It’s up. It’s live. It’s a bunch of smart people and their ideas about what to do about violence, right now. https://qualitypolicing.com/violencereduction/
Year: 2020
Murders in concentrated locations
There’s an article by Frank Main in the Chicago Sun-Times about the deadliest police district in Chicago. It’s a small area on the West Side of Chicago. My eyes went to the blue area, below. About 3 by 15 square blocks. Maybe 34 of those blocks are residential. Perhaps about 650 houses in all. Nice housing stock. Maybe 5,000 residents?…
The disparity that dare not speak its name
The recent increase in racial disparity in violence victims in NYC is getting worse. The disparity was always large. Nut now it’s worse. This year, through September, 1,430 New Yorkers have been shot. Five months between January and May, 366. Four months between June–September, 1,064. 1,064 is 2.6X compared to June–September last year. Over these past four months, a black…
Bail Reform’s “Collateral Damage”?
I know defund police police and prison advocates ignore this kind of case and accuse those who mention this of “sensationalizing” crime. But somebody was murdered. And if we don’t talk about this, how do we prevent it from happening again? As reported in the Daily News: “The diminutive 5-foot-tall Armand … was ordered by Judge April Neubauer to attend…
When you believe in crazy…
So last night I listened to a online discussion with Bill Bratton and Connie Rice. Bratton, you probably know, is the former police commissioner/chief of the NYPD and LAPD. Rice graduated from Harvard and NYU Law and is a civil rights attorney, activist, and a former member of President Barack Obama’s Taskforce on 21st Century Policing. That last part matters.…
Issues with analyzing police use of deadly force
Justin Nix has a good article (academic, but plain English and not behind paywall) about the dangers of using cops-killing-people as a variable. He writes in response to an article by Schwartz and Jahn that maps “police violence” across U.S. metropolitan areas. Schwartz and Jahn find, as have I, that Rates of police-related fatalities varied dramatically, with the deadliest MSAs…
History isn’t Bunk, part 2: New York City Police
This is Part Two. Part One is here. Jill Lepore has an article in the New Yorker about the invention of police that somehow manages to sidestep every thing I know about the history of police. I know a little about the history police history. Much more, I suspect, than Jill Lepore. I discussed a key problem of Lepore’s perspective…
History isn’t Bunk, part 1
This is Part One of Two. There’s so much Jill Lepore gets wrong in her New Yorker article “The Invention of the Police.” The spoiler is in the subtitle: “Why did American policing get so big, so fast? The answer, mainly, is slavery.” She seems to ignores the actual history of police in America, but I’ll get to that in…
Reliable NYC Crime Data: Yes, shootings are up.
[Warning, this is a whole lot of nothing-burger in the end. But still, for those interesting in crime data, it might be worth reading.] Shootings are up so much in NYC that social scientists are left accusing the NYPD of “juking” the stats. Now I’ve been using NYPD data for a long time and compared to, well, every other source…
The Jenga-like end of a safe NYC
Betteridge’s law of headlines states: “Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.” I hope I’m wrong and Betteridge is right. This piece of mine was in the Daily News. Violence in New York is up. If you ask the NYPD, the 30-year New York City crime decline is over. Police have been…