An emotional story in the Baltimore Sun — related to the “friendly-fire” death of Officer Jacai Colson — about another P.G. County officer who shot and killed his partner and best friend in 1988: “You’re not alone,” Sommers said he told the officer, who has not been identified publicly. “You can’t beat yourself up over…
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Stephen Morgan, my grad-school colleague, released his Baltimore report (co-authored with Joel Pally) that looks at crime and arrests pre- and post-riot. [The Harvard sociology cohort of 1995 always turned to Morgan as the quant guy when we needed help with stats class, which was often. So rather than blame my own limitations and laziness,…
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From some facebook musings of mine: [Update: I’d also look at this by Scott Winship, which goes against my main theme, and is quite convincing.] You just hear the racism and xenophobia, but Trump’s main themes are actually about trade and jobs. Blue-collar white voters feel abandoned by both major political parties… because they have…
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In New York City not only has the number of homicides being going down, but the percentage of homicides committed with a gun has been decreasing. Put another way, there were about 309 people shot and killed in 2011 in NYC (for UCR reasons we’re talking incidents, so this is a bit of an undercount).…
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I don’t post a lot of these videos, but this one is revealing. I honestly didn’t know which way this was going to go. Indian River Country, Florida, December, 2015. 3AM. A man has just gone to the convenience store to buy cigarettes. He’s riding a scooter without tags (that’s southern for “license plate”). Stop…
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Apparently there’s still no need to worry. Here is what I think matters: 2015 will almost assuredly see (we don’t the numbers for sure yet) a double digit in increase in homicide. See this Washington Post piece for a clue. And yet, if you listen to Ames Grawert and James Cullen, there’s no need to…
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My once (and probably future) co-author Nick Selby has this piece in the Washington Post: But a closer look at some statistics shows that the problem is not necessarily an issue of racist cops, and that means fixing the criminal justice system isn’t just an issue of addressing racism in uniform. … Some racial disparities…
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On 26 Feb, 2016, on her very first shift and just 1 day after being sworn in, Ashley Guidon of the Prince William County (VA) Police Department was killed. R.I.P. In honor of Ashley, police are posting their rookie photo. Ashley and two other officers were shot while responding to a domestic-related call. The killed…
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Not that you asked, but here’s a list of (most of) the books I’ve read in the past two years. Seems like I average one every 20 days. The best or at least most memorable of the list? In no particular order: One Righteous Man; The Warmth of Other Suns; A Curious Man; Longitude; Jacksonland;…
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An email from a Chicago Police Officer (emphasis added by me): I wanted to go through our new “investigatory stop report (ISR)” training before I replied. By now you realize we have an extremely long form to fill out every time we do a street stop. The form is ridiculous and redundant but fortunately the…
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