by Kent Scheidegger · Mar 9, 2021 4:05 pm
Three times as many Americans oppose defunding the police as support the notion, according to a recent Ipsos/USA Today poll. Sarah Elbeshbishi and Mabinty Quarshie have this report in USA Today.
Support to redistribute police department funding has decreased among Americans since August after a summer of protests had erupted across the country against racial injustice and police brutality, a recent Ipsos/USA TODAY poll found.
by Bill Otis · Mar 6, 2021 11:02 am
He might think he is, but the data tell a different story. As this story in today’s WSJ shows, “A detailed new report shows no racial disparities in crimes committed versus arrests made.”
by Bill Otis · Mar 6, 2021 10:43 am
I’ve taken the title of this post from an entry on Power Line by my friend Steve Hayward. He in turn is recounting a USAToday/Ipsos survey titled, “Stark divide on race, policing emerges since George Floyd’s death.” The gist of it is captured in the first sentence:
Americans’ trust in the Black Lives Matter movement has fallen and their faith in local law enforcement has risen since protests demanding social justice swept the nation last year, according to an exclusive USA TODAY/Ipsos Poll.
by Kent Scheidegger · Feb 25, 2021 1:01 pm
The extent to which rioters were able to enter the Capitol, trash it, and disrupt the work of Congress had multiple causes. One of them was insufficient use of force by the Capitol police. Buried deep in this AP story is this comment by Acting Capitol Police Chief Yogananda Pittman: “She also says officers didn’t understand when they were allowed to use deadly force, and that less-than-lethal weapons that officers had were not as successful as they expected.”
Now that Members of Congress have personally experienced the adverse consequences of insufficient use of force by police, will they learn the needed lessons from this experience? Continue reading . . .
by Bill Otis · Feb 16, 2021 8:48 pm
Minneapolis, the site of George Floyd’s death in the hands of the police in May of last year, initially reacted as you might expect a city with far Left leadership to react — namely, to strike out against the police as a product of reflex rather than reflection. The snarling demand was to de-fund and disband the police department. In early June, the Minneapolis City Council declared an intent to restructure the department as a “new community-based system of public safety.”
But a funny thing happened on the way to de-funding. Reality.
by Kent Scheidegger · Feb 10, 2021 1:37 pm
Eric Piza of John Jay College of Criminal Justice and Vijay Chillar of Rutgers School of Criminal Justice have published an article in Justice Evaluation Journal titled The Effect of Police Layoffs on Crime: A Natural Experiment Involving New Jersey’s Two Largest Cities. The published version is behind a paywall, but a post-publication manuscript version is available here.
“Our findings indicate that sudden and drastic reductions in police force size via police officer layoffs can generate significant crime increases.” The results “translate[] to approximately 108 … additional violent crime incidents per month resulting from the layoffs. Using a similar equation, the police layoffs resulted in approximately 103 additional property crime incidents per month in Newark.” Continue reading . . .
by Bill Otis · Jan 9, 2021 12:13 pm
This last week’s invasion of the Capitol by a mob seeking to prevent Vice President Pence from counting the electoral votes and certifying the election result leaves us with very few positives. The country is rightly shocked that a mob would think it has the right to take the law into its own hands, and that this belief extended even to the most fundamental aspect of democratic self-rule (the peaceful transfer of power through legal process). At least one police officer and at least one rioter were killed in the melee.
There may be one silver lining, however. Liberals (and not a few libertarians) may have awakened to the previously Neanderthals-only idea that we need police with sufficient numbers, weapons, confidence and authority forcibly to keep the peace against those who threaten it.
by Bill Otis · Dec 18, 2020 11:15 am
Progressive social and criminal justice policies are running the show, or perhaps I should say running amok, in New York City. Such policies are said to aim to help the poor and those who must rely on public services. Just now I received a small but valuable insight from the brilliant Rafael Mangual who lives in the City. Judge for yourself how much “help” is being provided.
by Kent Scheidegger · Dec 11, 2020 10:29 am
Yesterday, the U.S. Supreme Court decided that the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993 (RFRA) permits suits for money damages against government officers, including law enforcement. The Court also indicated in a footnote that qualified immunity applies to these suits, as it does to civil rights suits under 42 U.S.C. § 1983. Continue reading . . .
by Bill Otis · Dec 10, 2020 5:23 pm
What in the world is a “violence interrupter”? If you thought that might be a euphemism for a law enforcement officer—or maybe a prison guard—you’d be wrong. Here’s what Wikipedia says it is: “Violence interruption is a community-based approach to reducing communal and interpersonal violence that treats violence as a public health problem. Individuals providing violence interruption services are known as violence interrupters.”
OK, sounds a little nutty but probably harmless — until you see the rest of it, courtesy of Steve Hayward’s note on PowerLine.
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