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Did Reducing Imprisonment in the 1960s Increase Crime?
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Inimai M. Chettiar in The Atlantic

The graph above is one of many from an Atlantic article arguing that increasing imprisonment from 1980 onward didn’t have much impact of the big drop in crime from the mid-1990s onward:

What do the numbers say? Did this explosion in incarceration cause the crime decline?

It turns out that increased incarceration had a much more limited effect on crime than popularly thought. We find that this growth in incarceration was responsible for approximately 5 percent of the drop in crime in the 1990s. (This could vary from 0 to 10 percent.) Since then, however, increases in incarceration have had essentially zero effect on crime.

This may, or may not, be true, but it looks a lot more persuasive if you leave off your graphs America’s huge experiment with reducing imprisonment relative to the growing numbers of crimes in the 1960s and early 1970s. Here’s my graph from 2005 showing the rate of imprisonment and the rate of homicide (the most reliably reported crime statistic):

by Steve Sailer, 2005

If you add the homicide rate and the imprisonment rate together, you get the Crime Misery Index (modeled on the Economic Misery Index of the 1970s adding inflation and unemployment together). It’s quite possible that reducing incarceration at this point would reduce the overall Crime Misery Index, but we can’t begin to have any kind of productive discussion on that without liberals first admitting how badly they screwed up when they were in charge of the criminal justice system in the 1960s and 1970s.

Seven years ago in VDARE, I used the occasion of a family friend barely surviving a home invader’s attempted murder of her to ask the question: with all the improvements in technology, why hasn’t crime fallen further?

 
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  1. How about this question:

    Would enormously increasing our imprisonment rate have been necessary without enforced integration?

    Seems the imprisonment rate took off after the civil rights bill and enforced equality. And if you think about population differences, how could it have been otherwise?

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  2. California’s Three Strikes Law contributed to the increased incarceration rate. That law was pushed very hard, notably by the prison guards union.
    Their efforts also included hammering the then-ineffectual governor to extract significant pay and benefit concessions.
    That episode was a case study in modern Cui Bono politics. Citizens are told that they feel safer, they get to pay more taxes, and guards get new pickups and boats, along with fat pensions.

    Read More
  3. Anonymous says:     Show CommentNext New Comment

    Steve, what are your thoughts on vaccines? Isn’t the LA area the epicenter of the vaccine debate right now?

    Read More
  4. Anonymous says: • Website     Show CommentNext New Comment

    most of the recent reduction in crime comes from the big city police depts manipulating crime reports so that the crime rate won’t scare away potential residents and businesses. Once that dynamic caught on, all big cities had to participate in crime stats fraud or else look bad compared to all the other cities.

    Read More
    • Replies: @Jus' Sayin'...
    "most of the recent reduction in crime comes from the big city police depts manipulating crime reports so that the crime rate won’t scare away potential residents and businesses. ..."

    You may be a stats freak but you're not very familiar with crime statistics. The NCVS is a national probability survey of individuals who report criminal victimization. It's results have nothing to do with police statistics on crime and NCVS crime reports are similar to the temporal pattern shown by the UCR and other crime statyistics based on police reports of crime
  5. The incarceration rate is problematic. You need to factor out the large number of non-violent drug related prisoners.

    Read More
    • Replies: @Sparkling Wiggle
    And then you'd have to factor out from those the large number of violent criminals who just pled down to a non-violent drug offense...
    , @Harry Baldwin
    The incarceration rate is problematic. You need to factor out the large number of non-violent drug related prisoners.

    On a recent NPR "Fresh Air Show" the host Dave Davies interviewed Los Angeles Times crime reporter Jill Leovy about her book "Ghettoside: A True Story Of Murder In America."

    We hear a lot about all those poor innocent urban youths imprisoned for nothing but minor drug offenses. Leovy made a good point about that.

    DAVIES: You write that sometimes detectives who are frustrated at their inability to arrest people who they think have committed murders will arrest them for what you call proxy crimes. Explain that.

    LEOVY: Yes. This is a nuance that doesn't get talked about enough because there's I think a general impression that the police are just arbitrarily hammering, for example, drug crimes, possession crimes, probation and parole violations - petty stuff that doesn't do a lot of harm, and yet there's a lot of penalties built behind them and so they must be racist. They must be just trying to give people a hard time. What you see on the ground is that there's a tremendous amount of violence. There's a tremendous amount of impunity, and it's, as I say, semi-furtive. It's well to everybody in this small enclave who's doing stuff, who's boasting about it, who's dangerous. The police are part of that enclave. They're part of that community. They hear the street rumors, too. They hear so-and-so's a shooter and so-and-so's a rider, and they're frustrated because they cannot put a case on so-and-so for that assault or that homicide. So they think, well, we can get them on a drug offense. He's in a gang. He's selling drugs. If we can just get him on possession with intent to sell, at least that gets him off the street. And so you see certain amount of enforcement that's shaped by a reaction to the impunity for the serious crimes.

    It's almost - when you make the prosecution of some crimes very difficult and very expensive, as we have with homicide, it almost pushes the bubble. It's - the cops naturally gravitate towards places where they have more discretion and where it's easier to do the work and stopping and searching and possession and probation, parole - that is low-hanging fruit. It's easy, cheap stuff to prosecute. And so they are seeing these victims. They are seeing people who are paralyzed or in comas for the rest of their life, and they can't make an arrest. But they know that clique from such-and-such gang has been doing this stuff, and everyone knows it. And the graffiti on the wall says it, and they can't make a case. So if we're going to focus a drug-enforcement project tonight somewhere, why not focus on them? It's a compensatory strategy that I think ends up being counterproductive but is also somewhat understandable.
     
    Not sure why she describes it as "counterproductive." Sounds very productive.
    , @Anonymous

    The incarceration rate is problematic. You need to factor out the large number of non-violent drug related prisoners.
     
    Guess you haven't had an addict or two in your family, Sparky. Once you have, you'll understand that the drug-dealing process is FAR from "non-violent," and you'll feel stupid having ever mindlessly adopted the phrase.
    , @Art Deco
    The incarceration rate is problematic. You need to factor out the large number of non-violent drug related prisoners.

    About 20% of the prison census consists of those for whom top count was a drug charge. You commonly see people confused on this point because most federal prisoners have a drug charge as their top count; federal prisoners account for only about 11% of the total prison census. I suspect you'd discover (just by looking at their rap sheet) that most drug offenders are not tranquil and pacific.

  6. Finding no way to ever eliminate crime they decided to form a monopoly on it. War Inc. is in on the whole thing. Ukraine ditched all their nuke piles to save on expenses and is now getting jerked around by the nuke menace heads. Only more debt can save them now if you swallow the official line.

    Read More
  7. What lunacy.

    The assumption is that the crime rate was entirely unaffected by the deliberate destruction of the black family.

    Read More
  8. @Questioner
    The incarceration rate is problematic. You need to factor out the large number of non-violent drug related prisoners.

    And then you’d have to factor out from those the large number of violent criminals who just pled down to a non-violent drug offense…

    Read More
  9. @Questioner
    The incarceration rate is problematic. You need to factor out the large number of non-violent drug related prisoners.

    The incarceration rate is problematic. You need to factor out the large number of non-violent drug related prisoners.

    On a recent NPR “Fresh Air Show” the host Dave Davies interviewed Los Angeles Times crime reporter Jill Leovy about her book “Ghettoside: A True Story Of Murder In America.”

    We hear a lot about all those poor innocent urban youths imprisoned for nothing but minor drug offenses. Leovy made a good point about that.

    DAVIES: You write that sometimes detectives who are frustrated at their inability to arrest people who they think have committed murders will arrest them for what you call proxy crimes. Explain that.

    LEOVY: Yes. This is a nuance that doesn’t get talked about enough because there’s I think a general impression that the police are just arbitrarily hammering, for example, drug crimes, possession crimes, probation and parole violations – petty stuff that doesn’t do a lot of harm, and yet there’s a lot of penalties built behind them and so they must be racist. They must be just trying to give people a hard time. What you see on the ground is that there’s a tremendous amount of violence. There’s a tremendous amount of impunity, and it’s, as I say, semi-furtive. It’s well to everybody in this small enclave who’s doing stuff, who’s boasting about it, who’s dangerous. The police are part of that enclave. They’re part of that community. They hear the street rumors, too. They hear so-and-so’s a shooter and so-and-so’s a rider, and they’re frustrated because they cannot put a case on so-and-so for that assault or that homicide. So they think, well, we can get them on a drug offense. He’s in a gang. He’s selling drugs. If we can just get him on possession with intent to sell, at least that gets him off the street. And so you see certain amount of enforcement that’s shaped by a reaction to the impunity for the serious crimes.

    It’s almost – when you make the prosecution of some crimes very difficult and very expensive, as we have with homicide, it almost pushes the bubble. It’s – the cops naturally gravitate towards places where they have more discretion and where it’s easier to do the work and stopping and searching and possession and probation, parole – that is low-hanging fruit. It’s easy, cheap stuff to prosecute. And so they are seeing these victims. They are seeing people who are paralyzed or in comas for the rest of their life, and they can’t make an arrest. But they know that clique from such-and-such gang has been doing this stuff, and everyone knows it. And the graffiti on the wall says it, and they can’t make a case. So if we’re going to focus a drug-enforcement project tonight somewhere, why not focus on them? It’s a compensatory strategy that I think ends up being counterproductive but is also somewhat understandable.

    Not sure why she describes it as “counterproductive.” Sounds very productive.

    Read More
    • Replies: @Wyrd
    So a considerable percentage of "non-violent drug related prisoners" are actually murderers. No wonder Holder wants to put them back on the street.
    , @FWIW
    Of course it is sloppy and has huge potential for abuse, but convicting the right person for the wrong crime is pretty much the way our justice system works. And this isn't just for the underclasses. OJ is in jail for a long time for a minor crime.

    And, over 90% of cases are plead down, so why not go for some rough justice?

    I seriously doubt if our prisons are filled with harmless drug offenders.
    , @anonymous-antimarxist
    Cops know that every day drug dealers are destroying lives, causing children to be abandoned and abused, and thousands of drug causalities on a daily basis.

    Watch National Geographic 's show "Drugs Inc". Drug Dealers are the worst sort of sociopaths. Our drug laws are not nearly tough enough.

    If it was up to me there would be a national program to remove known drug dealers from the gene pool via Norplant and Vasagel as a condition of parole.

    In short Steve, its our open borders and the flood of drugs, that is the reason why crime rates have not fallen nearly enough given the increases in incarceration rates.
  10. I’m not sure how it would be possible to account for “police incompetence” in a survey of crime rates (and missed potential for reduction), but I suspect it’s an under-appreciated factor. A good many city-level police departments are known as bureaucratic outposts of political hires – either politically-connected in some minor sense (relatives of existing officers, etc.) or affirmative-action hires.

    This reduces their effectiveness at solving crime, and hence the “clearance rate” of crimes solved. It’s tough to compare non-murder crimes across jurisdictions, but looking just at murder, we can see this effect – in many major urban areas of the US (such as St. Louis), clearance rates struggle to reach the 1/4th or (if “lucky” in the sense of an unusual number of self-clearing murder-suicides) maybe 1/3rd. Chicago’s clearance rate a few years ago was reported to be as low as 15%, which caused a bit of a scandal.

    In Canada – where hiring is said to be somewhat more meritocratic – clearance rates are generally in the 85-90% range. Some of that is due to catchall “cultural differences,” but you don’t get from here to there on culture alone. Part of it has to do with sheer technical competence, along with more effective investigative methods. The ability to solve murders quickly seems to lead to a virtuous cycle in which the murder rate is reduced by eliminating the need/ability of would-be murderers to exact vengeance on uncaptured ones.

    Hence, the city of Toronto’s murder rate ends up being lower than the state of Minnesota for 2013, which is quite an achievement. Vancouver and Montreal’s rates are even lower, and Quebec City (pop. 500,000 or so at the time) managed to go an entire 18 months from 2006 to 2008 with ZERO murders. That’s unthinkable in America.

    Canadians seem to demand a higher level of competence out of their police than Americans do, and they receive it. It’s something to consider.

    Read More
    • Replies: @Another Canadian

    Canadians seem to demand a higher level of competence out of their police than Americans do, and they receive it. It’s something to consider.
     
    We don't have that pesky Constitution thingy.
    , @Jus' Sayin'...
    "I’m not sure how it would be possible to account for “police incompetence” in a survey of crime rates (and missed potential for reduction), but I suspect it’s an under-appreciated factor. "

    It's possible, using the FBI's Supplementary Homicide Reports to compare clearance rates for homicides across different USA police jurisdictions and over time. The first research in this area (presented at a professional conference, but unpublished) found a very interesting pattern: Some jurisdictions have very low clearance rates, some have very high, and some have clearance rates that are in between. And these differences persist over decades; cities with high rates in one year have them in subsequent years; cities with low rates keep failing to solve homicides. This first research found nothing obvious, e.g., police per capita, type of homicide mix, racial composition, etc., to explain these differences.

    There was some subsequent research done. Mostly it was hack work, done when community policing was the mantra that found, mirabile dictu, community policing or its absence was responsible for these differences.

    We really still don't know why some police departments are good at solving homicides and others aren't. It's a worthy subject for competent, unbiased professional research.
    , @syonredux

    In Canada – where hiring is said to be somewhat more meritocratic – clearance rates are generally in the 85-90% range.
     
    Well, America's huge Black population puts some rather severe limits on meritocracy:

    The ABC station in Dayton, Ohio reports:
    The Dayton Police Department is lowering its testing standards for recruits.

    It's a move required by the U.S. Department of Justice after it says not enough African-Americans passed the exam.

    Dayton is in desperate need of officers to replace dozens of retirees. The hiring process was postponed for months because the D.O.J. rejected the original scores provided by the Dayton Civil Service Board, which administers the test.

    Under the previous requirements, candidates had to get a 66% on part one of the exam and a 72% on part two. The D.O.J. approved new scoring policy only requires potential police officers to get a 58% and a 63%. That's the equivalent of an ‘F’ and a ‘D’. ...

    The D.O.J. and Civil Service Board declined Dayton’s News Source’s repeat requests for interviews. The lower standards mean 258 more people passed the test. The city won't say how many were minorities. ...

    The D.O.J. has forced other police departments across the country to lower testing standards, citing once again that not enough black candidates were passing.

    A story on WHIO in Dayton gives a few more (sometimes conflicting) numbers:
    Officials with the City of Dayton Service Board announced Thursday that it has accepted the cutoff score for the police recruit written examination administered on Nov. 20, 2010. Officials said a total of 1,083 candidates completed the written portion of the examination.

    The test was administered in two parts, a Test Preparation Manual (TPM) test with 86 questions and a Situational Judgment and Writing Ability Test (SJWAT) with 102 questions.After consultation with the United States Department of Justice, as well as Fire & Police Selection, Inc., the creator of the written examination, the cutoff score for the examination is 50 points for the TPM portion and 64 points for the SJWAT portion.

    This resulted in 748 individuals passing the written examination, which was a pass/fail examination.

    Presumably, this means that the top 748 out of 1083 now proceed afresh through the oral part of the hiring process all with equal chances.

    So, under the original scoring, 490 of 1,083 candidates for these "dozens" of jobs passed the test. So, you had to be in the top 45% on the written test. Now, they'll go down another quartile.

     

    http://isteve.blogspot.com/2011/03/neverending-story.html

    From the Chicago Sun-Times (thanks to the readers who sent this in):
    Police may scrap entrance exam
    'OPEN UP THE PROCESS' | Union chief: It's 'too stupid to be true'

    BY FRAN SPIELMAN AND FRANK MAIN, Staff Reporters

    The Chicago Police Department is seriously considering scrapping the police entrance exam to bolster minority hiring, save millions on test preparation and avert costly legal battles that have dogged the exam process for decades, City Hall sources said Tuesday.

    If the process is opened to everyone who applies and meets the minimum education and residency requirements, Chicago would be virtually alone among major cities. Most cities have police entrance exams -- and for good reason, experts say.

    "A background check and a psych [exam] alone will not eliminate some people who should not be there," said Brad Woods, who ran the Personnel Division under former Chicago Police Superintendents Phil Cline and Terry Hillard.

    Calling an application-only process a "step backward" and the "wrong way to go," Woods said, "When you lower your quality, you will get poor police service and more complaints. ... Whenever you make it easier to be the police, you're doing the citizens and the Police Department a disservice."

    Charlie Roberts, who ran the training division from 1995 to 1999, noted that there are "eleven tracks" recruits must go through in the police academy, including the law and the municipal code.
    "If you don't give someone at least a reading comprehension test, can you just put them in and risk the possibility of having so many of them fail? That could get quite expensive," Roberts said.

    "We were getting people with 60 hours of college credit who were reading at a third-grade level. What do you think you'll get if you have no screening process?"

    Human Resources Department spokesperson Connie Buscemi acknowledged Tuesday that the Daley administration has been exploring other "options" since last fall, when a "request-for-proposals" for companies interested in preparing an on-line police entrance exam was cancelled.

    The last police entrance exam was held on Nov. 5, 2006.

    "We wanted to try to develop something on-line to allow the city to accommodate members of the U.S. military who are on active duty. But, we didn't get any responses that met our needs. No one said they could administer an on-line exam" and guarantee its integrity, Buscemi said.

    This is a legitimate need, although I doubt if it has much to do with dumping testing. Hiring tests in Chicago are typically given on a single day every few years, with copies of the test delivered written by outside consulting firms delivered to the test site by armored car. Otherwise, insiders will get a look at the test ahead of time and alert their nephews and in-laws to what's on it.

    One problem with this system is that if you are a Chicagoan stuck on active duty in Iraq on the day of the test, you are out of luck getting hired as a Chicago fireman or policeman for years to come. And since the EEOC's Four-Fifths rule doesn't apply to military enlistment tests, such as the heavily g-weighted AFQT, Chicago is missing out on its most promising source of future policemen and firemen. But if Chicago offered the test online at the same time it was being given in Chicago, who would proctor the test-takers in the middle of the night in Iraq and Afghanistan?

    That's an interesting question, but it's a complete sideshow for what's really going on. Post-Ricci, the politicians can't fudge the results as much, so now they want to get rid of the test.
    "We're [now] reviewing our options on how to administer the police application process."

    Other sources confirmed that the police entrance exam could be scrapped altogether "to open up the process to as many people as possible." A final decision could be made later this week.

    Fraternal Order of Police President Mark Donahue said the idea "sounds too stupid to be true." "You need a testing process. ... You need to be very concerned about the very limited information you would get from just a screening and application process," Donahue said.

    Something that is completely overlooked but that is totally obvious when you stop to think about it is that civil servant unions, who are always demonized by Republicans, are one of the few effective forces actively working against affirmative action in big cities. The head of the union always has some name like "Donahue," and union policies work to keep older white civil servants from being fired in the name of making the government work force "look more like Chicago." This is particularly true for teachers unions, whose leaders all remember when black politicians got local control of New York public schools in the Ocean Hill neighborhood in the late 1960s, and immediately fired hundreds of Jewish schoolteachers and hired blacks to replace them.

    Hiring and promotions in the Police and Fire Departments have generated controversy in Chicago for as long as anyone can remember.

    The criticism reached a crescendo in 1994 after a sergeants exam produced just five minority promotions out of 114.

    The test was the first to be administered by the city after "race-norming" -- the practice of adjusting scores on the basis of race -- was ruled unconstitutional.

    In November 2005, City Hall announced plans to offer the police entrance exam a record four times the following year -- and for the first time on the Internet -- after an unprecedented outreach campaign that bolstered the number of minority applicants to 34 percent black, 24 percent Hispanic and 26 percent women.

    More than two years later, black ministers told newly-appointed Police Supt. Jody Weis that, if he was serious about re-establishing trust between police and the black community, he should start by hiring and promoting more African Americans.

    NBCChicago adds:
    And as of last year, one in four patrol officers were African-American, but just one in 12 Lieutenants were of color.

    Let me point out that, to get around the EEOC's Four-Fifth's Rule, Chicago has already almost completely emasculated its police and fire tests, in order to make the disparity between white and black passing rates (as innumerately measured by the feds) less than one-fifth. Chicago's last fire and police tests were passed by 85% of the people who walked in off the street. What's the point of even giving a test so easy that people at the fifth percentile among whites pass?

    So, why not give up on testing completely? That's the logical implication of the EEOC's Four-Fifth's Rule.

    As Steve Farron pointed out in The Affirmative Action Hoax, honest racial quotas would be better than abolishing testing. You'd at least get the smartest of each race.

    Considering that Barack Obama taught "Racism and the Law" (not, by the way, "Race and the Law") at the University of Chicago and litigated disparate impact lawsuits in Chicago, somebody might want to ask the President of the United States his opinion on this subject.

    But don't count on that ever happening.

     

    http://isteve.blogspot.com/2010/01/chicago-considering-scrapping-police.html
    , @anonymous-antimarxist
    Does Canada have anything close to the cult of Mumia Abu-Jamal, gangsta rap, the No Snitch Rule and legions of ACLU and National Lawyer Guild racial marxists egging it all on?

    The problem of persistent high crime and low conviction rates in the black ghettos is that the far left have convinced the black community to incentivize the murder of any witnesses in the name of sticking it to the "man".

    , @anon
    No NAM's in Canada.
  11. When I was in Alexandria detention center last year, I got into a small pod for drug offenders. Ostensibly the program was for drug abusers, but save for a few of us everyone else was there as a drug dealer.

    Small pods can be better or worse than large units, and it all depends on whether a power struggle occurs. Part of what made my experience relatively enjoyable was that the alpha of our de facto tribe was as noble a king as you could hope to have given the circumstance. Not only was he the oldest among us, he had spent more than half his life incarcerated. He had boxed growing up and retained the physique even into his fifties. And he had the rhythm of speech characteristic of being that age after growing up taking blows to the head. In other words, he was effortlessly the alpha, and I think Aristotle must have said that is just when a ruler can be pure, can be noble.

    Anyways, despite spending so few years of his life able to have sex, he apparently has 13 children. And I think one time he mentioned how many moms there were, but I can’t remember.

    Our incarceration policy was clearly not effective enough that way.

    Read More
    • Replies: @Jim
    This guy is the height of biological fitness. In older times many of his children might have perished due to his inability or lack of interest in supporting them but he is extremally well-adapted to modern society.
  12. with all the improvements in technology, why hasn’t crime fallen further?

    When a teenager is so brazen/stupid that he will rape a pizza delivery girl who goes to his home address on a Sunday morning (as happened in the outer suburbs of the Bay Area last weekend), he is not going to be deterred by techno-surveillance. He needs to be separated from society.

    http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2015/02/11/antioch-teen-rape-kidnapping-darrion-miles-jr-dominos-pizza-driver-life-in-prison/

    Read More
    • Replies: @Brutusale
    Hey, his dad said it was consensual. I'd pay to hear how daddy pronounced the word consensual!
  13. @Harry Baldwin
    The incarceration rate is problematic. You need to factor out the large number of non-violent drug related prisoners.

    On a recent NPR "Fresh Air Show" the host Dave Davies interviewed Los Angeles Times crime reporter Jill Leovy about her book "Ghettoside: A True Story Of Murder In America."

    We hear a lot about all those poor innocent urban youths imprisoned for nothing but minor drug offenses. Leovy made a good point about that.

    DAVIES: You write that sometimes detectives who are frustrated at their inability to arrest people who they think have committed murders will arrest them for what you call proxy crimes. Explain that.

    LEOVY: Yes. This is a nuance that doesn't get talked about enough because there's I think a general impression that the police are just arbitrarily hammering, for example, drug crimes, possession crimes, probation and parole violations - petty stuff that doesn't do a lot of harm, and yet there's a lot of penalties built behind them and so they must be racist. They must be just trying to give people a hard time. What you see on the ground is that there's a tremendous amount of violence. There's a tremendous amount of impunity, and it's, as I say, semi-furtive. It's well to everybody in this small enclave who's doing stuff, who's boasting about it, who's dangerous. The police are part of that enclave. They're part of that community. They hear the street rumors, too. They hear so-and-so's a shooter and so-and-so's a rider, and they're frustrated because they cannot put a case on so-and-so for that assault or that homicide. So they think, well, we can get them on a drug offense. He's in a gang. He's selling drugs. If we can just get him on possession with intent to sell, at least that gets him off the street. And so you see certain amount of enforcement that's shaped by a reaction to the impunity for the serious crimes.

    It's almost - when you make the prosecution of some crimes very difficult and very expensive, as we have with homicide, it almost pushes the bubble. It's - the cops naturally gravitate towards places where they have more discretion and where it's easier to do the work and stopping and searching and possession and probation, parole - that is low-hanging fruit. It's easy, cheap stuff to prosecute. And so they are seeing these victims. They are seeing people who are paralyzed or in comas for the rest of their life, and they can't make an arrest. But they know that clique from such-and-such gang has been doing this stuff, and everyone knows it. And the graffiti on the wall says it, and they can't make a case. So if we're going to focus a drug-enforcement project tonight somewhere, why not focus on them? It's a compensatory strategy that I think ends up being counterproductive but is also somewhat understandable.
     
    Not sure why she describes it as "counterproductive." Sounds very productive.

    So a considerable percentage of “non-violent drug related prisoners” are actually murderers. No wonder Holder wants to put them back on the street.

    Read More
  14. Whaaaaa? did you not see the movie, “American Gangster,” which I really liked. ‘Splains a lot about history into the 70′s during Vietnam…and the big $$$$ business model of drugs ever since. I’m kinda’ confused that you are not as cool as you think you are.

    Read More
  15. Best dippy-liberal journalism artifact I’ve found this month has to be this hipster hymn to Johannesburg’s Chateau-Robocop apartment tower– she moved in there for a couple months to get the vibe of the South African Ellis Island:

    http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/roads/2015/02/ponte_city_in_south_africa_africa_s_tallest_apartment_building_was_built.single.html

    Read More
  16. Did not mean to be a jerk, but, in the early 70′s heroin, coke and crack later, made inroads that have never left from the mainstream market of selling to High School and college kids. A whole new business model was created to attract/sell to affluent young people lookin’ to get high. I hate this cliche, but, “it is what it is.”

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  17. I really don’t need to read that Atlantic piece. I just need to read the author bio:

    Inimai M. Chettiar is the director of the Justice Program at New York University Law School’s Brennan Center.

    And I know it’s tendentious rot.

    And I keep looking at that graph, and it sure seems like the crime line goes down not long after the incarceration line goes up (“tipping point,” anyone? Bueller?). And then the incarceration “rate” kinda goes flat in the mid 90s (but still way up) and so somehow since the increase has slowed down (the “growth in incarceration”), they now say it’s not having an effect, or something? Seems to me that Ms. (Mr?) Chettiar is a bit innumerate.

    It’s the classic NY Times headline in action. “Imprisonment up despite drop in crime,” or something like that.

    Read More
  18. Anonymous says:     Show CommentNext New Comment
    @Questioner
    The incarceration rate is problematic. You need to factor out the large number of non-violent drug related prisoners.

    The incarceration rate is problematic. You need to factor out the large number of non-violent drug related prisoners.

    Guess you haven’t had an addict or two in your family, Sparky. Once you have, you’ll understand that the drug-dealing process is FAR from “non-violent,” and you’ll feel stupid having ever mindlessly adopted the phrase.

    Read More
    • Replies: @Lagertha
    I know....I was surprised when I found out (really recently) that 'they' have come up with a new Molly or ecstasy drug that is less, "won't give you cardiac arrest like in the past" but, will give you a substantial buzz like in 'history' of the past. Short of locking up my son and his HS friends to be safe from hard-core dealers peddling their wares, the drug dealers are wearing far too many 'Scooby-doo' masks to be ever caught by police. And, guns, well, that's obvious.
  19. @Anonymous

    The incarceration rate is problematic. You need to factor out the large number of non-violent drug related prisoners.
     
    Guess you haven't had an addict or two in your family, Sparky. Once you have, you'll understand that the drug-dealing process is FAR from "non-violent," and you'll feel stupid having ever mindlessly adopted the phrase.

    I know….I was surprised when I found out (really recently) that ‘they’ have come up with a new Molly or ecstasy drug that is less, “won’t give you cardiac arrest like in the past” but, will give you a substantial buzz like in ‘history’ of the past. Short of locking up my son and his HS friends to be safe from hard-core dealers peddling their wares, the drug dealers are wearing far too many ‘Scooby-doo’ masks to be ever caught by police. And, guns, well, that’s obvious.

    Read More
  20. OT, but I was kind of waiting for some news like this after all the hype earlier this year:

    They had the narrative! But Chicago is Chicago

    Little League Baseball has stripped the U.S. championship from Chicago-based Jackie Robinson West and suspended its coach for violating a rule prohibiting the use of players who live outside the geographic area that the team represents, it was announced Wednesday.

    http://espn.go.com/chicago/story/_/id/12308988/little-league-strips-chicago-team-us-championship-suspends-coach

    First articles I read seem to have scrubbed the parents’ cries of racism but… found this:

    Jackie Robinson West was the first all-African-American team to win the championship, and some are saying that racism influenced the Little League’s decision.

    Venisa Green, mother of JRW player Brandon Green, says that there were three investigations, and twice the allegations were unfounded.

    “The decision of Little League was not good enough until the powers that be bullied Little League into getting the decision that they ultimately wanted,” Venisa Green said.

    Fr. Michael Pfleger of St. Sabina parish singled out Chris Janes of Evergreen Park for a “witch hunt,” with Pfleger indicating he thought the allegations were racially motivated.

    “I can’t help but wonder the question if the same thing would have been done with another team from another place, another race,” said Rev. Michael Pfleger, St. Sabina Church.

    http://abc7chicago.com/sports/jrw-supporters-say-racism-influenced-little-league-decision-/513723/

    I wonder if I can write a “parental reaction bot” to write these articles

    Read More
  21. The assumption is that the crime rate was entirely unaffected by the deliberate destruction of the black family.

    The whole “destruction of the black (nuclear) family” thing relies on a very short, selectively-placed graph, too. On a proper graph, the black nuclear family is obviously the anomaly.

    It’s no different than a gold biz showing you a graph of gold prices that starts right after a price crash.

    Read More
    • Replies: @AnAnon
    Another thing to consider are the actual numbers rather than the percentages. There are currently about 5M married black couples today, and given a population of 18M in 1960, there were probably 5-7M married black couples then. It is kind of misleading to describe that as a collapse.
  22. In Canada – where hiring is said to be somewhat more meritocratic – clearance rates are generally in the 85-90% range. Some of that is due to catchall “cultural differences,” but you don’t get from here to there on culture alone.

    A lot of it. Policing black communities is not like policing white communities. They’re kind of opposites, actually.

    Then there’s volume to consider.

    Part of it has to do with sheer technical competence, along with more effective investigative methods.

    The vast majority of homicides are solved by old-fashioned police work. Interrogation, basically.

    Read More
    • Replies: @Truth
    "A lot of it. Policing black communities is not like policing white communities. They’re kind of opposites, actually."

    And you've worked, how long, as a police officer?
  23. @Je Suis Charlie Martel
    OT, but I was kind of waiting for some news like this after all the hype earlier this year:

    They had the narrative! But Chicago is Chicago


    Little League Baseball has stripped the U.S. championship from Chicago-based Jackie Robinson West and suspended its coach for violating a rule prohibiting the use of players who live outside the geographic area that the team represents, it was announced Wednesday.
     
    http://espn.go.com/chicago/story/_/id/12308988/little-league-strips-chicago-team-us-championship-suspends-coach

    First articles I read seem to have scrubbed the parents' cries of racism but... found this:

    Jackie Robinson West was the first all-African-American team to win the championship, and some are saying that racism influenced the Little League's decision.

    Venisa Green, mother of JRW player Brandon Green, says that there were three investigations, and twice the allegations were unfounded.

    "The decision of Little League was not good enough until the powers that be bullied Little League into getting the decision that they ultimately wanted," Venisa Green said.

    Fr. Michael Pfleger of St. Sabina parish singled out Chris Janes of Evergreen Park for a "witch hunt," with Pfleger indicating he thought the allegations were racially motivated.

    "I can't help but wonder the question if the same thing would have been done with another team from another place, another race," said Rev. Michael Pfleger, St. Sabina Church.
     

    http://abc7chicago.com/sports/jrw-supporters-say-racism-influenced-little-league-decision-/513723/

    I wonder if I can write a "parental reaction bot" to write these articles

    “Fr. Michael Pfleger”

    Rev. Wright’s pal.

    Read More
  24. From Local ‘Police Blotter’

    • Ashley M. Sronkoski, 31, of the 800 block of Gannon Drive, Hoffman Estates, was arrested around 4:20 a.m. July 25 at 930 Elk Grove Town Center and charged with possession of a controlled substance, forgery, obstructing justice, and fraudulent acquisition of a controlled substance. Her court date is Aug. 18. [Ashley has been busted for Oxy before]

    • A male shoplifter was seen by a security agent putting four desktop computers into a shopping cart around 3:05 a.m. July 25 at Walmart, 801 Meacham Road, and leaving through an emergency door in the Lawn and Garden area. Value was estimated at $2,600.

    • Vandals spray painted playground equipment, pavement and a storage shed between 7 p.m. July 29 and 7 a.m. July 30 at Salt Creek School, 65 Kennedy Blvd. Damage was estimated at $500.

    • Thieves stole a carved wooden bear statue between June 1 and July 26 out of the front yard at a home on the 1200 block of Maple Lane. Value was estimated at $300.

    http://www.dailyherald.com/article/20140624/news/140629332/

    I won’t say the crime rate in the Chicago Suburbs rounds to zero, but it is very low. As far as murder, in the entire metro area, blacks/hispanics kill other blacks/hispanics, and whites kill family members and lovers (love gone bad).

    As far as under reporting, to collect insurance for theft or vandalism (robbery, burglary) a police report must be filed.

    Read More
  25. @Harry Baldwin
    The incarceration rate is problematic. You need to factor out the large number of non-violent drug related prisoners.

    On a recent NPR "Fresh Air Show" the host Dave Davies interviewed Los Angeles Times crime reporter Jill Leovy about her book "Ghettoside: A True Story Of Murder In America."

    We hear a lot about all those poor innocent urban youths imprisoned for nothing but minor drug offenses. Leovy made a good point about that.

    DAVIES: You write that sometimes detectives who are frustrated at their inability to arrest people who they think have committed murders will arrest them for what you call proxy crimes. Explain that.

    LEOVY: Yes. This is a nuance that doesn't get talked about enough because there's I think a general impression that the police are just arbitrarily hammering, for example, drug crimes, possession crimes, probation and parole violations - petty stuff that doesn't do a lot of harm, and yet there's a lot of penalties built behind them and so they must be racist. They must be just trying to give people a hard time. What you see on the ground is that there's a tremendous amount of violence. There's a tremendous amount of impunity, and it's, as I say, semi-furtive. It's well to everybody in this small enclave who's doing stuff, who's boasting about it, who's dangerous. The police are part of that enclave. They're part of that community. They hear the street rumors, too. They hear so-and-so's a shooter and so-and-so's a rider, and they're frustrated because they cannot put a case on so-and-so for that assault or that homicide. So they think, well, we can get them on a drug offense. He's in a gang. He's selling drugs. If we can just get him on possession with intent to sell, at least that gets him off the street. And so you see certain amount of enforcement that's shaped by a reaction to the impunity for the serious crimes.

    It's almost - when you make the prosecution of some crimes very difficult and very expensive, as we have with homicide, it almost pushes the bubble. It's - the cops naturally gravitate towards places where they have more discretion and where it's easier to do the work and stopping and searching and possession and probation, parole - that is low-hanging fruit. It's easy, cheap stuff to prosecute. And so they are seeing these victims. They are seeing people who are paralyzed or in comas for the rest of their life, and they can't make an arrest. But they know that clique from such-and-such gang has been doing this stuff, and everyone knows it. And the graffiti on the wall says it, and they can't make a case. So if we're going to focus a drug-enforcement project tonight somewhere, why not focus on them? It's a compensatory strategy that I think ends up being counterproductive but is also somewhat understandable.
     
    Not sure why she describes it as "counterproductive." Sounds very productive.

    Of course it is sloppy and has huge potential for abuse, but convicting the right person for the wrong crime is pretty much the way our justice system works. And this isn’t just for the underclasses. OJ is in jail for a long time for a minor crime.

    And, over 90% of cases are plead down, so why not go for some rough justice?

    I seriously doubt if our prisons are filled with harmless drug offenders.

    Read More
  26. Policing black communities is not like policing white communities.

    Sure, but Toronto is about 9% black, which is similar to LA, and is higher than US cities with higher murder rates such as Seattle. It’s not as though Canadian cities have no black populations to speak of. But their management of crime within those communities seems to be a lot more competent.

    For example, Canadian cities seem to have fairly frequent roundups/big raids involving hundreds of officers and dozens of arrests/weapons and drugs seizures at the same time. These kinds of raids have broken the back of various gangs, such as they were, in Canadian cities.

    US police forces – though better-armed and a lot more aggressive on a “small unit” level – seem to lack the coordination, intel, or competence to use these kinds “combined arms” (with prosecutors and other agencies, provincial and federal) tactics in an effective manner.

    Read More
    • Replies: @Simon in London
    London is around 12-14% black and the Metropolitan Police claim a 90% conviction rate for murder, similar to Canada.
    , @syonredux

    Sure, but Toronto is about 9% black, which is similar to LA, and is higher than US cities with higher murder rates such as Seattle. It’s not as though Canadian cities have no black populations to speak of. But their management of crime within those communities seems to be a lot more competent.
     
    Canada as a whole is 2.5% Black:

    According to the 2006 Census by Statistics Canada, 783,795 Canadians identified themselves as black, constituting 2.5% of the entire Canadian population.[9]

     

    The USA, in contrast, is 12.6% Black:

    2010 38.9 million 12.6%
     
    Blacks in the USA have attained critical mass.They are a nation within the nation
    , @AP

    Sure, but Toronto is about 9% black
     
    Toronto's blacks are largely from the West Indies or African. These black populations have lower crime rates than do slave descendants. In America African and Jamaican areas are safer than African-American ones, and influx of these people into African-American areas results in reduced crime rates.

    If 10% of Toronto's population were immigrants from Detroit or Compton I suspect crime stats in that city would be much different.
    , @Art Deco
    Sure, but Toronto is about 9% black, which is similar to LA, and is higher than US cities with higher murder rates such as Seattle.

    Canadian blacks would be immigrant West Indians. Not a particularly problematic problem in the first place (cross national migration taking only subsets of the source country population) and not subject to assimilation into the descendants-of-slaves population. The baselines of Canadian blacks and American blacks would be different.
  27. @Harry Baldwin
    The incarceration rate is problematic. You need to factor out the large number of non-violent drug related prisoners.

    On a recent NPR "Fresh Air Show" the host Dave Davies interviewed Los Angeles Times crime reporter Jill Leovy about her book "Ghettoside: A True Story Of Murder In America."

    We hear a lot about all those poor innocent urban youths imprisoned for nothing but minor drug offenses. Leovy made a good point about that.

    DAVIES: You write that sometimes detectives who are frustrated at their inability to arrest people who they think have committed murders will arrest them for what you call proxy crimes. Explain that.

    LEOVY: Yes. This is a nuance that doesn't get talked about enough because there's I think a general impression that the police are just arbitrarily hammering, for example, drug crimes, possession crimes, probation and parole violations - petty stuff that doesn't do a lot of harm, and yet there's a lot of penalties built behind them and so they must be racist. They must be just trying to give people a hard time. What you see on the ground is that there's a tremendous amount of violence. There's a tremendous amount of impunity, and it's, as I say, semi-furtive. It's well to everybody in this small enclave who's doing stuff, who's boasting about it, who's dangerous. The police are part of that enclave. They're part of that community. They hear the street rumors, too. They hear so-and-so's a shooter and so-and-so's a rider, and they're frustrated because they cannot put a case on so-and-so for that assault or that homicide. So they think, well, we can get them on a drug offense. He's in a gang. He's selling drugs. If we can just get him on possession with intent to sell, at least that gets him off the street. And so you see certain amount of enforcement that's shaped by a reaction to the impunity for the serious crimes.

    It's almost - when you make the prosecution of some crimes very difficult and very expensive, as we have with homicide, it almost pushes the bubble. It's - the cops naturally gravitate towards places where they have more discretion and where it's easier to do the work and stopping and searching and possession and probation, parole - that is low-hanging fruit. It's easy, cheap stuff to prosecute. And so they are seeing these victims. They are seeing people who are paralyzed or in comas for the rest of their life, and they can't make an arrest. But they know that clique from such-and-such gang has been doing this stuff, and everyone knows it. And the graffiti on the wall says it, and they can't make a case. So if we're going to focus a drug-enforcement project tonight somewhere, why not focus on them? It's a compensatory strategy that I think ends up being counterproductive but is also somewhat understandable.
     
    Not sure why she describes it as "counterproductive." Sounds very productive.

    Cops know that every day drug dealers are destroying lives, causing children to be abandoned and abused, and thousands of drug causalities on a daily basis.

    Watch National Geographic ‘s show “Drugs Inc”. Drug Dealers are the worst sort of sociopaths. Our drug laws are not nearly tough enough.

    If it was up to me there would be a national program to remove known drug dealers from the gene pool via Norplant and Vasagel as a condition of parole.

    In short Steve, its our open borders and the flood of drugs, that is the reason why crime rates have not fallen nearly enough given the increases in incarceration rates.

    Read More
    • Replies: @HA
    "Drug Dealers are the worst sort of sociopaths. Our drug laws are not nearly tough enough."

    And thankfully, they’re only selling drugs, which is probably the most victimless crime they’re able to engage in without losing their street cred. Once drugs are legalized, and they have to go back to jacking cars, mugging, burglary -- or else selling 10-year old girls and munitions for jihad INC. -- that’s when the fireworks will really start.

  28. @anonymous-antimarxist
    Cops know that every day drug dealers are destroying lives, causing children to be abandoned and abused, and thousands of drug causalities on a daily basis.

    Watch National Geographic 's show "Drugs Inc". Drug Dealers are the worst sort of sociopaths. Our drug laws are not nearly tough enough.

    If it was up to me there would be a national program to remove known drug dealers from the gene pool via Norplant and Vasagel as a condition of parole.

    In short Steve, its our open borders and the flood of drugs, that is the reason why crime rates have not fallen nearly enough given the increases in incarceration rates.

    “Drug Dealers are the worst sort of sociopaths. Our drug laws are not nearly tough enough.”

    And thankfully, they’re only selling drugs, which is probably the most victimless crime they’re able to engage in without losing their street cred. Once drugs are legalized, and they have to go back to jacking cars, mugging, burglary — or else selling 10-year old girls and munitions for jihad INC. — that’s when the fireworks will really start.

    Read More
    • Replies: @WowJustWow
    But after legalization lowers prices, fewer addicts will have to resort to crime to support their habit. So it could be a wash.
  29. McNulty said dumb criminals make dumb cops.

    The clearance rate for homicides in B-Mo is 90 % . “More recently, in 2012, the national clearance rate for homicide in 2012 was 62.5 percent. Baltimore County’s clearance rate was 95.7 percent.”

    In the city : “So far this year, homicide detectives have a clearance rate of 42 percent, down from last year’s end-of-the-year figure of about 47 percent” Also 2012. Rawls must be tearing his hair out.

    Baltimore city is 63% black. The county is 27 % but it is growing. And so of course is crime.

    #25 FWIW , I knew a guy in New York who had been in prison for bank robbery , he thought everybody in prison belonged there. I doubt that’s 100 % true but he’d been I haven’t . Knock wood.

    Read More
  30. For example, Canadian cities seem to have fairly frequent roundups/big raids involving hundreds of officers and dozens of arrests/weapons and drugs seizures at the same time. These kinds of raids have broken the back of various gangs, such as they were, in Canadian cities.

    US police forces – though better-armed and a lot more aggressive on a “small unit” level – seem to lack the coordination, intel, or competence to use these kinds “combined arms” (with prosecutors and other agencies, provincial and federal) tactics in an effective manner.

    -Rick Johnsmeyer

    You can’t compare Canada to the US. The minorities there are of a different quality and class. Latin Americans and Africans have so much more of a propensity to engage in criminal behavior than South and East Asians that police tactics that are effective in Canada simply wouldn’t work in much of the US. And think of the political implications. Imagine the screaming we’d hear if the LAPD engaged in roundups on a regular basis.

    I’m from Seattle, BTW, and the crime rate is a hell of a lot lower than it is in most similar-sized Californian cities. The first time I decided to take a walk through Oakland back in the 90s when I was on the way to SF to visit family (I was waiting for the next train at the Coliseum station and thought I’d check out the neighborhood), I quickly realized I’d made a mistake and went back inside the station.

    I have never seen anything in Canada like what I saw in Oakland back then. Not even close. The best cops can do in that kind of environment is try to contain the problem geographically. There isn’t enough space in the prisons for all the criminals by our standards.

    Read More
    • Replies: @Steve Sailer
    The LAPD started going on these big round-up raids against street gangs under Bill Bratton.

    Toronto had Bratton up there to give them some advice about a decade ago.

    , @Anonymous Nephew
    "I quickly realized I’d made a mistake and went back inside the station. "

    Visited a friend in SF around the same time, came by train from Seattle, rang to arrange to be met.

    "If you'll be arriving in the day, get off at Oakland. If you're coming in at night, I'll drive to Sacramento for you".

    We arrived at Oakland during the day, got into her car and she had the doors locked within three seconds.

    "Don't even like stopping at traffic lights here !"
  31. @Bill P

    For example, Canadian cities seem to have fairly frequent roundups/big raids involving hundreds of officers and dozens of arrests/weapons and drugs seizures at the same time. These kinds of raids have broken the back of various gangs, such as they were, in Canadian cities.

    US police forces – though better-armed and a lot more aggressive on a “small unit” level – seem to lack the coordination, intel, or competence to use these kinds “combined arms” (with prosecutors and other agencies, provincial and federal) tactics in an effective manner.

    -Rick Johnsmeyer
     
    You can't compare Canada to the US. The minorities there are of a different quality and class. Latin Americans and Africans have so much more of a propensity to engage in criminal behavior than South and East Asians that police tactics that are effective in Canada simply wouldn't work in much of the US. And think of the political implications. Imagine the screaming we'd hear if the LAPD engaged in roundups on a regular basis.

    I'm from Seattle, BTW, and the crime rate is a hell of a lot lower than it is in most similar-sized Californian cities. The first time I decided to take a walk through Oakland back in the 90s when I was on the way to SF to visit family (I was waiting for the next train at the Coliseum station and thought I'd check out the neighborhood), I quickly realized I'd made a mistake and went back inside the station.

    I have never seen anything in Canada like what I saw in Oakland back then. Not even close. The best cops can do in that kind of environment is try to contain the problem geographically. There isn't enough space in the prisons for all the criminals by our standards.

    The LAPD started going on these big round-up raids against street gangs under Bill Bratton.

    Toronto had Bratton up there to give them some advice about a decade ago.

    Read More
    • Replies: @Brutusale
    Boston's has spent 20 years trying to replace Bratton. Maybe the most effective crime fighter of our time.
  32. Crime can’t fall and can only rise. Because a dominant Dem controled federal beaurocracy will not arrest and imprison significant numbers of core Dem voters … Blacks and Hispanics. Or allow local authorities to act.

    Consent decrees? Its drive and wave time.

    Read More
  33. Anonymous says:     Show CommentNext New Comment

    Steve, technology has made life vastly more difficult for offenders.
    The UK is a leader in this respect, having suffered from an enormous crime wave back in the 80s and 90s.
    CCTV is absolutely ubiquitous on every British main street. If you do anything, anything at all on a main British street, you will be filmed on multiple cameras – this has held convictions vasdly.
    Secondly, the UK was the leader in establishing a DNA database. Anyone who is arrested in the UK, has a DNA swab taken, even if they are never actually charged with anything. By this surreptitious means, most of the adult male population is now on the database. This has caught numerous offenders.
    UK police forces have also pioneered facial recognition software and facial recognition cameras placed at all sorts of place. Apparently the data base of photos is around 40% of the adult population, which must mean the majority of adult British males. The photos used are police mugshots taken habitually on arrest.

    Read More
    • Replies: @Steve Sailer
    Anthony Burgess's 1962 novel "A Clockwork Orange" was strikingly prescient in predicting both a rise in crime, including home invasion (a crime that almost didn't exist in Britain back then), and the government's technocratic response. He didn't get the details of the technological response quite right, but he was on the right track.
  34. @Anonymous
    Steve, technology has made life vastly more difficult for offenders.
    The UK is a leader in this respect, having suffered from an enormous crime wave back in the 80s and 90s.
    CCTV is absolutely ubiquitous on every British main street. If you do anything, anything at all on a main British street, you will be filmed on multiple cameras - this has held convictions vasdly.
    Secondly, the UK was the leader in establishing a DNA database. Anyone who is arrested in the UK, has a DNA swab taken, even if they are never actually charged with anything. By this surreptitious means, most of the adult male population is now on the database. This has caught numerous offenders.
    UK police forces have also pioneered facial recognition software and facial recognition cameras placed at all sorts of place. Apparently the data base of photos is around 40% of the adult population, which must mean the majority of adult British males. The photos used are police mugshots taken habitually on arrest.

    Anthony Burgess’s 1962 novel “A Clockwork Orange” was strikingly prescient in predicting both a rise in crime, including home invasion (a crime that almost didn’t exist in Britain back then), and the government’s technocratic response. He didn’t get the details of the technological response quite right, but he was on the right track.

    Read More
  35. The incarceration rate and the drop in crime rate seem to correlate fairly nicely, except for the period of 1984-1991, when the crack epidemic occurred. If not for the rising incarceration rate, the spike probably would have been higher.

    What should also be pointed out is that the rate doesn’t actually level out so much at the end. The figure is per 100,000 people, but the age distribution of the U.S. is getting older, so all things being equal, we should expect the incarceration rate to decrease simply due to the fact that young people make up an increasingly smaller share of the population. And by the way, we should expect the crime rate to decrease as well.

    Read More
    • Replies: @Steve Sailer
    The crack era was one of very young criminals, perhaps because the older ones were locked up.
  36. @David M.
    The incarceration rate and the drop in crime rate seem to correlate fairly nicely, except for the period of 1984-1991, when the crack epidemic occurred. If not for the rising incarceration rate, the spike probably would have been higher.

    What should also be pointed out is that the rate doesn't actually level out so much at the end. The figure is per 100,000 people, but the age distribution of the U.S. is getting older, so all things being equal, we should expect the incarceration rate to decrease simply due to the fact that young people make up an increasingly smaller share of the population. And by the way, we should expect the crime rate to decrease as well.

    The crack era was one of very young criminals, perhaps because the older ones were locked up.

    Read More
    • Replies: @Pat Casey
    But are juvenile criminals in black ghettos any older or fewer today than then? From what I can see, boys start to commit crimes right before they start having sex. But probably what caused very young criminals in the 80's was very young boys getting away with having sex in the sixties. The culture has only gotten worse in that respect, and it's not obvious to me that black ghettos have gotten better about producing fewer very young criminals per capita than in the 80's-early 90s. DC still very often has to apply the law that makes it illegal for cops to chase stolen cars driven by 10 year olds.
  37. anon says:     Show CommentNext New Comment

    Academia and the prestige press are almost entirely devoted to shooting down democratic ideas (common sense logic that appeals to average IQ people) of the majority community.

    So you get things like ‘while the laws of supply and demand are relatively easy to understand and have great impact and thus one can see their appeal to Joe Average, high-end number crunching reveals it just doesn’t apply that importing millions and millions of low-skill labor does any real harm to our own large supply of low-skill labor’ and ‘it sure seems chaotic on the streets with too much crime, but the obvious solution of locking more people up has only very minor impact on crime rates’.

    Read More
    • Replies: @AnotherDad

    Academia and the prestige press are almost entirely devoted to shooting down democratic ideas (common sense logic that appeals to average IQ people) of the majority community.
     
    Well said "anon"--BTW, just pick a name.

    A lot of modern leftism has always struck me as "you gotta have a fancy education to believe something this stupid".
  38. @Scotty G. Vito
    Best dippy-liberal journalism artifact I've found this month has to be this hipster hymn to Johannesburg's Chateau-Robocop apartment tower-- she moved in there for a couple months to get the vibe of the South African Ellis Island:
    http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/roads/2015/02/ponte_city_in_south_africa_africa_s_tallest_apartment_building_was_built.single.html

    Well now that’s just embarrassing.

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  39. @Rick Johnsmeyer

    Policing black communities is not like policing white communities.
     
    Sure, but Toronto is about 9% black, which is similar to LA, and is higher than US cities with higher murder rates such as Seattle. It's not as though Canadian cities have no black populations to speak of. But their management of crime within those communities seems to be a lot more competent.

    For example, Canadian cities seem to have fairly frequent roundups/big raids involving hundreds of officers and dozens of arrests/weapons and drugs seizures at the same time. These kinds of raids have broken the back of various gangs, such as they were, in Canadian cities.

    US police forces - though better-armed and a lot more aggressive on a "small unit" level - seem to lack the coordination, intel, or competence to use these kinds "combined arms" (with prosecutors and other agencies, provincial and federal) tactics in an effective manner.

    London is around 12-14% black and the Metropolitan Police claim a 90% conviction rate for murder, similar to Canada.

    Read More
    • Replies: @syonredux

    London is around 12-14% black and the Metropolitan Police claim a 90% conviction rate for murder, similar to Canada.
     
    Yeah, but Britain as a whole is only 3.3% Black

    The black population formed around 3.3% of the UK's population in 2011.[4] It has increased from 1 million in 2001 to over 1.8 million in 2011.[8]
     
    The USA, in contrast, is 12.6% Black

    2010 38.9 million 12.6%
     
    Black Americans have attained a kind of critical mass, a nation within the nation.That's not the case in the UK
  40. @Steve Sailer
    The crack era was one of very young criminals, perhaps because the older ones were locked up.

    But are juvenile criminals in black ghettos any older or fewer today than then? From what I can see, boys start to commit crimes right before they start having sex. But probably what caused very young criminals in the 80′s was very young boys getting away with having sex in the sixties. The culture has only gotten worse in that respect, and it’s not obvious to me that black ghettos have gotten better about producing fewer very young criminals per capita than in the 80′s-early 90s. DC still very often has to apply the law that makes it illegal for cops to chase stolen cars driven by 10 year olds.

    Read More
    • Replies: @anonymous-antimarxist
    Please read up on Vasalgel. It is now possible to remove young male sociopaths from the gene pool. Vasalgel provides a low cost reversible vasectomy that can be applied to young criminals as a condition of their sentencing and parole.

    England in the 19th century lowered their crime rate by shipping their felons to Australia. We have Norplant and Vasalgel. In a couple of generations they would work wonders.
  41. @Svigor

    In Canada – where hiring is said to be somewhat more meritocratic – clearance rates are generally in the 85-90% range. Some of that is due to catchall “cultural differences,” but you don’t get from here to there on culture alone.
     
    A lot of it. Policing black communities is not like policing white communities. They're kind of opposites, actually.

    Then there's volume to consider.

    Part of it has to do with sheer technical competence, along with more effective investigative methods.
     
    The vast majority of homicides are solved by old-fashioned police work. Interrogation, basically.

    “A lot of it. Policing black communities is not like policing white communities. They’re kind of opposites, actually.”

    And you’ve worked, how long, as a police officer?

    Read More
    • Replies: @peterike

    And you’ve worked, how long, as a police officer?

     

    You don't have to be a whale to write "Moby Dick."
  42. @Rick Johnsmeyer
    I'm not sure how it would be possible to account for "police incompetence" in a survey of crime rates (and missed potential for reduction), but I suspect it's an under-appreciated factor. A good many city-level police departments are known as bureaucratic outposts of political hires - either politically-connected in some minor sense (relatives of existing officers, etc.) or affirmative-action hires.

    This reduces their effectiveness at solving crime, and hence the "clearance rate" of crimes solved. It's tough to compare non-murder crimes across jurisdictions, but looking just at murder, we can see this effect - in many major urban areas of the US (such as St. Louis), clearance rates struggle to reach the 1/4th or (if "lucky" in the sense of an unusual number of self-clearing murder-suicides) maybe 1/3rd. Chicago's clearance rate a few years ago was reported to be as low as 15%, which caused a bit of a scandal.

    In Canada - where hiring is said to be somewhat more meritocratic - clearance rates are generally in the 85-90% range. Some of that is due to catchall "cultural differences," but you don't get from here to there on culture alone. Part of it has to do with sheer technical competence, along with more effective investigative methods. The ability to solve murders quickly seems to lead to a virtuous cycle in which the murder rate is reduced by eliminating the need/ability of would-be murderers to exact vengeance on uncaptured ones.

    Hence, the city of Toronto's murder rate ends up being lower than the state of Minnesota for 2013, which is quite an achievement. Vancouver and Montreal's rates are even lower, and Quebec City (pop. 500,000 or so at the time) managed to go an entire 18 months from 2006 to 2008 with ZERO murders. That's unthinkable in America.

    Canadians seem to demand a higher level of competence out of their police than Americans do, and they receive it. It's something to consider.

    Canadians seem to demand a higher level of competence out of their police than Americans do, and they receive it. It’s something to consider.

    We don’t have that pesky Constitution thingy.

    Read More
  43. @Pat Casey
    When I was in Alexandria detention center last year, I got into a small pod for drug offenders. Ostensibly the program was for drug abusers, but save for a few of us everyone else was there as a drug dealer.

    Small pods can be better or worse than large units, and it all depends on whether a power struggle occurs. Part of what made my experience relatively enjoyable was that the alpha of our de facto tribe was as noble a king as you could hope to have given the circumstance. Not only was he the oldest among us, he had spent more than half his life incarcerated. He had boxed growing up and retained the physique even into his fifties. And he had the rhythm of speech characteristic of being that age after growing up taking blows to the head. In other words, he was effortlessly the alpha, and I think Aristotle must have said that is just when a ruler can be pure, can be noble.

    Anyways, despite spending so few years of his life able to have sex, he apparently has 13 children. And I think one time he mentioned how many moms there were, but I can't remember.

    Our incarceration policy was clearly not effective enough that way.

    This guy is the height of biological fitness. In older times many of his children might have perished due to his inability or lack of interest in supporting them but he is extremally well-adapted to modern society.

    Read More
    • Replies: @anonymous

    This guy is the height of biological fitness. In older times many of his children might have perished due to his inability or lack of interest in supporting them but he is extremally well-adapted to modern society.
     
    Which means the children are all on welfare. Also, they are the meal ticket for the baby mommas who also get support. All future felons.
  44. @Anonymous
    most of the recent reduction in crime comes from the big city police depts manipulating crime reports so that the crime rate won't scare away potential residents and businesses. Once that dynamic caught on, all big cities had to participate in crime stats fraud or else look bad compared to all the other cities.

    “most of the recent reduction in crime comes from the big city police depts manipulating crime reports so that the crime rate won’t scare away potential residents and businesses. …”

    You may be a stats freak but you’re not very familiar with crime statistics. The NCVS is a national probability survey of individuals who report criminal victimization. It’s results have nothing to do with police statistics on crime and NCVS crime reports are similar to the temporal pattern shown by the UCR and other crime statyistics based on police reports of crime

    Read More
  45. @Rick Johnsmeyer
    I'm not sure how it would be possible to account for "police incompetence" in a survey of crime rates (and missed potential for reduction), but I suspect it's an under-appreciated factor. A good many city-level police departments are known as bureaucratic outposts of political hires - either politically-connected in some minor sense (relatives of existing officers, etc.) or affirmative-action hires.

    This reduces their effectiveness at solving crime, and hence the "clearance rate" of crimes solved. It's tough to compare non-murder crimes across jurisdictions, but looking just at murder, we can see this effect - in many major urban areas of the US (such as St. Louis), clearance rates struggle to reach the 1/4th or (if "lucky" in the sense of an unusual number of self-clearing murder-suicides) maybe 1/3rd. Chicago's clearance rate a few years ago was reported to be as low as 15%, which caused a bit of a scandal.

    In Canada - where hiring is said to be somewhat more meritocratic - clearance rates are generally in the 85-90% range. Some of that is due to catchall "cultural differences," but you don't get from here to there on culture alone. Part of it has to do with sheer technical competence, along with more effective investigative methods. The ability to solve murders quickly seems to lead to a virtuous cycle in which the murder rate is reduced by eliminating the need/ability of would-be murderers to exact vengeance on uncaptured ones.

    Hence, the city of Toronto's murder rate ends up being lower than the state of Minnesota for 2013, which is quite an achievement. Vancouver and Montreal's rates are even lower, and Quebec City (pop. 500,000 or so at the time) managed to go an entire 18 months from 2006 to 2008 with ZERO murders. That's unthinkable in America.

    Canadians seem to demand a higher level of competence out of their police than Americans do, and they receive it. It's something to consider.

    “I’m not sure how it would be possible to account for “police incompetence” in a survey of crime rates (and missed potential for reduction), but I suspect it’s an under-appreciated factor. ”

    It’s possible, using the FBI’s Supplementary Homicide Reports to compare clearance rates for homicides across different USA police jurisdictions and over time. The first research in this area (presented at a professional conference, but unpublished) found a very interesting pattern: Some jurisdictions have very low clearance rates, some have very high, and some have clearance rates that are in between. And these differences persist over decades; cities with high rates in one year have them in subsequent years; cities with low rates keep failing to solve homicides. This first research found nothing obvious, e.g., police per capita, type of homicide mix, racial composition, etc., to explain these differences.

    There was some subsequent research done. Mostly it was hack work, done when community policing was the mantra that found, mirabile dictu, community policing or its absence was responsible for these differences.

    We really still don’t know why some police departments are good at solving homicides and others aren’t. It’s a worthy subject for competent, unbiased professional research.

    Read More
    • Replies: @Steve Sailer
    Analyzing police clearance rates by city sounds like a great topic for Moneyballers.

    Of course it might turn out that Springfield has a consistently high clearance rate because they have a time-honored tradition of framing the usual suspects.

    , @anonymous

    We really still don’t know why some police departments are good at solving homicides and others aren’t. It’s a worthy subject for competent, unbiased professional research.
     
    Community cooperation. The vast majority of shooting victims, fatal or not, take place in the ghetto areas of the larger cities. No one saw anything, no one knows anything. Victims themselves will not cooperate. It's hard to make a case under these circumstances. Even when they do make a case the witnesses are criminals themselves or drug-addled types with no credibility.
  46. @Jus' Sayin'...
    "I’m not sure how it would be possible to account for “police incompetence” in a survey of crime rates (and missed potential for reduction), but I suspect it’s an under-appreciated factor. "

    It's possible, using the FBI's Supplementary Homicide Reports to compare clearance rates for homicides across different USA police jurisdictions and over time. The first research in this area (presented at a professional conference, but unpublished) found a very interesting pattern: Some jurisdictions have very low clearance rates, some have very high, and some have clearance rates that are in between. And these differences persist over decades; cities with high rates in one year have them in subsequent years; cities with low rates keep failing to solve homicides. This first research found nothing obvious, e.g., police per capita, type of homicide mix, racial composition, etc., to explain these differences.

    There was some subsequent research done. Mostly it was hack work, done when community policing was the mantra that found, mirabile dictu, community policing or its absence was responsible for these differences.

    We really still don't know why some police departments are good at solving homicides and others aren't. It's a worthy subject for competent, unbiased professional research.

    Analyzing police clearance rates by city sounds like a great topic for Moneyballers.

    Of course it might turn out that Springfield has a consistently high clearance rate because they have a time-honored tradition of framing the usual suspects.

    Read More
  47. @Simon in London
    London is around 12-14% black and the Metropolitan Police claim a 90% conviction rate for murder, similar to Canada.

    London is around 12-14% black and the Metropolitan Police claim a 90% conviction rate for murder, similar to Canada.

    Yeah, but Britain as a whole is only 3.3% Black

    The black population formed around 3.3% of the UK’s population in 2011.[4] It has increased from 1 million in 2001 to over 1.8 million in 2011.[8]

    The USA, in contrast, is 12.6% Black

    2010 38.9 million 12.6%

    Black Americans have attained a kind of critical mass, a nation within the nation.That’s not the case in the UK

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  48. @Rick Johnsmeyer

    Policing black communities is not like policing white communities.
     
    Sure, but Toronto is about 9% black, which is similar to LA, and is higher than US cities with higher murder rates such as Seattle. It's not as though Canadian cities have no black populations to speak of. But their management of crime within those communities seems to be a lot more competent.

    For example, Canadian cities seem to have fairly frequent roundups/big raids involving hundreds of officers and dozens of arrests/weapons and drugs seizures at the same time. These kinds of raids have broken the back of various gangs, such as they were, in Canadian cities.

    US police forces - though better-armed and a lot more aggressive on a "small unit" level - seem to lack the coordination, intel, or competence to use these kinds "combined arms" (with prosecutors and other agencies, provincial and federal) tactics in an effective manner.

    Sure, but Toronto is about 9% black, which is similar to LA, and is higher than US cities with higher murder rates such as Seattle. It’s not as though Canadian cities have no black populations to speak of. But their management of crime within those communities seems to be a lot more competent.

    Canada as a whole is 2.5% Black:

    According to the 2006 Census by Statistics Canada, 783,795 Canadians identified themselves as black, constituting 2.5% of the entire Canadian population.[9]

    The USA, in contrast, is 12.6% Black:

    2010 38.9 million 12.6%

    Blacks in the USA have attained critical mass.They are a nation within the nation

    Read More
  49. @Pat Casey
    But are juvenile criminals in black ghettos any older or fewer today than then? From what I can see, boys start to commit crimes right before they start having sex. But probably what caused very young criminals in the 80's was very young boys getting away with having sex in the sixties. The culture has only gotten worse in that respect, and it's not obvious to me that black ghettos have gotten better about producing fewer very young criminals per capita than in the 80's-early 90s. DC still very often has to apply the law that makes it illegal for cops to chase stolen cars driven by 10 year olds.

    Please read up on Vasalgel. It is now possible to remove young male sociopaths from the gene pool. Vasalgel provides a low cost reversible vasectomy that can be applied to young criminals as a condition of their sentencing and parole.

    England in the 19th century lowered their crime rate by shipping their felons to Australia. We have Norplant and Vasalgel. In a couple of generations they would work wonders.

    Read More
  50. @Rick Johnsmeyer
    I'm not sure how it would be possible to account for "police incompetence" in a survey of crime rates (and missed potential for reduction), but I suspect it's an under-appreciated factor. A good many city-level police departments are known as bureaucratic outposts of political hires - either politically-connected in some minor sense (relatives of existing officers, etc.) or affirmative-action hires.

    This reduces their effectiveness at solving crime, and hence the "clearance rate" of crimes solved. It's tough to compare non-murder crimes across jurisdictions, but looking just at murder, we can see this effect - in many major urban areas of the US (such as St. Louis), clearance rates struggle to reach the 1/4th or (if "lucky" in the sense of an unusual number of self-clearing murder-suicides) maybe 1/3rd. Chicago's clearance rate a few years ago was reported to be as low as 15%, which caused a bit of a scandal.

    In Canada - where hiring is said to be somewhat more meritocratic - clearance rates are generally in the 85-90% range. Some of that is due to catchall "cultural differences," but you don't get from here to there on culture alone. Part of it has to do with sheer technical competence, along with more effective investigative methods. The ability to solve murders quickly seems to lead to a virtuous cycle in which the murder rate is reduced by eliminating the need/ability of would-be murderers to exact vengeance on uncaptured ones.

    Hence, the city of Toronto's murder rate ends up being lower than the state of Minnesota for 2013, which is quite an achievement. Vancouver and Montreal's rates are even lower, and Quebec City (pop. 500,000 or so at the time) managed to go an entire 18 months from 2006 to 2008 with ZERO murders. That's unthinkable in America.

    Canadians seem to demand a higher level of competence out of their police than Americans do, and they receive it. It's something to consider.

    In Canada – where hiring is said to be somewhat more meritocratic – clearance rates are generally in the 85-90% range.

    Well, America’s huge Black population puts some rather severe limits on meritocracy:

    The ABC station in Dayton, Ohio reports:
    The Dayton Police Department is lowering its testing standards for recruits.

    It’s a move required by the U.S. Department of Justice after it says not enough African-Americans passed the exam.

    Dayton is in desperate need of officers to replace dozens of retirees. The hiring process was postponed for months because the D.O.J. rejected the original scores provided by the Dayton Civil Service Board, which administers the test.

    Under the previous requirements, candidates had to get a 66% on part one of the exam and a 72% on part two. The D.O.J. approved new scoring policy only requires potential police officers to get a 58% and a 63%. That’s the equivalent of an ‘F’ and a ‘D’. …

    The D.O.J. and Civil Service Board declined Dayton’s News Source’s repeat requests for interviews. The lower standards mean 258 more people passed the test. The city won’t say how many were minorities. …

    The D.O.J. has forced other police departments across the country to lower testing standards, citing once again that not enough black candidates were passing.

    A story on WHIO in Dayton gives a few more (sometimes conflicting) numbers:
    Officials with the City of Dayton Service Board announced Thursday that it has accepted the cutoff score for the police recruit written examination administered on Nov. 20, 2010. Officials said a total of 1,083 candidates completed the written portion of the examination.

    The test was administered in two parts, a Test Preparation Manual (TPM) test with 86 questions and a Situational Judgment and Writing Ability Test (SJWAT) with 102 questions.After consultation with the United States Department of Justice, as well as Fire & Police Selection, Inc., the creator of the written examination, the cutoff score for the examination is 50 points for the TPM portion and 64 points for the SJWAT portion.

    This resulted in 748 individuals passing the written examination, which was a pass/fail examination.

    Presumably, this means that the top 748 out of 1083 now proceed afresh through the oral part of the hiring process all with equal chances.

    So, under the original scoring, 490 of 1,083 candidates for these “dozens” of jobs passed the test. So, you had to be in the top 45% on the written test. Now, they’ll go down another quartile.

    http://isteve.blogspot.com/2011/03/neverending-story.html

    From the Chicago Sun-Times (thanks to the readers who sent this in):
    Police may scrap entrance exam
    ‘OPEN UP THE PROCESS’ | Union chief: It’s ‘too stupid to be true’

    BY FRAN SPIELMAN AND FRANK MAIN, Staff Reporters

    The Chicago Police Department is seriously considering scrapping the police entrance exam to bolster minority hiring, save millions on test preparation and avert costly legal battles that have dogged the exam process for decades, City Hall sources said Tuesday.

    If the process is opened to everyone who applies and meets the minimum education and residency requirements, Chicago would be virtually alone among major cities. Most cities have police entrance exams — and for good reason, experts say.

    “A background check and a psych [exam] alone will not eliminate some people who should not be there,” said Brad Woods, who ran the Personnel Division under former Chicago Police Superintendents Phil Cline and Terry Hillard.

    Calling an application-only process a “step backward” and the “wrong way to go,” Woods said, “When you lower your quality, you will get poor police service and more complaints. … Whenever you make it easier to be the police, you’re doing the citizens and the Police Department a disservice.”

    Charlie Roberts, who ran the training division from 1995 to 1999, noted that there are “eleven tracks” recruits must go through in the police academy, including the law and the municipal code.
    “If you don’t give someone at least a reading comprehension test, can you just put them in and risk the possibility of having so many of them fail? That could get quite expensive,” Roberts said.

    “We were getting people with 60 hours of college credit who were reading at a third-grade level. What do you think you’ll get if you have no screening process?”

    Human Resources Department spokesperson Connie Buscemi acknowledged Tuesday that the Daley administration has been exploring other “options” since last fall, when a “request-for-proposals” for companies interested in preparing an on-line police entrance exam was cancelled.

    The last police entrance exam was held on Nov. 5, 2006.

    “We wanted to try to develop something on-line to allow the city to accommodate members of the U.S. military who are on active duty. But, we didn’t get any responses that met our needs. No one said they could administer an on-line exam” and guarantee its integrity, Buscemi said.

    This is a legitimate need, although I doubt if it has much to do with dumping testing. Hiring tests in Chicago are typically given on a single day every few years, with copies of the test delivered written by outside consulting firms delivered to the test site by armored car. Otherwise, insiders will get a look at the test ahead of time and alert their nephews and in-laws to what’s on it.

    One problem with this system is that if you are a Chicagoan stuck on active duty in Iraq on the day of the test, you are out of luck getting hired as a Chicago fireman or policeman for years to come. And since the EEOC’s Four-Fifths rule doesn’t apply to military enlistment tests, such as the heavily g-weighted AFQT, Chicago is missing out on its most promising source of future policemen and firemen. But if Chicago offered the test online at the same time it was being given in Chicago, who would proctor the test-takers in the middle of the night in Iraq and Afghanistan?

    That’s an interesting question, but it’s a complete sideshow for what’s really going on. Post-Ricci, the politicians can’t fudge the results as much, so now they want to get rid of the test.
    “We’re [now] reviewing our options on how to administer the police application process.”

    Other sources confirmed that the police entrance exam could be scrapped altogether “to open up the process to as many people as possible.” A final decision could be made later this week.

    Fraternal Order of Police President Mark Donahue said the idea “sounds too stupid to be true.” “You need a testing process. … You need to be very concerned about the very limited information you would get from just a screening and application process,” Donahue said.

    Something that is completely overlooked but that is totally obvious when you stop to think about it is that civil servant unions, who are always demonized by Republicans, are one of the few effective forces actively working against affirmative action in big cities. The head of the union always has some name like “Donahue,” and union policies work to keep older white civil servants from being fired in the name of making the government work force “look more like Chicago.” This is particularly true for teachers unions, whose leaders all remember when black politicians got local control of New York public schools in the Ocean Hill neighborhood in the late 1960s, and immediately fired hundreds of Jewish schoolteachers and hired blacks to replace them.

    Hiring and promotions in the Police and Fire Departments have generated controversy in Chicago for as long as anyone can remember.

    The criticism reached a crescendo in 1994 after a sergeants exam produced just five minority promotions out of 114.

    The test was the first to be administered by the city after “race-norming” — the practice of adjusting scores on the basis of race — was ruled unconstitutional.

    In November 2005, City Hall announced plans to offer the police entrance exam a record four times the following year — and for the first time on the Internet — after an unprecedented outreach campaign that bolstered the number of minority applicants to 34 percent black, 24 percent Hispanic and 26 percent women.

    More than two years later, black ministers told newly-appointed Police Supt. Jody Weis that, if he was serious about re-establishing trust between police and the black community, he should start by hiring and promoting more African Americans.

    NBCChicago adds:
    And as of last year, one in four patrol officers were African-American, but just one in 12 Lieutenants were of color.

    Let me point out that, to get around the EEOC’s Four-Fifth’s Rule, Chicago has already almost completely emasculated its police and fire tests, in order to make the disparity between white and black passing rates (as innumerately measured by the feds) less than one-fifth. Chicago’s last fire and police tests were passed by 85% of the people who walked in off the street. What’s the point of even giving a test so easy that people at the fifth percentile among whites pass?

    So, why not give up on testing completely? That’s the logical implication of the EEOC’s Four-Fifth’s Rule.

    As Steve Farron pointed out in The Affirmative Action Hoax, honest racial quotas would be better than abolishing testing. You’d at least get the smartest of each race.

    Considering that Barack Obama taught “Racism and the Law” (not, by the way, “Race and the Law”) at the University of Chicago and litigated disparate impact lawsuits in Chicago, somebody might want to ask the President of the United States his opinion on this subject.

    But don’t count on that ever happening.

    http://isteve.blogspot.com/2010/01/chicago-considering-scrapping-police.html

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    • Replies: @Art Deco
    Well, America’s huge Black population puts some rather severe limits on meritocracy:

    Rubbish. Political patronage in police hiring is a clear policy choice, not a function of demographics. Ask yourself why something similar is universal in academe, which is quite insulated from (and contemptuous of) political pressure or popular opinion. Self-aggrandizing status games among professional managerial types is the source of this.
  51. anonymous says:     Show CommentNext New Comment
    @Jus' Sayin'...
    "I’m not sure how it would be possible to account for “police incompetence” in a survey of crime rates (and missed potential for reduction), but I suspect it’s an under-appreciated factor. "

    It's possible, using the FBI's Supplementary Homicide Reports to compare clearance rates for homicides across different USA police jurisdictions and over time. The first research in this area (presented at a professional conference, but unpublished) found a very interesting pattern: Some jurisdictions have very low clearance rates, some have very high, and some have clearance rates that are in between. And these differences persist over decades; cities with high rates in one year have them in subsequent years; cities with low rates keep failing to solve homicides. This first research found nothing obvious, e.g., police per capita, type of homicide mix, racial composition, etc., to explain these differences.

    There was some subsequent research done. Mostly it was hack work, done when community policing was the mantra that found, mirabile dictu, community policing or its absence was responsible for these differences.

    We really still don't know why some police departments are good at solving homicides and others aren't. It's a worthy subject for competent, unbiased professional research.

    We really still don’t know why some police departments are good at solving homicides and others aren’t. It’s a worthy subject for competent, unbiased professional research.

    Community cooperation. The vast majority of shooting victims, fatal or not, take place in the ghetto areas of the larger cities. No one saw anything, no one knows anything. Victims themselves will not cooperate. It’s hard to make a case under these circumstances. Even when they do make a case the witnesses are criminals themselves or drug-addled types with no credibility.

    Read More
    • Replies: @Jus' Sayin'...
    Your argument that community cooperation is the key to solving homicides is reasonable and I tend to agree with it. But without solid evidence from empirical research it won't carry water with academics, foundations or the police administrators who use them as cover when designing and implementing new policies. Even more important, such research might provide some ideas on how to generate and foster that community cooperation. If I had a chance to start over again, I'd seriously consider building an academic career on researching this topic.
  52. And while we are noting homicide rates, it’s always useful to note the racial disparity in the USA:

    According to the FBI SHR data, in 2011 there were 6,309 black homicide victims in the United States. The homicide rate
    among black victims in the United States was 17.51 per 100,000. For that year, the overall national homicide rate was 4.44
    per 100,000. For whites, the national homicide rate was 2.64 per 100,000.

    http://www.vpc.org/studies/blackhomicide14.pdf

    White American Homicide Rate: 2.64 per 100,000

    Black American Homicide Rate: 17.51 per 100,000

    Read More
  53. AP [AKA "Dr. Preobrazhensky"] says:     Show CommentNext New Comment
    @Rick Johnsmeyer

    Policing black communities is not like policing white communities.
     
    Sure, but Toronto is about 9% black, which is similar to LA, and is higher than US cities with higher murder rates such as Seattle. It's not as though Canadian cities have no black populations to speak of. But their management of crime within those communities seems to be a lot more competent.

    For example, Canadian cities seem to have fairly frequent roundups/big raids involving hundreds of officers and dozens of arrests/weapons and drugs seizures at the same time. These kinds of raids have broken the back of various gangs, such as they were, in Canadian cities.

    US police forces - though better-armed and a lot more aggressive on a "small unit" level - seem to lack the coordination, intel, or competence to use these kinds "combined arms" (with prosecutors and other agencies, provincial and federal) tactics in an effective manner.

    Sure, but Toronto is about 9% black

    Toronto’s blacks are largely from the West Indies or African. These black populations have lower crime rates than do slave descendants. In America African and Jamaican areas are safer than African-American ones, and influx of these people into African-American areas results in reduced crime rates.

    If 10% of Toronto’s population were immigrants from Detroit or Compton I suspect crime stats in that city would be much different.

    Read More
    • Replies: @Art Deco
    If 10% of Toronto’s population were immigrants from Detroit or Compton I suspect crime stats in that city would be much different.

    Yeah, but Detroit is not representative of the black American population. The crime metrics in Detroit are about 1.5x worse than a slum black population in an ordinary city. The corps of black politicians is variegated. Few cities have had a crew as crooked and destructive as Detroit's; DC did for a while and you've had smaller scale disasters like Gary, Indiana.
  54. Does the Atlantic article address de-institutionalization of the mentally ill (and their subsequent incarceration) as part of the picture? Reihan Salaam discusses here: http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/398269/real-sources-prison-boom-reihan-salam

    Read More
  55. @Rick Johnsmeyer
    I'm not sure how it would be possible to account for "police incompetence" in a survey of crime rates (and missed potential for reduction), but I suspect it's an under-appreciated factor. A good many city-level police departments are known as bureaucratic outposts of political hires - either politically-connected in some minor sense (relatives of existing officers, etc.) or affirmative-action hires.

    This reduces their effectiveness at solving crime, and hence the "clearance rate" of crimes solved. It's tough to compare non-murder crimes across jurisdictions, but looking just at murder, we can see this effect - in many major urban areas of the US (such as St. Louis), clearance rates struggle to reach the 1/4th or (if "lucky" in the sense of an unusual number of self-clearing murder-suicides) maybe 1/3rd. Chicago's clearance rate a few years ago was reported to be as low as 15%, which caused a bit of a scandal.

    In Canada - where hiring is said to be somewhat more meritocratic - clearance rates are generally in the 85-90% range. Some of that is due to catchall "cultural differences," but you don't get from here to there on culture alone. Part of it has to do with sheer technical competence, along with more effective investigative methods. The ability to solve murders quickly seems to lead to a virtuous cycle in which the murder rate is reduced by eliminating the need/ability of would-be murderers to exact vengeance on uncaptured ones.

    Hence, the city of Toronto's murder rate ends up being lower than the state of Minnesota for 2013, which is quite an achievement. Vancouver and Montreal's rates are even lower, and Quebec City (pop. 500,000 or so at the time) managed to go an entire 18 months from 2006 to 2008 with ZERO murders. That's unthinkable in America.

    Canadians seem to demand a higher level of competence out of their police than Americans do, and they receive it. It's something to consider.

    Does Canada have anything close to the cult of Mumia Abu-Jamal, gangsta rap, the No Snitch Rule and legions of ACLU and National Lawyer Guild racial marxists egging it all on?

    The problem of persistent high crime and low conviction rates in the black ghettos is that the far left have convinced the black community to incentivize the murder of any witnesses in the name of sticking it to the “man”.

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    • Replies: @Art Deco
    Does Canada have anything close to the cult of Mumia Abu-Jamal, gangsta rap, the No Snitch Rule and legions of ACLU and National Lawyer Guild racial marxists egging it all on?

    After 1982, their appellate judiciary conducted itself on contentious questions more arrogantly than did our own. Also, until quite recently, federal law provided for a public system of campus style star chambers to suppress dissent. The law was repealed after Mark Steyn and Ezra Levant fought off the star chambers and exposed some of their agents provacateurs.

    As for Wesley Cook, he's some sort of honorary citizen of Paris. The cult is worse in some foreign loci.
  56. anonymous says:     Show CommentNext New Comment
    @Jim
    This guy is the height of biological fitness. In older times many of his children might have perished due to his inability or lack of interest in supporting them but he is extremally well-adapted to modern society.

    This guy is the height of biological fitness. In older times many of his children might have perished due to his inability or lack of interest in supporting them but he is extremally well-adapted to modern society.

    Which means the children are all on welfare. Also, they are the meal ticket for the baby mommas who also get support. All future felons.

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  57. @Truth
    "A lot of it. Policing black communities is not like policing white communities. They’re kind of opposites, actually."

    And you've worked, how long, as a police officer?

    And you’ve worked, how long, as a police officer?

    You don’t have to be a whale to write “Moby Dick.”

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  58. It’s pretty counter-intuitive to posit you’re going to dramatically decrease the probability of punishment (per Ernest van den Haag, the probability of imprisonment consequent to an index crime declined by 80% between 1960 and 1970) without generating an increase in the frequency of crime. The converse is also counter-intuitive. Both, however, are congruent with the vocational and ideological interests of the social work and mental health trade, so they were were assumptions latent in public discussions of crime prior to 1985. New York reaped some benefit from having politicians in gatekeeper positions who were simply not invested in the social work/mental health trade world view, Messrs. Koch, Cuomo, and Giuliani to name three.

    A more precise question would be how sensitive the crime rate is to various policy measures: police manpower, police tactics and strategy, sentencing rules, and statutory sentences.

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  59. @Rick Johnsmeyer

    Policing black communities is not like policing white communities.
     
    Sure, but Toronto is about 9% black, which is similar to LA, and is higher than US cities with higher murder rates such as Seattle. It's not as though Canadian cities have no black populations to speak of. But their management of crime within those communities seems to be a lot more competent.

    For example, Canadian cities seem to have fairly frequent roundups/big raids involving hundreds of officers and dozens of arrests/weapons and drugs seizures at the same time. These kinds of raids have broken the back of various gangs, such as they were, in Canadian cities.

    US police forces - though better-armed and a lot more aggressive on a "small unit" level - seem to lack the coordination, intel, or competence to use these kinds "combined arms" (with prosecutors and other agencies, provincial and federal) tactics in an effective manner.

    Sure, but Toronto is about 9% black, which is similar to LA, and is higher than US cities with higher murder rates such as Seattle.

    Canadian blacks would be immigrant West Indians. Not a particularly problematic problem in the first place (cross national migration taking only subsets of the source country population) and not subject to assimilation into the descendants-of-slaves population. The baselines of Canadian blacks and American blacks would be different.

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  60. @Questioner
    The incarceration rate is problematic. You need to factor out the large number of non-violent drug related prisoners.

    The incarceration rate is problematic. You need to factor out the large number of non-violent drug related prisoners.

    About 20% of the prison census consists of those for whom top count was a drug charge. You commonly see people confused on this point because most federal prisoners have a drug charge as their top count; federal prisoners account for only about 11% of the total prison census. I suspect you’d discover (just by looking at their rap sheet) that most drug offenders are not tranquil and pacific.

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  61. @syonredux

    In Canada – where hiring is said to be somewhat more meritocratic – clearance rates are generally in the 85-90% range.
     
    Well, America's huge Black population puts some rather severe limits on meritocracy:

    The ABC station in Dayton, Ohio reports:
    The Dayton Police Department is lowering its testing standards for recruits.

    It's a move required by the U.S. Department of Justice after it says not enough African-Americans passed the exam.

    Dayton is in desperate need of officers to replace dozens of retirees. The hiring process was postponed for months because the D.O.J. rejected the original scores provided by the Dayton Civil Service Board, which administers the test.

    Under the previous requirements, candidates had to get a 66% on part one of the exam and a 72% on part two. The D.O.J. approved new scoring policy only requires potential police officers to get a 58% and a 63%. That's the equivalent of an ‘F’ and a ‘D’. ...

    The D.O.J. and Civil Service Board declined Dayton’s News Source’s repeat requests for interviews. The lower standards mean 258 more people passed the test. The city won't say how many were minorities. ...

    The D.O.J. has forced other police departments across the country to lower testing standards, citing once again that not enough black candidates were passing.

    A story on WHIO in Dayton gives a few more (sometimes conflicting) numbers:
    Officials with the City of Dayton Service Board announced Thursday that it has accepted the cutoff score for the police recruit written examination administered on Nov. 20, 2010. Officials said a total of 1,083 candidates completed the written portion of the examination.

    The test was administered in two parts, a Test Preparation Manual (TPM) test with 86 questions and a Situational Judgment and Writing Ability Test (SJWAT) with 102 questions.After consultation with the United States Department of Justice, as well as Fire & Police Selection, Inc., the creator of the written examination, the cutoff score for the examination is 50 points for the TPM portion and 64 points for the SJWAT portion.

    This resulted in 748 individuals passing the written examination, which was a pass/fail examination.

    Presumably, this means that the top 748 out of 1083 now proceed afresh through the oral part of the hiring process all with equal chances.

    So, under the original scoring, 490 of 1,083 candidates for these "dozens" of jobs passed the test. So, you had to be in the top 45% on the written test. Now, they'll go down another quartile.

     

    http://isteve.blogspot.com/2011/03/neverending-story.html

    From the Chicago Sun-Times (thanks to the readers who sent this in):
    Police may scrap entrance exam
    'OPEN UP THE PROCESS' | Union chief: It's 'too stupid to be true'

    BY FRAN SPIELMAN AND FRANK MAIN, Staff Reporters

    The Chicago Police Department is seriously considering scrapping the police entrance exam to bolster minority hiring, save millions on test preparation and avert costly legal battles that have dogged the exam process for decades, City Hall sources said Tuesday.

    If the process is opened to everyone who applies and meets the minimum education and residency requirements, Chicago would be virtually alone among major cities. Most cities have police entrance exams -- and for good reason, experts say.

    "A background check and a psych [exam] alone will not eliminate some people who should not be there," said Brad Woods, who ran the Personnel Division under former Chicago Police Superintendents Phil Cline and Terry Hillard.

    Calling an application-only process a "step backward" and the "wrong way to go," Woods said, "When you lower your quality, you will get poor police service and more complaints. ... Whenever you make it easier to be the police, you're doing the citizens and the Police Department a disservice."

    Charlie Roberts, who ran the training division from 1995 to 1999, noted that there are "eleven tracks" recruits must go through in the police academy, including the law and the municipal code.
    "If you don't give someone at least a reading comprehension test, can you just put them in and risk the possibility of having so many of them fail? That could get quite expensive," Roberts said.

    "We were getting people with 60 hours of college credit who were reading at a third-grade level. What do you think you'll get if you have no screening process?"

    Human Resources Department spokesperson Connie Buscemi acknowledged Tuesday that the Daley administration has been exploring other "options" since last fall, when a "request-for-proposals" for companies interested in preparing an on-line police entrance exam was cancelled.

    The last police entrance exam was held on Nov. 5, 2006.

    "We wanted to try to develop something on-line to allow the city to accommodate members of the U.S. military who are on active duty. But, we didn't get any responses that met our needs. No one said they could administer an on-line exam" and guarantee its integrity, Buscemi said.

    This is a legitimate need, although I doubt if it has much to do with dumping testing. Hiring tests in Chicago are typically given on a single day every few years, with copies of the test delivered written by outside consulting firms delivered to the test site by armored car. Otherwise, insiders will get a look at the test ahead of time and alert their nephews and in-laws to what's on it.

    One problem with this system is that if you are a Chicagoan stuck on active duty in Iraq on the day of the test, you are out of luck getting hired as a Chicago fireman or policeman for years to come. And since the EEOC's Four-Fifths rule doesn't apply to military enlistment tests, such as the heavily g-weighted AFQT, Chicago is missing out on its most promising source of future policemen and firemen. But if Chicago offered the test online at the same time it was being given in Chicago, who would proctor the test-takers in the middle of the night in Iraq and Afghanistan?

    That's an interesting question, but it's a complete sideshow for what's really going on. Post-Ricci, the politicians can't fudge the results as much, so now they want to get rid of the test.
    "We're [now] reviewing our options on how to administer the police application process."

    Other sources confirmed that the police entrance exam could be scrapped altogether "to open up the process to as many people as possible." A final decision could be made later this week.

    Fraternal Order of Police President Mark Donahue said the idea "sounds too stupid to be true." "You need a testing process. ... You need to be very concerned about the very limited information you would get from just a screening and application process," Donahue said.

    Something that is completely overlooked but that is totally obvious when you stop to think about it is that civil servant unions, who are always demonized by Republicans, are one of the few effective forces actively working against affirmative action in big cities. The head of the union always has some name like "Donahue," and union policies work to keep older white civil servants from being fired in the name of making the government work force "look more like Chicago." This is particularly true for teachers unions, whose leaders all remember when black politicians got local control of New York public schools in the Ocean Hill neighborhood in the late 1960s, and immediately fired hundreds of Jewish schoolteachers and hired blacks to replace them.

    Hiring and promotions in the Police and Fire Departments have generated controversy in Chicago for as long as anyone can remember.

    The criticism reached a crescendo in 1994 after a sergeants exam produced just five minority promotions out of 114.

    The test was the first to be administered by the city after "race-norming" -- the practice of adjusting scores on the basis of race -- was ruled unconstitutional.

    In November 2005, City Hall announced plans to offer the police entrance exam a record four times the following year -- and for the first time on the Internet -- after an unprecedented outreach campaign that bolstered the number of minority applicants to 34 percent black, 24 percent Hispanic and 26 percent women.

    More than two years later, black ministers told newly-appointed Police Supt. Jody Weis that, if he was serious about re-establishing trust between police and the black community, he should start by hiring and promoting more African Americans.

    NBCChicago adds:
    And as of last year, one in four patrol officers were African-American, but just one in 12 Lieutenants were of color.

    Let me point out that, to get around the EEOC's Four-Fifth's Rule, Chicago has already almost completely emasculated its police and fire tests, in order to make the disparity between white and black passing rates (as innumerately measured by the feds) less than one-fifth. Chicago's last fire and police tests were passed by 85% of the people who walked in off the street. What's the point of even giving a test so easy that people at the fifth percentile among whites pass?

    So, why not give up on testing completely? That's the logical implication of the EEOC's Four-Fifth's Rule.

    As Steve Farron pointed out in The Affirmative Action Hoax, honest racial quotas would be better than abolishing testing. You'd at least get the smartest of each race.

    Considering that Barack Obama taught "Racism and the Law" (not, by the way, "Race and the Law") at the University of Chicago and litigated disparate impact lawsuits in Chicago, somebody might want to ask the President of the United States his opinion on this subject.

    But don't count on that ever happening.

     

    http://isteve.blogspot.com/2010/01/chicago-considering-scrapping-police.html

    Well, America’s huge Black population puts some rather severe limits on meritocracy:

    Rubbish. Political patronage in police hiring is a clear policy choice, not a function of demographics. Ask yourself why something similar is universal in academe, which is quite insulated from (and contemptuous of) political pressure or popular opinion. Self-aggrandizing status games among professional managerial types is the source of this.

    Read More
    • Replies: @syonredux
    Well, America’s huge Black population puts some rather severe limits on meritocracy:

    Rubbish. Political patronage in police hiring is a clear policy choice, not a function of demographics.
     
    More like an interplay between policy choice and demographics, dear fellow.After all, if there were no Blacks, there would be no dysfunctional minority for White Liberals to feel guilty about.

    Ask yourself why something similar is universal in academe, which is quite insulated from (and contemptuous of) political pressure or popular opinion. Self-aggrandizing status games among professional managerial types is the source of this.
     
    Again, dear fellow, policy plus demographics.The Devil's arithmetic
  62. anon says:     Show CommentNext New Comment
    @Rick Johnsmeyer
    I'm not sure how it would be possible to account for "police incompetence" in a survey of crime rates (and missed potential for reduction), but I suspect it's an under-appreciated factor. A good many city-level police departments are known as bureaucratic outposts of political hires - either politically-connected in some minor sense (relatives of existing officers, etc.) or affirmative-action hires.

    This reduces their effectiveness at solving crime, and hence the "clearance rate" of crimes solved. It's tough to compare non-murder crimes across jurisdictions, but looking just at murder, we can see this effect - in many major urban areas of the US (such as St. Louis), clearance rates struggle to reach the 1/4th or (if "lucky" in the sense of an unusual number of self-clearing murder-suicides) maybe 1/3rd. Chicago's clearance rate a few years ago was reported to be as low as 15%, which caused a bit of a scandal.

    In Canada - where hiring is said to be somewhat more meritocratic - clearance rates are generally in the 85-90% range. Some of that is due to catchall "cultural differences," but you don't get from here to there on culture alone. Part of it has to do with sheer technical competence, along with more effective investigative methods. The ability to solve murders quickly seems to lead to a virtuous cycle in which the murder rate is reduced by eliminating the need/ability of would-be murderers to exact vengeance on uncaptured ones.

    Hence, the city of Toronto's murder rate ends up being lower than the state of Minnesota for 2013, which is quite an achievement. Vancouver and Montreal's rates are even lower, and Quebec City (pop. 500,000 or so at the time) managed to go an entire 18 months from 2006 to 2008 with ZERO murders. That's unthinkable in America.

    Canadians seem to demand a higher level of competence out of their police than Americans do, and they receive it. It's something to consider.

    No NAM’s in Canada.

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  63. @Svigor

    The assumption is that the crime rate was entirely unaffected by the deliberate destruction of the black family.
     
    The whole "destruction of the black (nuclear) family" thing relies on a very short, selectively-placed graph, too. On a proper graph, the black nuclear family is obviously the anomaly.

    It's no different than a gold biz showing you a graph of gold prices that starts right after a price crash.

    Another thing to consider are the actual numbers rather than the percentages. There are currently about 5M married black couples today, and given a population of 18M in 1960, there were probably 5-7M married black couples then. It is kind of misleading to describe that as a collapse.

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  64. @Bill P

    For example, Canadian cities seem to have fairly frequent roundups/big raids involving hundreds of officers and dozens of arrests/weapons and drugs seizures at the same time. These kinds of raids have broken the back of various gangs, such as they were, in Canadian cities.

    US police forces – though better-armed and a lot more aggressive on a “small unit” level – seem to lack the coordination, intel, or competence to use these kinds “combined arms” (with prosecutors and other agencies, provincial and federal) tactics in an effective manner.

    -Rick Johnsmeyer
     
    You can't compare Canada to the US. The minorities there are of a different quality and class. Latin Americans and Africans have so much more of a propensity to engage in criminal behavior than South and East Asians that police tactics that are effective in Canada simply wouldn't work in much of the US. And think of the political implications. Imagine the screaming we'd hear if the LAPD engaged in roundups on a regular basis.

    I'm from Seattle, BTW, and the crime rate is a hell of a lot lower than it is in most similar-sized Californian cities. The first time I decided to take a walk through Oakland back in the 90s when I was on the way to SF to visit family (I was waiting for the next train at the Coliseum station and thought I'd check out the neighborhood), I quickly realized I'd made a mistake and went back inside the station.

    I have never seen anything in Canada like what I saw in Oakland back then. Not even close. The best cops can do in that kind of environment is try to contain the problem geographically. There isn't enough space in the prisons for all the criminals by our standards.

    “I quickly realized I’d made a mistake and went back inside the station. “

    Visited a friend in SF around the same time, came by train from Seattle, rang to arrange to be met.

    “If you’ll be arriving in the day, get off at Oakland. If you’re coming in at night, I’ll drive to Sacramento for you”.

    We arrived at Oakland during the day, got into her car and she had the doors locked within three seconds.

    “Don’t even like stopping at traffic lights here !”

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  65. @HA
    "Drug Dealers are the worst sort of sociopaths. Our drug laws are not nearly tough enough."

    And thankfully, they’re only selling drugs, which is probably the most victimless crime they’re able to engage in without losing their street cred. Once drugs are legalized, and they have to go back to jacking cars, mugging, burglary -- or else selling 10-year old girls and munitions for jihad INC. -- that’s when the fireworks will really start.

    But after legalization lowers prices, fewer addicts will have to resort to crime to support their habit. So it could be a wash.

    Read More
    • Replies: @anonymous-antimarxist
    Drug legalization will only increase the number of profit seekers, yes prices will fall but the market for the poisons they sell will dramatically increase in the search for profits.

    The opium trade in China devastated the economy. Infrastructure literally collapsed. Ever see Detroit ruin porn? In China whole provinces were wrecked. Imagine entire states being destroyed.
  66. @WowJustWow
    But after legalization lowers prices, fewer addicts will have to resort to crime to support their habit. So it could be a wash.

    Drug legalization will only increase the number of profit seekers, yes prices will fall but the market for the poisons they sell will dramatically increase in the search for profits.

    The opium trade in China devastated the economy. Infrastructure literally collapsed. Ever see Detroit ruin porn? In China whole provinces were wrecked. Imagine entire states being destroyed.

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  67. We really still don’t know why some police departments are good at solving homicides and others aren’t. It’s a worthy subject for competent, unbiased professional research.

    Nope. They are too busy researching transgenderism and other stupid shite.

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  68. @anonymous-antimarxist
    Does Canada have anything close to the cult of Mumia Abu-Jamal, gangsta rap, the No Snitch Rule and legions of ACLU and National Lawyer Guild racial marxists egging it all on?

    The problem of persistent high crime and low conviction rates in the black ghettos is that the far left have convinced the black community to incentivize the murder of any witnesses in the name of sticking it to the "man".

    Does Canada have anything close to the cult of Mumia Abu-Jamal, gangsta rap, the No Snitch Rule and legions of ACLU and National Lawyer Guild racial marxists egging it all on?

    After 1982, their appellate judiciary conducted itself on contentious questions more arrogantly than did our own. Also, until quite recently, federal law provided for a public system of campus style star chambers to suppress dissent. The law was repealed after Mark Steyn and Ezra Levant fought off the star chambers and exposed some of their agents provacateurs.

    As for Wesley Cook, he’s some sort of honorary citizen of Paris. The cult is worse in some foreign loci.

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  69. @anonymous

    We really still don’t know why some police departments are good at solving homicides and others aren’t. It’s a worthy subject for competent, unbiased professional research.
     
    Community cooperation. The vast majority of shooting victims, fatal or not, take place in the ghetto areas of the larger cities. No one saw anything, no one knows anything. Victims themselves will not cooperate. It's hard to make a case under these circumstances. Even when they do make a case the witnesses are criminals themselves or drug-addled types with no credibility.

    Your argument that community cooperation is the key to solving homicides is reasonable and I tend to agree with it. But without solid evidence from empirical research it won’t carry water with academics, foundations or the police administrators who use them as cover when designing and implementing new policies. Even more important, such research might provide some ideas on how to generate and foster that community cooperation. If I had a chance to start over again, I’d seriously consider building an academic career on researching this topic.

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    • Replies: @Brutusale
    Omerta is an old term. The Mob has lived and prospered by it, and absent the Gravanos and Hills, they still do.

    In Boston, Stop Snitching in the late 70s didn't originate in the black ghetto, which, comparatively, is pretty calm. It started in the Irish enclave of Charlestown, home to the largest population of bank/armored car robbers in America.

  70. @AP

    Sure, but Toronto is about 9% black
     
    Toronto's blacks are largely from the West Indies or African. These black populations have lower crime rates than do slave descendants. In America African and Jamaican areas are safer than African-American ones, and influx of these people into African-American areas results in reduced crime rates.

    If 10% of Toronto's population were immigrants from Detroit or Compton I suspect crime stats in that city would be much different.

    If 10% of Toronto’s population were immigrants from Detroit or Compton I suspect crime stats in that city would be much different.

    Yeah, but Detroit is not representative of the black American population. The crime metrics in Detroit are about 1.5x worse than a slum black population in an ordinary city. The corps of black politicians is variegated. Few cities have had a crew as crooked and destructive as Detroit’s; DC did for a while and you’ve had smaller scale disasters like Gary, Indiana.

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    • Replies: @syonredux

    Yeah, but Detroit is not representative of the black American population. The crime metrics in Detroit are about 1.5x worse than a slum black population in an ordinary city. The corps of black politicians is variegated. Few cities have had a crew as crooked and destructive as Detroit’s; DC did for a while and you’ve had smaller scale disasters like Gary, Indiana.
     
    Well, the homicide stats for Black America as a whole are quite grim.

    According to the FBI SHR data, in 2011 there were 6,309 black homicide victims in the United States. The homicide rate
    among black victims in the United States was 17.51 per 100,000. For that year, the overall national homicide rate was 4.44
    per 100,000. For whites, the national homicide rate was 2.64 per 100,000.
     
    http://www.vpc.org/studies/blackhomicide14.pdf

    White American Homicide Rate: 2.64 per 100,000

    Black American Homicide Rate: 17.51 per 100,000
  71. @Art Deco
    Well, America’s huge Black population puts some rather severe limits on meritocracy:

    Rubbish. Political patronage in police hiring is a clear policy choice, not a function of demographics. Ask yourself why something similar is universal in academe, which is quite insulated from (and contemptuous of) political pressure or popular opinion. Self-aggrandizing status games among professional managerial types is the source of this.

    Well, America’s huge Black population puts some rather severe limits on meritocracy:

    Rubbish. Political patronage in police hiring is a clear policy choice, not a function of demographics.

    More like an interplay between policy choice and demographics, dear fellow.After all, if there were no Blacks, there would be no dysfunctional minority for White Liberals to feel guilty about.

    Ask yourself why something similar is universal in academe, which is quite insulated from (and contemptuous of) political pressure or popular opinion. Self-aggrandizing status games among professional managerial types is the source of this.

    Again, dear fellow, policy plus demographics.The Devil’s arithmetic

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  72. @Art Deco
    If 10% of Toronto’s population were immigrants from Detroit or Compton I suspect crime stats in that city would be much different.

    Yeah, but Detroit is not representative of the black American population. The crime metrics in Detroit are about 1.5x worse than a slum black population in an ordinary city. The corps of black politicians is variegated. Few cities have had a crew as crooked and destructive as Detroit's; DC did for a while and you've had smaller scale disasters like Gary, Indiana.

    Yeah, but Detroit is not representative of the black American population. The crime metrics in Detroit are about 1.5x worse than a slum black population in an ordinary city. The corps of black politicians is variegated. Few cities have had a crew as crooked and destructive as Detroit’s; DC did for a while and you’ve had smaller scale disasters like Gary, Indiana.

    Well, the homicide stats for Black America as a whole are quite grim.

    According to the FBI SHR data, in 2011 there were 6,309 black homicide victims in the United States. The homicide rate
    among black victims in the United States was 17.51 per 100,000. For that year, the overall national homicide rate was 4.44
    per 100,000. For whites, the national homicide rate was 2.64 per 100,000.

    http://www.vpc.org/studies/blackhomicide14.pdf

    White American Homicide Rate: 2.64 per 100,000

    Black American Homicide Rate: 17.51 per 100,000

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  73. Sailer’s point, that incarceration rates respond positively to crime rates naturally clouding the causality, is sufficiently obvious that even Kevin Drum acknowledges it on his blog. He doesn’t seem to notice how strange it is that such an obvious point never seemed to occur to the authors of the paper.

    However, one interesting result that the authors do find is that policing seems to have a strong negative effect on crime. Maybe something like up to 20-25% of the state-by-state differences in crime rates are attributed to hiring a lot of police and using high-tech tools like Compstat. Odd how they dont seem to highlight this.

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  74. Rubbish. Political patronage in police hiring is a clear policy choice, not a function of demographics.

    Yeah, because there’s no noticeable difference between patronage in black run cities and white run cities.

    Man, you gotta get out the house more.

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  75. @anon
    Academia and the prestige press are almost entirely devoted to shooting down democratic ideas (common sense logic that appeals to average IQ people) of the majority community.

    So you get things like 'while the laws of supply and demand are relatively easy to understand and have great impact and thus one can see their appeal to Joe Average, high-end number crunching reveals it just doesn't apply that importing millions and millions of low-skill labor does any real harm to our own large supply of low-skill labor' and 'it sure seems chaotic on the streets with too much crime, but the obvious solution of locking more people up has only very minor impact on crime rates'.

    Academia and the prestige press are almost entirely devoted to shooting down democratic ideas (common sense logic that appeals to average IQ people) of the majority community.

    Well said “anon”–BTW, just pick a name.

    A lot of modern leftism has always struck me as “you gotta have a fancy education to believe something this stupid”.

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  76. @Grumpy

    with all the improvements in technology, why hasn’t crime fallen further?
     
    When a teenager is so brazen/stupid that he will rape a pizza delivery girl who goes to his home address on a Sunday morning (as happened in the outer suburbs of the Bay Area last weekend), he is not going to be deterred by techno-surveillance. He needs to be separated from society.

    http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2015/02/11/antioch-teen-rape-kidnapping-darrion-miles-jr-dominos-pizza-driver-life-in-prison/

    Hey, his dad said it was consensual. I’d pay to hear how daddy pronounced the word consensual!

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  77. @Steve Sailer
    The LAPD started going on these big round-up raids against street gangs under Bill Bratton.

    Toronto had Bratton up there to give them some advice about a decade ago.

    Boston’s has spent 20 years trying to replace Bratton. Maybe the most effective crime fighter of our time.

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  78. Just saw a “cop”, who works in the vibrant city two towns closer to Boston, getting her coffee. A borderline obese, 40-something blonde.

    Therein lies a good bit of the problem.

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  79. @Jus' Sayin'...
    Your argument that community cooperation is the key to solving homicides is reasonable and I tend to agree with it. But without solid evidence from empirical research it won't carry water with academics, foundations or the police administrators who use them as cover when designing and implementing new policies. Even more important, such research might provide some ideas on how to generate and foster that community cooperation. If I had a chance to start over again, I'd seriously consider building an academic career on researching this topic.

    Omerta is an old term. The Mob has lived and prospered by it, and absent the Gravanos and Hills, they still do.

    In Boston, Stop Snitching in the late 70s didn’t originate in the black ghetto, which, comparatively, is pretty calm. It started in the Irish enclave of Charlestown, home to the largest population of bank/armored car robbers in America.

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