Author: Moskos

Shooting in NYC, 2020

Quality of life / Broken Windows policing has basically ended in NYC. There simply is no proactive enforcement. Every category is down, from open container to public pissing to being in a park after hours. Collectively all these categories (listed below) resulted in tens of thousands of police public contacts. It correlates with the largest…
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Storming of the Capitol

The these clips are all taken from a 40-minute video by John Sullivan, aka Jayden X. (He was clearly into this, by the way, assisting and cheering along. But document he did.) I’ll taken some clips from his video. The full video is here. It’s worth watching, because these events always are about the passage…
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2020: A Bad Year

I’m just playing with charts and data presentation. If I graphed the number of people shot in NYC and the percent change on the previous year, it’s a challenge when a number that is between -20 and +7 suddenly goes to 100best I can come up with is something like this. Without 2020 it’s much…
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The Violence Reduction Project

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/

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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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