This was gonna be my idea! “Bobbies and Baseball Players: Evaluating Patrol Officer Productivity Using Sabermetrics.” So kudos to Luke Bonkiewicz because he actually researched and wrote the article and I didn’t. Here’s the abstract from the current issue of Police Quarterly (2015, Vol. 18(1) 55–78): Police officer productivity is an understudied topic in police…
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You know, “Crimes prevented Over rePlacement.” (Or maybe just “C-POR.”) Like WAR, wins above replacement, but for cops. The idea is to break crime down by beat/post and looking at it over time (a long time, like years). Wouldn’t it be nice to know if there actually was less crime on your post while you…
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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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One of the reasons I like NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton is that he is prone to quoting Robert Peel, the man who invented police as we know them back in 1829 London. Bratton has reprinted “Peel’s” principles online. Those nine principles are an excellent philosophical base for policing, they’re just not Robert Peel’s. And now…
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I don’t apply for many grants, in part because they’re so hard for a qualitative researcher to get. Ethnographic work and qualitative research isn’t taken seriously in a generally quantitative field. My research doesn’t follow the standard “theory, hypothesis, experiment, verify” model of hard science. Nor should it. But it’s hard to get grants or…
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There are two main clearinghouses for crime stats in this country, the UCR (The Uniform Crime Report) and the NCVS (National Crime Victimization Survey). The former is collected from police departments and thus only includes reported crime as recorded by the police. The latter is conducted by surveys and sampling and asks people (160,000 per…
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Unless you’re an academic, of course. From Commentary and worth reading in its entirely (if you care about this sort of thing): Since the 1970s, the government has overseen the establishment of bodies called Institutional Review Boards, and these “IRBs” have suppressed vast amounts of talking, printing, and publishing—even mere reading and analyzing—for hundreds of…
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What can universities do to improve the IRB? Zachary Schrag, Professor of History at George Mason University and the author of, Ethical Imperialism: Institutional Review Boards and the Social Sciences, 1965-2009, summarizes what your school can do (in ten easy steps).
Wow. You can buy an essay about my book, In Defense of Flogging. But it’s not very good. Really. It’s surprisingly crappy. Mostly because it’s not about me book. I would expect more for my money. On the other hand, this does appear to be free.