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…
Read more
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…
Read more
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…
Read more
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.…
Read more
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…
Read more
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…
Read more
[This relates to my previous post] Years ago, like when I was 13, I was with my father, driving from NYC to Chicago, on a baseball road trip (he drove). Between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, we spent one night in Johnstown, PA. (Remember the Johnstown Flood!). After watching the Johnston Jonnies play baseball, we had dinner…
Read more
This picture of adults overdosing when a kid in their car has been making the rounds since police in East Liverpool, Ohio, posted it on facebook. The police department wrote: We are well aware that some may be offended by these images and for that we are truly sorry, but it is time that the…
Read more
The NYPD released its response to the “quality-of-life policing is bad” report issued by the NYC Dept of Investigation. Guess what? Quality-of-life policing is good! (The original report, the one this responds to, is titled, and I’m not joking: “The New York City Department Of Investigation’s Office Of The Inspector General For The New York…
Read more
It’s unclear how big of a problem this is. But even that is part of the problem. The fact that it happens at all is horrible. You’d also think police departments, even the tiny ones (much less Cleveland), would be a bit more inclined to do a more thorough background check. Maybe pick up the…
Read more