Police

To call 911 or not to call 911?

May 17 of last year the NYPD issued an obscure order concerning “aided reports” — that’s when a cop responds to a 911 call for a sick person waiting for an ambulance (a “bus,” as they say here) — requiring the officer to enter the person’s information into their phone. This looks all technical and boring. When you put the…

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Police

What’s Up With Crime Being Down in Camden?

Let me start by saying I don’t know much about Camden, New Jersey. So if you know more, help me figure things out. The city of Camden is just across the river from Philadelphia. It’s part of Camden County. The city has a declining population of about 75,000. Camden is about half black and half hispanic. It is, by any…

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Police

More on state differences in cops shooting people

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.…

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Police

Pushing the Ideological Narrative

I updated the Brennan Center’s crime report from 2016, to update it for 2018. I still have this urge to show how goofy their methods are. Why? Because, the authors are still cited by reputable journalists as experts, despite never acknowledging or correcting their past efforts to intentionally mislead journalists and the public. It’s advocacy data-analysis. It’s unethical, wrong, and…

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Police

State variation in police-involved shootings

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…

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