[Update: Cut to the chase. You might just want to read my summary post.] One of my liberal de Blasio-loving not-so-fond-of-cops friend send me an email with the subject “you gotta check yo facts” and a link to ProPublica: “Young black males in recent years were at a far greater risk of being shot dead…
Read more
I asked Jim, my Dominican-born Austin-raised San Francisco-living white friend, why he thought so many Californian cities were high on my PIHN list. He thought for a very few short seconds and answered, “because hispanics aren’t violent but police think they are.” I love over-generalizations and stereotypes that could very well be true. So I…
Read more
The winner, still by far, is Riverside, CA. But sneaking into second place is Mesa, Arizona, the only non-Californian city in the top 6. Here’s the top 20 with the PIHN. All 20 are west of the Mississippi: Riverside: 31 Mesa: 14 San Diego: 12 Sacramento: 9 Bakersfield: 8 Seattle: 8 Portland: 8 Albuquerque: 7…
Read more
The city of Riverside, California appears to be, by far, the city in which police are most likely to commit justifiable homicide. I listed a rough rank order of cities in my previous post. Riverside is almost 50 percent higher than the next highest cities, St. Louis and Baltimore. (Even more so if one takes…
Read more
I’ve invented a statistic (and acronym) called PIHN (pronounced “pin”). It stands for “Police-Involved Homicide Number.” PIHN looks at police-involved homicides but takes a city’s violence into account. PIHN assumes a (very questionable) direct relationship between homicides in a city and the number police-involved homicides one might expect. A high PIHN means that there are…
Read more
The data on police-involved shootings are notoriously bad (that’s a link to Jon Stewart worth clicking on!). And yet, at least we kind of know which data are missing. That makes the data not as bad as you might think. At least when it comes to police-involved justifiable homicides (for shootings, we don’t know. But…
Read more
The tenth and perhaps last in a series from Sgt. Adam Plantinga’s excellent 400 Things Cops Know: Street-Smart Lessons from a Veteran Patrolman: Once the fleeing vehicle has finally come to a halt, your training dictates that you then conduct a high risk stop. You park your squad car in a position of tactical advantage…
Read more
This is the second of two postson basic math. Use rates when you want compare something in groups of different sizes. Say New York City has 400 homicides a year. Say Baltimore City has 300 homicides. Is New York more dangerous than Baltimore because New York has more homicides. No. Because New York is much…
Read more
As promised, here is how to determine basic percentages. Too many of my college students don’t understand basic percentages. Clearly GTF has the same problem. So here is how it works — in words — with no math symbols. I’m totally serious. It’s never too late to learn. And not knowing how to relate “doubled”…
Read more
marijuana I wonder if an end-the-drug war voter is just an law-and-order conservative whose backyard okra garden was raided by local cops after being spotted from a helicopter funded by the Drug Enforcement Agency Domestic Cannabis Eradication/Suppression Program? Barstow County, Georgia, resident Dwayne Perry may be a recent convert: “I do the right thing and…
Read more