This article in Slate by Justin Peters is perhaps not the stupidest thing I’ve ever read on policing. But it is the stupidest thing I’ve read about Broken Windows since Bratton was announced as the next NYPD commissioner about 20 hours ago. Peters writes, “Broken-windows strategies and zero-tolerance policing strategies go hand in hand.” Well,…
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NBC Chicago Reports via Atlantic Cities: Chicago closed out the first 11 months of 2013 with 380 murders, a drop from 474 in the same period of 2012, according to police data. That’s the fewest for any year in Chicago since 1965, according to Adam Collins, the Chicago Police Department Director of News Affairs.
This is exciting news for policing (and police research) in NYC.
Dang is the Onion funny. Watch the video here.
What? It’s true! (Even if it is from 1909.) Why do I mention this? Maybe because it all started when a Greek-American shot and killed South Omaha Police Officer Ed Lowery. Or maybe not. Look, this has nothing to do with police (except for the aforementioned killing), but my third book is finally out. It’s…
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It’s being reportedthat fatal NYPD police-involved shootings were way up in 2012. They are, but it’s a non-story. Indeed, fatal police-involved shootings increased from 9 to 16, but better aim and luck were probably the reasons why. Police-involved shootings were only up by 2, to 30. (And this even though the average distance from which…
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The Post reports (and some cops confirm) that word on the street is that cops can’t stop anybody anymore. Of course that’s not true. But it still make for some chilling anecdotes. “You can’t be stopping me, yo! The cops can’t be harassing us!” He was still frisked. And yet there is still no apparent…
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There are two main clearinghouses for crime stats in this country, the UCR (The Uniform Crime Report) and the NCVS (National Crime Victimization Survey). The former is collected from police departments and thus only includes reported crime as recorded by the police. The latter is conducted by surveys and sampling and asks people (160,000 per…
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(Can you guess I was just on buzzfeed? A better headline would be “Murders way down in NYC. And so are stop and frisks. And nobody seems to care.” But what kind of clickbaite would that be?) 1) Breakdown of NYC stops by race. Indeed, as often reported, 83% of stops have happened to black…
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Waste an hour watching my dangerous idea at the Sydney Opera House’s 2013 Festival of Dangerous Ideas: There’s also me on a panel “Getting Soft on Crime”: You can watch all the Dangerous Ideas here. What an amazing weekend and amazingly well run festival! Thanks to everybody at FODI.