Category: Studies and Statistics

Very often we hear economic arguments being made against effective law enforcement. We can’t afford a law enforcement measure (police, jail space, etc.) because we should be spending that money on some other purpose (schools, parks, etc.). As a matter of common sense, it is obvious that these other worthy goals are worth a lot more if they are safe from crime and a lot less if they are not. Traci Pedersen at Psych Central reports on an empirical study that confirms what common sense has always told us. Continue reading . . .

The FBI released the Preliminary Semiannual Uniform Crime Report in late January. See the press release. For several years now, I have been comparing the one-year changes in California to the rest of the country for cities over 100,000, the only data released that lets us compare by state. See this post two years ago and this post four years ago.

The latest data are consistent with the overall trend, i.e., California is not sharing proportionately in the national drop in crime.

Continue reading . . .

New York City has long been the exemplar of a big city that achieved big drops in it crime rate. Today, though, the NYPD released a disturbing report that crime in the month just ended is up nearly 17% over the same month the year before.

Robbery, burglary, assault, and grand larceny are all up substantially, and grand larceny auto is up a staggering 72%.

Murder is down 21% even though shootings are up 29%, prompting the Seinfeldian Question, “What’s up with that?”

Continue reading . . .