In the New York Times David Brooks repeats John Pfaff’s argument in Slate that the war on drugs isn’t responsible for our crazy high prison population. Brooks vouches for Pfaff as “wonderfully objective, nonideological and data-driven.” That might all be true. Pfaff is probably a swell guy and kind to animals, too. There’s something to…
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Over at Vox there’s a fair and brief look for and against all the theories of the crime drop. 1. There’s about half as much violent crime in the US as there was 25 years ago 2. The theory: putting more people in prison helped reduce crime 3. The theory: putting more police on the…
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As I suspected (and hoped) crime was not up last year. Of course it was up some places (and thus down in others). What a country we live in: we can send a man to the moon and don’t know how many people were murdered in 2014 until late September, 2015. When the 2015 figures…
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Just browsing the 1921 Annual NYPD Report, as you do.
Jarret Murphy over at City Limitspoints out that crime has increased plenty of times in NYC in the past 15 years. And nobody really raised an alarm. This year it’s not even clear that crime is up, despite news accounts saying so. So there’s this a narrative of crime being out of control: Murders are…
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Some stats about the NYPD in the New York Times. Bratton is giving more discretion to local commanders for disciplining cops for minor offenses. That’s good. It’s another move away from the micro-managed overly top-down approach of former Commissioner Ray Kelly. The article then tries to say Bratton is not applying Broken Windows within his…
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You know when you hear that on the subway, some obnoxious person is going to come through, asking for money. Well, I sure am. I don’t ask much of you, gentle reader. But why not give a little money to help feed hungry people? And it will actually go to buying food to put in…
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Interesting conceptreported in the New York Times to get subway dancers out of the subway. An arrest based approach wasn’t working (not the first time you’ve heard that): Arrests alone — though drastically increasing — were not solving the problem, Mr. Bassin said. He said many of the dancers interviewed in the planning stages of…
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There’s an interview with Justin George in The Trace. He was a Baltimore Sun reporter who recently moved on to Milwaukee. I like that he’s willing to consider the possibility there might be some trade-off between aggressive policing, which causes community resentment, and getting illegal guns off the streets, which saves lives: Which of the…
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A new report from the New York’s CCRB (civilian complaint review board) is out. There are some interesting things here. Much more video evidence means more complaints are being substantiated. But overall complaints are down substantially (22%) from one year ago. And this: From January 2014 through June 30, 2015, one percent of identified officers…
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