Kansas City Police Department reported a 22% drop in crime to the state (and to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report). Now it turns out that crime actually went up 10%. The department basically blames this mix-up on a paperwork mess. Sounds fishy. But having worked in a real big city police department, I kind of believe them.…