A study by Daryl Fischer shows that 94 percent of Arizona state inmates are repeat or violent offenders. That “or” is important. “The myth that we’re filling our prisons with first-time drug offenders is not true.” Well sort of. It is generally true (with some notable exceptions) that people don’t do prison time for non-violent…
Read more
Last week the BPD announced that they were suspending comstat. I’m not certain if that’s cutting edge or retro. Perhaps it’s time to suspend compstat here in NYC. I don’t think anybody wants a police department that doesn’t hold commanders accountable and use the timely analysis of crime data, but (and this is putting it…
Read more
In this era of tight budgets, smaller cities and towns should consider disbanding the local SWAT team. They’ll save money on training, equipment and overtime. They’ll be returning to a less aggressive, less militaristic, more community-oriented method of policing. And though there always will be crime, it seems unlikely that should they do away with…
Read more
Prince George’s County Police Department Chief Roberto L. Hylton has been very quick to express outrage at the beat down a few of his officers gave to a college student. I’m just curious where chief Hylton was that night. Did he have somewhere more important to be? Really. Where was he if not out there…
Read more
The beating looks bad (oh, hell, it is bad), but will be defending by some. Hell, it isn’t easy being told to restore order in riot. But lying on your report? Now that gets you fired. But regardless of the specifics, what are you supposed to do with thousands of stupid drunk stupid college students…
Read more
Streetsblog New York did an interview with me about police and traffic enforcement. It’s a good interview, even if “Talking Traffic with Peter Moskos” sounds like the world’s worst Sunday morning AM radio show.
“Southern Succession and the Civil War were about slavery.” If your response is, “duh!” then just ignore this. But if you believe otherwise, if you think hundreds of thousands of people were fighting and dying for the principle of preserving the union or abstract concepts of state’s rights, if you think Robert Lee was an…
Read more
If Tennessee Republican Congressman John Duncan is to be believed, we spend $860 million for the Air Marshal Service. They make an average of 4.2 arrests per year. Not per officer. But the entire agency. That works out to $200 million per arrest. Now I’m the first to say let’s not judge police by arrest…
Read more
There’s a good article by Tom Siegfried in Science News about what’s wrong with statistics. Take the idea of statistical significance. Much of social science is based on the (very arbitrary) idea that for any given correlation, there should be a less than 5% chance of that result being due to random chance. [And as…
Read more