Sometimes the police-are-bad set can be so casual in their negative assumptions about police you just might miss it. But it’s worth calling out, because accepting these lies is damaging, potentially lethal if you’re in a high-crime neighborhood. This is buried in Kate Crawford’s article in the New York Timesabout artificial intelligence: Police departments across…
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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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Swamy Pete, the gypsy scryer, looks into his crystal ball. With eerie music in the background and an echoey voice, Swamie Pete makes a bold prediction: In the future, in fact tomorrow at exactly 19:00 hours eastern time, crime will not happen. The crystal ball says that for maybe three hours, somehow people will manage…
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Here’s a report with some numbers on the problem of untreated mental illness and police response. Bottom line, according to these numbers: About two percent of Americans have untreated severe mental illness. Those two percent of people account for 10 percent of police responses, 20 percent of those behind bars, and 25 percent of fatal…
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Anybody know if ShotSpotter is good? From an NYPD press release: This is one of more than 30 firearms that have been recovered since the inception of the ShotSpotter program, back in March of this year. Three guns a month doesn’t seem like so many. But then to get 30 guns off the streets, back…
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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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Total arrests per day are in orange. Firearms crimes per day are the lower lines, in blue. (Click to embiggen) The bottom axis represents the numbered day of year. 1 is Jan 1. 178 is June 27th. The riot was on April 27, day 117. This was partly inspired by a frustrating discussion on the…
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Here’s another piece of mine in CNN, also out today. I hope this gets a bit of attention because I was able to move past the headlines (thanks to my wonderful editor at CNN for her encouragement and mad editing skillz) to question the very concept police patrol. That’s the type of moderately deep-thinking that…
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Here’s my piece in today’s New York Times: Critics of police — and there have been a lot this past year — are too focused on what we don’t want police to do: don’t make so many arrests; don’t stop, question and frisk innocent people; don’t harass people; don’t shoot so many people, and for…
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The recent crime numbers in NYC will soon come out, and they’re not good. Homicides this week are way up compared to last year. Of course that’s just one week… till it’s not. Shootings are up in NYC. Not Baltimore up. But up. People are dying. It is time to ring the alarm. Maybe not…
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