I asked Jim, my Dominican-born Austin-raised San Francisco-living white friend, why he thought so many Californian cities were high on my PIHN list. He thought for a very few short seconds and answered, “because hispanics aren’t violent but police think they are.” I love over-generalizations and stereotypes that could very well be true. So I…
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The winner, still by far, is Riverside, CA. But sneaking into second place is Mesa, Arizona, the only non-Californian city in the top 6. Here’s the top 20 with the PIHN. All 20 are west of the Mississippi: Riverside: 31 Mesa: 14 San Diego: 12 Sacramento: 9 Bakersfield: 8 Seattle: 8 Portland: 8 Albuquerque: 7…
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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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