Fact 4: Police-involved killings are going up. This one surprised me. Because police-involved shootings are generally correlated with overall homicides. But homicides are more or less steady right now, and down 10,000 since 1998 (14,000 in 1998, 13,000 in 2012). The trend is about five more killings a year, for the past 15 years. Keep…
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[Update: Using better data, the number is more like three a day.] Fact 3: UCR data on justified police-homicides are notorious incomplete. These numbers are an undercount. But given the data we have, as reported (or not) to the DOJ by local police departments, police kill at least one person a day (426 in 2012,…
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Fact 2: Blacks are more likely than whites to be shot and killed by police, but probably less so than you’d suspect. 34 percent of those killed by police are African American. But put another way, 62 percent of those killed by police are white. (Actual numbers provided in next post.) What you want to…
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Back in 2008 I posted about what I called the “Al Sharpton effect”: cops shooting white people doesn’t generally make the news. That post has gotten a lot of hits recently (roughly 2,000 page views a day, when normally my whole blog gets about 700). So I’ve re-crunched these numbers, both to make them more…
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That’s because I’m out of town, in New Mexico (“not really new and not really Mexico”), and only have my phone to type on. I’ll be back home and posting in about two weeks.
Telling officers what not to do doesn’t tell them what they should do. And it’s never going to look pretty. That doesn’t make it wrong. Here’s my op-ed in today’s New York Daily News: If you’re a cop, how do you cuff a 6-foot-tall, 350-pound man who doesn’t want to go to jail? Most arrests…
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The medical examiner’s office says Eric Garner was murdered. To wit: “compression of neck (chokehold), compression of chest and prone positioning during physical restraint by police.” Asthma, heart disease, diabetes, and obesity were contributing factors. His death has been ruled a homicide, and presumably we’re going to be in for a Staten Island trial with…
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This recent decision in DC saying there is right to carryis actually bigger news than you’d think. Why? Because up till now you did not have that right. This decision asserts constitutional rights beyond what the Supreme Court has ever ruled. The Court said that the government cannot prevent you from having a gun in…
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I just learned that cops in Greece have to be at least 5’7″ (170 cm) tall. Male and female. That’s crazy. Hell, I’m just barely over the cutoff. …which is the highest minimum in Europe, along with Malta, Romania and Serbia. At 152cm, Belgium has the lowest height requirement. Female applicants in Greece must also…
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So asks W. James Antle III in the Daily Caller. The answer is no, even with death of Eric Garner. But it is an arrestable offense. And that’s a problem for police. It should be a problem for society. But people love passing stupid laws and then getting upset with police for enforcing them.