The city of Riverside, California appears to be, by far, the city in which police are most likely to commit justifiable homicide. I listed a rough rank order of cities in my previous post. Riverside is almost 50 percent higher than the next highest cities, St. Louis and Baltimore. (Even more so if one takes…
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I’ve invented a statistic (and acronym) called PIHN (pronounced “pin”). It stands for “Police-Involved Homicide Number.” PIHN looks at police-involved homicides but takes a city’s violence into account. PIHN assumes a (very questionable) direct relationship between homicides in a city and the number police-involved homicides one might expect. A high PIHN means that there are…
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The data on police-involved shootings are notoriously bad (that’s a link to Jon Stewart worth clicking on!). And yet, at least we kind of know which data are missing. That makes the data not as bad as you might think. At least when it comes to police-involved justifiable homicides (for shootings, we don’t know. But…
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The tenth and perhaps last in a series from Sgt. Adam Plantinga’s excellent 400 Things Cops Know: Street-Smart Lessons from a Veteran Patrolman: Once the fleeing vehicle has finally come to a halt, your training dictates that you then conduct a high risk stop. You park your squad car in a position of tactical advantage…
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This is the second of two postson basic math. Use rates when you want compare something in groups of different sizes. Say New York City has 400 homicides a year. Say Baltimore City has 300 homicides. Is New York more dangerous than Baltimore because New York has more homicides. No. Because New York is much…
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As promised, here is how to determine basic percentages. Too many of my college students don’t understand basic percentages. Clearly GTF has the same problem. So here is how it works — in words — with no math symbols. I’m totally serious. It’s never too late to learn. And not knowing how to relate “doubled”…
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marijuana I wonder if an end-the-drug war voter is just an law-and-order conservative whose backyard okra garden was raided by local cops after being spotted from a helicopter funded by the Drug Enforcement Agency Domestic Cannabis Eradication/Suppression Program? Barstow County, Georgia, resident Dwayne Perry may be a recent convert: “I do the right thing and…
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The ninth in a series from Sgt. Adam Plantinga’s excellent 400 Things Cops Know: Street-Smart Lessons from a Veteran Patrolman: Most critical incidents you’re involved in take anywhere from a few seconds to a few minutes to resolve themselves. The paperwork that follows takes hours. You’ve got the incident report, the clearance report, the inventory…
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Imagine you’re a New York City Police Officer. You take pride in your job and serving the city. You work hard. You play by the rules. You also feel you don’t get enough respect for what you do. And that disrespect comes right from the top. De Blasio gets elected mayor. You believe, perhaps correctly,…
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So many controversial police incidents, where police are accused of being prejudiced or racist — and here I’m thinking of the grandfather “kidnapping” his black granddaughter in the previous post, or police shooting the guy in Walmart, or the black guy in Minneapolis being hassled while waiting for his daughter, or just “swatting” in general.…
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