The NYPD: Always Giving 110% (UPDATE!)
Thank god conservatives have come out en force against profiling. We should be able to nip this thing in the bud… right?
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All my hockey coaches in college were NY cops. All but one were loud mouth jerks who thought coaching meant yelling a lot. I wouldn’t particularly trust anyone of them if i was in a suspect class.Report
Cops are a very interesting buncha people. I trust city Cops way way more than i trust the ones in the country (suburbs) where they’ve got basically free rein to harass anyone, and little oversight.Report
Young black and Latino men in the 14-24 age group accounted for 41.6% of the total police stops in 2011, the report found, even though that demographic makes up just 4.7% the city’s total population.
This is grossly misleading. Of course the police are going to focus on young men. Are they specifically focusing on blacks and Latinos? Probably, though not to anywhere near the degree implied by the above. So why can’t they make their case without pulling this crap?Report
On second thought, maybe I’m being unfair. It’s possible—even likely—that they legitimately don’t understand statistics.Report
How disproportionate is too disproportionate?
BB, Don’t you identify as libertarian? If so, why doesn’t the entirety of the S&F program appall you?Report
He isn’t the good kind of libertarianReport
Kazzy:
Yes. And to the extent that they’re criticizing it on civil libertarian grounds, I’m on board. But insofar as they’re trying to exaggerate the role racism plays in our society, I’m not. And bullshit is bullshit, even when it’s in service of a goal I favor.
I’m also not a big fan of the “disparate effect” line of argument in general, because it’s so often used to attack perfectly legitimate policies.
NewDealer: If you don’t have anything intelligent to say, don’t say anything at all.Report
With all due reapect, it often appears as if debunking claims of racism trumps denouncing government overreach. S&F is wrong on its face, but it is really wrong when you consider the disproportionality and the disparate impact, both of which are very real (see Fnord below) and neither of which you’ve really offered a true counter to. Are the numbers exactly as presented? Depends on how you take them. Are the NYPD’s tactics evidence of a form of institutional racism that has very real impacts? Yes. Your insistence that they are not, offered without facts, is curious and (for me, at least) calls into question your motives.Report
8.2 million people. Per wikipedia, it’s 45% white and 25% black, so 3.7 million white and 2.1 million black.
In 2012, 51 thousand white people stopped, so 1 stop per 72 people.
287 thousand black people stopped, so 1 stop per 7.3 people.
So, yeah, I’d say that the numbers reflect no small degree of specific focus on certain racial groups.
Oh, and while the rate of finding weapons, or even any contraband at all, is pretty darn low for everybody, it’s higher for whites than blacks.Report
This. And wht Kazzy said above. I know there’s a bit of a cottage industry of people overstating the degree to which racism plays a role in all unlovely outcomes in our society, but I’m appalled that we libertarians have created our own cottage industry of rushing to deny it, particularly when it means we’re implicitly rushing to the defense of government. For fuck’s sake, we’re supposed to be suspicious of government, so let’s fucking be suspicious of government! Isn’t unequal and illegitimate application of force exactly what we would expect?
(Directed at my fellow traveler, Brandon. Many thank to Fnord for making the links and saving me the trouble.)Report
As a Liberal, I don’t find it any more wonderful. Fact is, arrests and incarcerations precisely model income distributions, especially incarcerations. So yeah, lots of minority people end up in prison. But lots of white people end up in prison, too. They’re all too poor to afford a decent attorney. And being poor, they were raised in rotten environments and went to rotten schools, with rotten authority figures. And since they were rotten neighbourhoods, the police did patrol more heavily: that’s because so much crime happens in that part of town — the odds of being stopped are far better where those guys live.
Sure, we’re supposed to be suspicious of government. Quite correctly so. But we know who goes to jail: the poor. Many of them are crooks and belong there. And lots of cops are racists. But they’re patrolling where the crimes happen. Who do we blame for the proximity of cops to crime areas?Report
The funny thing about Stop and Frisk is that in the vast majority of cases it doesn’t lead to an arrest or incarceration. There’s no evidence linking most people stopped to a specific crime, and contraband is only found in a tiny fraction of searches.
Oh, so it’s just that cops are concentrated in crime-prone areas, and crime-prone areas have, for various reasons, higher minority concentrations. It’s not that they’re targeting minorities. It’s just that minorities are more common in the areas where they do stops.
Except…
Report
There’s no evidence linking most people stopped to a specific crime, and contraband is only found in a tiny fraction of searches.
It’s not about contraband. It’s about power and control.
How many people who care about Stop and Frisk would stop caring if the population sample stopped and frisked mirrored, within a percentage point or two, the population of the neighborhoods?Report
It’s all about probabilities. Those probabilities lead to problems. Lots of poor people are black or Hispanic. The cops aren’t stopping and frisking the well-heeled commuters walking through Penn Station on their way to prosperous suburbs.
It’s a vicious cycle. My older cousin was the assistant police chief of Augusta GA. He talked about how difficult it is to keep from being warped by the probabilities into racist positions. The way he managed it — was to balance his inchoate probability-based racism against the probabilities of those same minorities being the victims of crimes. Often they’re the same people.
… if that makes any sense at all. Policemen and firemen see terrible things. Spending that much time out there on the ragged edge of society would warp anyone. I couldn’t do it.Report
Ha. now I’m picturing a work exchange program where Nurses and Cops switch jobs (half-and-half).Report
Your point being? Let’s stipulate to the vast majority of S&Fs don’t lead to convictions. Where’s the data?
Don’t put words in my mouth, Fnord. If Jumping to Conclusions was an Olympic event, these NYCLU types would be world-beaters. The police patrol where the crimes are most likely to happen, I laid out how that works below. Those areas feature both higher crime and lower incomes. There’s your discriminant.Report
My point being your link to arrest and conviction rates is a non sequitur.
Don’t play the victim. The only words even arguably put in your mouth are:
Which you immediately confirmed with:
A claim substantially identical to the claim I allegedly put in your mouth and responded to. Claim persecution, ignore the opposing argument, repeat your original claim. I’ve been around this merry-go-round with you before, though I’ll admit this makes a picture-perfect example of it.Report
Here’s a far more substantive analysis of the S&F problem in NYC. It’s not a made-up problem and I never said it was.
What I’m asking for — and not getting — is a substantive review, this time using meaningful analysis, not this innumerate Sob Sister crap from NYCLU, which would point the finger at the actual problem.Report
The intensity of your dismissal of folks who do things in a way other than how you might have is really off putting…Report
Really off-putting, eh? I find the misuse of statistics and probability truly annoying. I guess, after all this time, I’m no longer as accepting of innumeracy in the General Pop as once I was. Have I asked for anything unreasonable here? Were even common sense, much less first semester statistics, applied to this problem, we’d have something to discuss.Report
You don’t like Stop ‘n Frisk without probable cause? That goes both ways: I don’t like busting police officers who are mostly just doing the bidding of the higher-ups on the basis of a rush to conclusions. If you read that article, you’ll see what’s going on and why it’s becoming such a problem.
And I’ll add this in passing, when it becomes about me and not the facts… damning the entire NYPD on the basis of bad stats — I want to see an end to racial profiling. But before it can be stopped, it has to be defined and evidence collected and then and only then can we make the case.Report
But the thing is, Blaise, you want to make it about other people. You’ve voiced your frustration with the stats. But then you go several steps further, making personal attacks on the group presenting them (“… Sob Sister crap from the NYCLU…”) and those of us who disagree with you on their usefulness.
So we’re not making it about you. You are making it about far more than stats with the way you are going about voicing your objections.Report
And if you notice, I said nothing about you or your character. I only commented on how you went about expressing your opinions.Report
Here’s prima facie Sob Sisterism:
A new analysis of the New York Police Department’s stop-and-frisk tactics found that officers performed more searches on young black men last year than the total number of young black men living in the city
There’s your lede, Kazzy. That’s a bullshit application of statistics. How many black men were actually S&F-ed? We don’t know. Was every black man stopped and a few stopped twice? Were a handful stopped a hundred times? We don’t know.
Now I’ll tell you what’s Vivid and Damning, to use the piquant adjectives of NYCLU’s Donna Lieberman: a horrible problem which hasn’t been correctly defined. The heat map crime statistics got us into this predicament and statistics can get us out of it. If we’re interested in truth and justice, our cause will not be advanced by frothing and blethering and the misapplication of data.
The best argument against S&F is this: it’s a waste of time. Most never lead to an arrest and even fewer lead to convictions. Furthermore, S&F alienates people from law enforcement, the very people who most need the protection of law.Report
Just to be clear, you are arguing that a potential misuse of statistics is worse than racial profiling?Report
Also, did you read the NYCLU’s actual report? What I linked to was a blog post from the WSJ discussing the report.Report
Well, you have to understand, by virtue of their very unusualness, they obviously look suspicious just for being there.
More seriouly, I’ve had too many black and Latino friends tell me about having police stop them without cause and ask what they were doing in this neighborhood or even telling them to go back where they belong to give any denial of racism in policies the benefit of the doubt.Report
Is it still racism if they do shit like that to white folks too?
Cause in my city, they do driving while black, and driving while white as well.Report
That’s exactly the sort of incident we need to track down and isolate.
Tell you a true story. So I lived for years in a fairly nice area of Chicago. I’d park my car in Lincoln Park most nights. I had two cars stolen out of Lincoln Park over five years. Both cars were recovered on the South Side, within a few blocks of each other. One car contained my cameras.
So there I am, standing in the recovery lot for the second time, the wheels stolen, battery stolen, radio pulled out, steering column broken open. The thieves had left my son’s little blue teddy bear. I picked up that bear and wept. Hard to forget.
The car thieves obviously target nice neighbourhoods where they can find nice cars to steal and apartments to rob. And they take them down MLK Drive and strip them. When does generalising this sort of thing become racism? Once? Twice?Report
I get that folks have certain ideological axes to grind and the left gives folk no shortage of stones on which to grind them upon (is that how grinding works???), but it really is interesting how ending racism has come to be perceived as a left issue. Shouldn’t we all be concerned with it? We might disagree on the forms it takes and how it functions and how pervasive it is. But everyone should be anti-racist. Being anti-anti-racist is… odd.Report
Being anti-bad-stats should be a universally acceptable bias.Report
Being anti-anti-racist is… odd.
During the cold war, there was the anti-anti-communist phenomenon.
It evolved into anti-anti-anti-communists vs. anti-anti-anti-anti-communists. (This is actually intended to be less snarky than it comes across.)
All that to say, Hegel talks about this.Report
Not snarky at all. That is indeed very, very odd.
Who is this Hegel?Report
SecDef.Report
Heh…Report
During the cold war, there was the anti-anti-communist phenomenon.
Which was a direct reaction to HUAC, McCarthy, and the other excesses of anti-communism (or things that called themselves that.) For all his influence, Limbaugh is just an irritation; he can’t ruin innocent people’s lives.Report
Limbaugh comes from a long tradition of pseudo-Conservative rabble rousing.
Rush has done plenty of damage in his time, mostly to the reputation of Conservative Talk Radio. Mark Levin, a nasty enough customer in his own right, is another guy whose targets seem to be his own feet.Report
Sure, but the anti-anti-and-so-ons eventually collapsed into a melange of neoliberalism.
The anti-anti-racists are a step in the right direction. I hope they inspire anti-anti-anti-racists.Report
Wait, anti-anti-racists are a GOOD thing?Report
Compared to what?Report
Erm… well, if we could have a world with anti-anti-racists and a world without it, which would be preferable?
To me, I think we can objectively say that racism is bad. Thus, anti-racism, at least in theory, is good (not all attempts at anti-racism are good, but the broader goal of eradicating it seems like a good one). So, anti-anti-racism, attempts at stopping people from ending racism, seem bad.
But, the more anti’s you get, the screwier you get. So who knows?Report
So, anti-anti-racism, attempts at stopping people from ending racism, seem bad.
The anti-anti-communists weren’t trying to stop people from ending communism, Kazzy. They were opposed to (cutting and pasting here) “HUAC, McCarthy, and the other excesses of anti-communism (or things that called themselves that.)”
The “anti-” prefix doesn’t work the way that “not” works in logical functions. While P equals ~~P, it’s not fair to say that the anti-anti-communists were communists.
Which brings me back to: The anti-anti-racists are a step in the right direction. I hope they inspire anti-anti-anti-racists.Report
Compared to the anti-anti-anti-anti-racists, of course.Report
Kazzy, an important concept in Hegel’s philosophy is sublation (aufheben), which is a sort of overcoming. The process goes like this: after an initial positing of a concept (today this is usually labeled the “thesis,” but this isn’t Hegel’s term), inherent contradictions are discovered (negation, or “antithesis” as it’s usually labeled these days), and then overcome by transcending the contradictions and discovering the inherent relations between the concept and its negation (“synthesis”).
In historical development, this might look like this: anti-communists, appalled by the communist assault on individual liberty, begin to become overzealous and, in the form of things like blacklists and the McCarthy hearings, assault individual liberty themselves, sparking a movement of anti-anti-communism which attempts to pull out the respect for individual liberty in the anti-communists while overcoming the excesses of the actual anti-communist behavior. And eventually the process repeats, with the tolerance of anti-anti-communists meeting its contradiction in their overly harsh treatment of the anti-communists who weren’t, perhaps, participating in any of the overzealous anti-communist behavior, and this gives rise to anti-anti-anti-communists, who quickly reveal the contradictions in their behavior, sparking an anti-anti-anti-anti-communist movement, and so on until they reach an absolute synthesis in Jaybird.Report
Who wants pirogi?Report
Who are the anti-anti-racists? Going by the heuristic “people who criticize anti-racism”, it’s Derb, Sailer, and that crowd [1], which can’t be who you mean.
At VDARE, “anti-racist” is an insult that means “person who denies the obvious inferiority of the dark-skinned”.Report
I don’t know if there is any real formal anti-anti-racist movement.
What I was more generally referring to was folks who kneejerk reject any and all attempts to expose and eliminate racism. Anything short of people wearing hoods gets dismissed aggressively, even if it means abandoning other, broader principles one might hold.Report
I think we’ve had two kind of anti-anti-racists at the LoOG over the years. The first is represented by TVD or Cheeks, and their response to anti-racism is to push and even cross the boundaries of genuine racism, whether out of actual racist sympathies or a deep-seated hatred of everything they perceive as “liberal” and PC. The second type is represented by the folks who’ve argued that throwing around the term “bigot” or “racist” can be counterproductive (I remember a post and extended discussion about that, but I don’t remember when — I think Jason K was one of the people making this point, but I’m not sure), which leads to a discussion about what bigotry is, when and how it should be used as a label, and so on.
Derb and Sailer are closer to TVD-Cheeks than to the second type.Report
@Kazzy: we’ve had some formalised pushback on anti-racism. It’s been around since the beginning of the civil rights struggle.
Going back to the Civil War and Reconstruction, there were two schools of thought. One, embodied in Marcus Garvey and eventually in Malcolm X, said the oppressed should band together and form their own economic power base, acting as the other immigrant populations had done before them, without much effort at integration. The other school was assimilationist, embodied in George Washington Carver and later Dr. MLKing, saying the oppressed should integrate themselves into the larger society.
During the late 1960s, horrible times they were, black society began to resent the white do-gooders. These well-meaning white folk, however much they wanted to help, couldn’t help beyond a certain point: the oppressed had to stand up for themselves and fight their own battles. Lot of hard feelings on both sides: the oppressed saw the white do-gooders as patriarchal and condescending, the do-gooders saw the oppressed as resentful and ungrateful, even racist.
I once lived across the street from three blind ladies. Learned an important lesson from them: always ask if someone wants help with a problem. Don’t just wade in and start Helping. You’re not being helpful. Once, when I stopped by to see if they needed anything, I was asked to look for bits of trash on the floor. One of the blind ladies followed me around with the broom. When I found a bit of trash, I’d guide her to it and she’d sweep it up: she wanted to know the areas she was missing.
It doesn’t matter what we say. What matters is what they hear. In the struggle to eliminate injustice and oppression, it’s the oppressed who must stand up to fight it. Others can help — but you can’t fight other people’s battles for them.Report
I think there is plenty of room to criticize a lot of anti-racist efforts. Don’t get me wrong. I think one of the things that most undermines the anti-racist effort are false claims of racism. So, there is certainly room for disagreement. But I struggle with the folks, who seem increasingly present in conservative media, who seem to argue that racism is simply a liberal plot to screw white people and it is they who are the real victims.
As the clip shows, profiling is an abomination… unless we’re talking about brown folks; then it’s just good police work.Report
@Blaise,
“…always ask if someone wants help with a problem. Don’t just wade in and start Helping. You’re not being helpful.”
I teach this to my kids. As a general rule, unwanted help is not help at all.
Because of much of what you’ve said, I’ve been doing a lot of research on what white allies ought to be and do. The two pieces that most resonated with me are:
1.) We need not only speak of the direct victims of racism (or other forms of oppression). If I hear a racist comment, I don’t have to say, “Hey, that might offend Jim!” I can say, “That offends me!”
2.) We must listen… listen, listen, and listen. I’m not doing anyone any good if I don’t understand their wants, needs, and interests. This means formulating real, honest relationships.Report
I don’t know if there is any real formal anti-anti-racist movement.
There is. Go look at VDARE or Taki’s Magazine, if you can stomach it.Report
@Kazzy: I’ve had some harsh words for Do Gooders over the years. I can’t abide Do Gooders on principle. Inevitably, they make things worse. Here I’m going to quote an email I sent to a childhood friend from Africa:
So they’re renaming it C Hospital, heh. Well, I guess so, Dr. C started it up.
I despair of every such effort. The missionaries have been throwing
blood, sweat, toil and tears at Africa forever. It’s like the Planck
Body.
The Planck Body absorbs every watt. Once it’s hot enough, it begins
to re-radiate that energy in the infrared. Africa is so fucked up,
Nigeria especially: the missionaries established the first maternity
clinic in 1925, C gets E Hospital going in the 50s, the NTS
starts up as an adjunct, T College. E was once a lovely
place, shining brightly — but only because outside money and talent
and goodwill was heaped upon it. The whole point of T College and
E Hospital and NTS was to turn those over to Africans. The
missionaries were trying to work themselves out of a job. It never
quite worked out, did it?
Now it’s long since cooled off, now still perfectly black, still
absorbing whatever few photons which fall upon it. And here comes
D C to lather, rinse and repeat. He’s been at it for some
years now. It’s a perfect waste of money. It’s a bad joke. It was
a waste of my parents’ lives, your parents’ lives. When will the
Oyinbo finally conclude this is now ECWA’s problem? Until Africans
start believing in this process, until it’s Africans throwing blood,
sweat, toil and tears at Africa, every such effort is only enabling
more of the same failure.
If D C wanted to do anything profitable with the ruins of
E, he’d bring in a crew of anthropologists and document the whole
thing and write a paper describing the failure in depth, lest some
unwary person or group get one of those Do-Gooder Impulses and try to
resurrect the experiment. Insanity, we are told, is repeating the
same experiment, over and over, expecting different results.Report
Prima facie misuse of statistics here. Obviously there are more total stops than total My Norty Boys on an integer basis. The important questions, never answered in the article are: what is the spectrum distribution of repeated stops and what is the total number of persons ever stopped? And how many were actually arrested?
One known gangbanger could account for a dozen stops per year.Report
Eh… I don’t think anyone actually thinks every young black male plus a bunch of imaginary young black males are getting S&F. What it does show us is the propensity for it happening, in very stark terms. There is a lot that can be mined from the data. There is some real winnowing down that ought to take place based on a number of legitimate factors (well, as legitimate as S&F can reasonably be). But there is no doubt that the NYPD is engaged in an unjustified war on people of color. See Fnord’s links above for more.Report
Whatever facts may be mined, you will find none of the important ones in this NYTimes story and certainly not in this link, nor in this one, neither of which furnish the total number of discrete stopped persons.
Without the numbers of unique individuals, everything else is meaningless hooey and no statistically sound case has been presented for NYPD’s racism. I do not exclude the possibility of such racism in NYPD. With roughly 34,500 uniformed police officers, the statistical probability of racism in the ranks is beyond dispute: there are racists in NYPD. But how do we go about identifying them? Not with these lousy stats, Kazzy.Report
So if they S&F the same young black dude 160K times and never arrested him, is that any better?Report
That’s where we would have to start with the statistics. We need a sorted histogram graph, showing how many people have been S&F-ed how many times. A few people have been S&F-ed many times, far more have only been S&F-ed once. But it’s a finite set of people, a fraction of the total minority male population. And without that graph, it’s an unknown fraction and every conclusion drawn from these pseudo-statistics is bullshit without it.
One dude probably stands out like a turd in a punchbowl: this guy barely gets out the door before he’s leaned up against a building with his hands on the wall. He’s been stopped so many times every cop in that precinct knows his name and LKA. I want to see the data on that dude.
Out on the other end, there are doubtless many more young men who have been S&F-ed and never arrested. These are your likely victims of racism. Which police officers are making these bogus S&Fs? There’s where you want to concentrate your efforts to suss out racism in the NYPD ranks.Report
I certainly am not arguing that every instance of a young black man being S&F is indicative of racism. But the numbers are worth something even as presented.
And, if you S&F a guy before he hits the sidewalk and never find reason to arrest him, maybe you’re barking up the wrong tree. Maybe.
Now, maybe you’re not finding reason to arrest him because he has adjusted his behavior for the S&Fs. To this regard, S&F has been successful. He has ceased a certain criminal activity, though he may have replaced it with another. But at what cost?
S&F, in theory, is wrong, an affront to individual liberty. S&F as practiced by the NYPD demonstrates institutional racism that makes even defense of it on a theoretical level really difficult to swallow.Report
They’re not worth a dime, Kazzy. Not without the count of discrete persons thus targeted.Report
I disagree. They might not be what the article states they are, but they are not worthless.Report
I’ve made my case for why this data is at best incomplete. Reaching conclusions about racism at this point, with this dataset, is unwarranted. Yes, more minority people are being S&F-ed. That’s unfortunate. Doubtless many of these S&Fs have a basis in prejudicial conduct.
But the case has not been made for racism — not yet. If NYCLU wanted to present their case in a meaningful fashion, they could suss out the rogue S&F-ers, using the methodology I have set forth — and thus point the finger at the proper subset of NYPD officers. At this point, it’s all so much specious and patently unreasonable whinging about the entire NYPD police force.Report
One of my inlaw’s brothers was a New York cop, and some of the people he targeted were stopped and frisked so often (their whole look, behavior, and records pretty much screamed “I am a criminal looking to score”) that they had carefully glued razor blade edges to the backs of their driver’s licenses, perpendicular to the surface, so that when they handed it to a cop they could yank it back and slice his fingers. They would also put fishhooks on the insides of their jackets so the cops would get hooked during a frisk.
That’s anecdotal, but it does indicate that yes, some of the people being frisked are probably being stopped a couple times a week.Report
So, if there are so many bad people standing around screaming “I’m a bad guy, stop and frisk me” who get frisked all the time, why can’t the NYPD find contraband in more than 1 in 61 cases (for black people)?Report
Bullspace. You’re apparently as credulous as kimmie.Report
So if I’m S&Fed when I have no contraband on me, I want to get busted for assaulting a cop? And if I do have something they can arrest me on, I want to add assaulting a cop to the charges? And knowing how cops react to being assaulted, I want to plan ahead with the intent of inciting them into beating the shit out of me?
This has urban legend stamped all over it. The razorblades seem to have migrated from apples go drivers licenses.Report
yeah i mean, i know a few guys on the job but no one’s ever said anything like that. the ny post would jack off all over that.Report
Thinking this through, we need three histograms:
X = number of S&Fs
Y = number of persons S&F-ed X times
1. X = All S&Fs
2. X = S&F leading to arrest
3. X = S&F leading to conviction.
We also need to look at the NYPD, asking
How many total officers are making S&Fs? Sort the officers as above. Some officers are making bogus S&Fs, then letting the victim go free. But some are arresting on the basis of a bogus S&F and of those, a certain fraction of those arrests lead to convictions, perhaps even based on perjured testimony. Now that is where you’d find your racists, I’ll bet. I wonder if every S&F has to be recorded…. some officers reallyreally stand out among their peers as S&F-ers.Report
Yeah. This.
The idea that we can’t get good stats on this is perpetuating injustice.Report
Yes. but one can be using a purely colorblind policy (haha, as if it exists!), and still be S&Fing minorities much more heavily.
In fact, one can be pursuing a non-colorblind, tilted towards frisking whites, and still be hitting minorities more heavily (if you’re doing it solely in districts where minorities are a majority, obviously).Report
When Ed Koch started in reforming the NYPD, he set up a database and a huge monitor, laying out the Five Boroughs. From that dataset, the NYPD could do predictive work: at this location on this day of the year at this time of day, in Central Park, there’s a high probability of purse snatching. So they’d put a police officer at that location.
Within a five hundred yard radius of this point, there have been three murders over the last five years. Might want to increase police presence at that location.
Along this street, 42 arrests for prostitution have been made this year alone. Now we know where to send the vice squad.
By constructing these heat graphs of crime, by type, time and location, he was able to reduce crime — not by arrests, but by predictive analysis.
The one thing we know about incarceration is how closely it tracks with education and income inequality. As it happens, lots of poor people also fit into minority categories. Attempting to make this about race is statistical nonsense. We know why minority people are sent to prison: those facts are have nothing to do with skin tone.Report
Thanks Kazzy, I’ve been waiting all month for a good place to post this. I subscribe to the channel to practice my Mandarin, but it has subtitles (and is almost always hilarious).Report
Not subtle, but pretty damn funny.Report