This is Part One of Two. There’s so much Jill Lepore gets wrong in her New Yorker article “The Invention of the Police.” The spoiler is in the subtitle: “Why did American policing get so big, so fast? The answer, mainly, is slavery.” She seems to ignores the actual history of police in America, but…
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Shootings are up so much in NYC that social scientists are left accusing the NYPD of “juking” the stats. Now I’ve been using NYPD data for a long time and compared to, well, every other source of data I’ve every used, NYPD data is pretty damn good. Seriously. They are smart people there and they…
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Betteridge’s law of headlines states: “Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.” I hope I’m wrong and Betteridge is right. This piece of mine was in the Daily News. Violence in New York is up. If you ask the NYPD, the 30-year New York City crime decline…
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I just want to put this out here so *I* don’t forget. I somehow hadn’t heard of Tony Timba until like two weeks ago. This is an egregious Floyd like case of a man killed by cops. But only Floyd, here there was also a cover up and there was no accountability. Cops did nothing…
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In some ways this is yet another too typical police-involved shooting (not that police-involved shootings are typical — these kind of calls get handled in the thousands “without incident”). But it’s all here: a man with a gun, mentally disturbed, confronted by police. And not for the first time. The man is black, unlike the…
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So I’ve done a little work using the data from FatalEncounters.org on people shot and killed by police. Fatal Encounters is like the Washington Post database, but for adults. I combined/merged this with a city or police department’s population, number of cops, average number of murders in the jurisdiction (over 4 or 3 years), median…
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In some ways this is a very typical police-involved shooting, not that police-involved shootings are are typical. But it’s all here: a man with a gun, probably mentally disturbed, confronted by police. And not for the first time. The man is white. You hear cops saying, “We can help you.” You also hear the de…
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I saw some tweets from a certain kind of professorial class saying: “COVID fatality rate is now about 125/100K in NYC. So why do people over-react to small rises in the murder rate, which is just 5/100K.” In high-crime neighborhoods, such as Baltimore’s Eastern and Western Districts, the murder rate is 125 per 100,000 EVERY…
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Just last month, I swear I told my class, “People won’t talk about crime until a cute white girl gets murdered.” Tessa Majors, unfortunately, is that woman. Would her murder be getting as much press if she had been black? I doubt it. But who knows? Turns out not a lot college students of any…
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My op-ed in the Daily News: Police officer Lesly Lafontant emerged form a coma yesterday after a bystander, Kwesi Ashun, somehow deemed it appropriate to beat Lafontant with a metal chair while Lafontant was trying to arrest Dewayne Hawkes, wanted on a warrant, after Hawkes had urinated on the floor on a nail salon. Ashun…
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