Monday Trivia #141 [Mark Thompson Wins!]

32 thoughts on “Monday Trivia #141 [Mark Thompson Wins!]”

1. Homicide rates circa 1992?Report

   1. It’s definitely something to do with crime.Report

      1. With Detroit at #17?Report

      2. 1992 was so bad in Detroit that even the criminals felt demotivated.Report

      3. Detroit would win if we were doing rate in 2013. Maybe it’s an older stat, as Mark suspects.Report

2. My initial guess was that it was something to do with the proportion of the population that identifies as African-American. But Detroit is too low. Seeing other people think/insist it has to do with crime makes me feel a little squirrely on some level, though I’m not sure I should.Report

   1. Minority population in absolute terms, perhaps? The biggest cities do seem to appear near the top of the list. Possibly related to that, the second half of the list seems to be dominated by cities west of the Mississippi. Don’t know if that’s relevant to Will’s metric, or perhaps just an accident of the geographical size distribution. I was surprised to see that Nebraska has two cities in the top 100 now, more than any of Georgia, Illinois, or Washington.Report

   2. Cincinnati is pretty white compared to some of the cities below it, and I’m pretty sure Atlanta would be higher.Report

      1. I got as far as JC when that thought popped into my head; all those cities have large black populations. Going further, it does seem quite wrong.Report

   3. Seattle is not blacker than Oakland.Report

      1. But it’s much much grayer.Report

3. The amount of muncipal corruption?Report

4. A shot in the dark: auto insurance rates?Report

5. Is there a sports thing going on? A lot of those early cities have pro teams, and I see Greensboro and Winston-Salem up there. None of the lower cities have significant sports activity that I can think of.Report

6. Average (public) school teacher salary?Report

7. Percentage of residents and/or employed residents who are members of labor unions?Report

   1. It’d be all Cali and NY at the top.Report

      1. My impression was that most (nearly all) Federal employees are unionized, and a very high percentage of D.C. residents will be either Federal or D.C. government employees, thus D.C. at the top of the list. ‘Course, this was simply a guess.Report

      2. http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2010-01-25/politics/36813046_1_federal-worker-unions-union-members-union-contracts

         Looks like it’s less than a third.Report

8. Percentage drop of African-American’s in the past twenty years within the metro area? I’m only guessing this because #1 is DC and gentrification has gone crazy there.Report

9. % of population employed by the federal government.Report

10. % of the city’s population that identifies as Gay/Lesbian? only because the week told me that dc is the gayest city in america at 10%.Report

11. Tuesday Hint(s): Some good guesses yesterday.

    This is a per-capita measurement.

    It is possible, though doubtful, there are some cities missing from this list because they are not applicable to this list.Report

    1. Buses per capita?Report

    2. Now I’m trying to figure out what are those libertopian cities without police officers 😉Report

12. Police officers per capita.

    I’m pretty sure this is right. Or at least really close.Report

    1. That would be it.Report

       1. Huh. So it is a crime thing. Vegas surprises me, though. I’d think that a tourist destination, especially one that caters to the decadant side, would have to have a large police force. New Orleans does. Even Orlando does.Report

       2. That is interesting. Then again, Henderson and North Las Vegas are both in the bottom 15 while Vegas itself is pretty much in the middle of the list, suggesting that the baseline number of cops without the tourism is remarkably low. Looking at the numbers a bit, Vegas has about 50% more cops per capita than Henderson and North LV, so that actually does seem to be a pretty heft tourism premium. I’d wager that Las Vegas’ numbers are also pushed down a bit further by what has to be about the highest ratio of private security guards in the country, who I’d assume act as something equivalent to a supplemental police force, handling the preliminary work on a lot of stuff that would be handled by regular cops in most places and/or acting as de facto beat cops within the casinos and hotels.

          FWIW, the way I figured this one out was that it really did look like it correlated with crime rates 20 or so years ago, and it occurred to me that one of the residual effects of a really high crime rate, even long after it’s fallen, is probably that police forces are beefed up, and it’s not easy to undo that once it’s been put in place.Report

       3. Though the DC numbers could be further enhanced if data Wiil T used also includes all the sworn police forces that are not part of the metropolitan police department (like the Capitol police and the Park police)Report

       4. It seems likely that D.C. is so high because it has so many different police forces, unless this is just a measure of the municipal police department and nothing else. Likewise, a place like Madison, a state capital with a flagship state university, has the MPD, the State Capitol Police, the UW Police, and also a fair portion of the Dane County Sheriff’s Dept. working within its limits on any given day.Report

       5. Sorry, didn’t scan the thread closely enough. Second what Kolohe said.Report

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