The 2015 UCRis finally out. This means we have real numbers on last year. And the numbers are not good. Homicide is up 10.8 percent. That’s biggest increase in 45 years. Don’t downplay it. I’ll talk about that in my next post, but first the boring roundup: Firearms were used in 71.5 percent, which is…
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Murder is up. Who knew? (I’ve been saying so since last October.) Eventually, we’re all going to have to accept this (not in a moral sense but in a statistical sense). The accepted liberal reaction to this increase seems to be “it’s not a big deal” and “Don’t freak out.” Let’s not get “hysterical.” Let’s…
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In minor but fun news, I got a call from the New Orleans Police Department regarding the burglary that happened to us in New Orleans in May. They IDd and arrested the guy who did it! Turns out this very moment — when crime lab took swabbed the energy drink the crook drunk half of…
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The good people at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law have assured us (pdf link to report): Reports of a national crime wave were premature and unfounded, and that “the average person in a large urban area is safer walking on the street today than he or she would have been…
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If we want to reduce police-involved shootings— and we do — why not focus on states where cops shoot the most and learn from states where cops shoot the least? These differences are huge. What is New Mexico doing wrong? What is New York doing right? The top twenty states (ignoring D.C.) are all west…
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In relation to my previous post, it’s not like the NYPD didn’t used to shoot a lot of people. There are two trends going on here. Police-involved shootings always reflect homicide numbers. (Cops are more likely to shoot a murder with a gun.) So there’s a spike in 1990 the then a big drop after…
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Updated: November 15, 2017 Also see this 2020 update. And an important caveat. Using data from 2014 through mid November 2017 (killedbypolice.net for 2014 and the Washington Post thereafter) Oklahoma City Police kill an average of 6.3 per year; NYPD 0.57 a year. The rate in Oklahoma City is 11 times as high. The rate…
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I’ll cut right to the chase, I think this is a bad shooting; but not as bad as many people seem to think. (In my very first sentence, I probably just pissed everybody off.) Terence Crutcher wasn’t armed. And I don’t think he was an imminent threat when he was shot. Therefore it wasn’t reasonable.…
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In reaction to this Missouri law, a friend of mine asked me “why police are not standing up to the gun lobby more vociferously and effectively? It seems to me that their jobs are made immeasurably harder and more dangerous by rollbacks in gun laws such as this.” You’d think, she said, police would want…
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This is pretty striking data, as published in JAMAand reported in Newsweek. From JAMA: States with medical cannabis laws had a 24.8% lower mean annual opioid overdose mortality rate compared with states without medical cannabis laws. Examination of the association between medical cannabis laws and opioid analgesic overdose mortality in each year after implementation of…
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