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cactusdust's avatar

I was carjacked at gunpoint while driving a delivery van back in the 1970s and it was terrifying. Glad to see it is going down

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Gene Frenkle's avatar

I think the crime wave was the product of a myriad of factors such as PPP fraud and access to guns and police retirements and understaffed PDs and truancy from Covid and fentanyl gang wars and Tik Tok (definitely Kia) and social media beefs among young people not in school maybe George Floyd protests. So I read illegal guns increased in value because so much PPP money was in the criminal system. So gangs were breaking into cars just to get guns…and the thugs would target big trucks because they were more likely to have guns. Thanks to PPP there was more than enough money to pay for the guns even with gun inflation. And with the increase in used car prices due to Covid supply chain disruptions maybe stolen cars increased in value as well. But I think gangs got a capital infusion from PPP and its sibling programs which was essentially seed capital and then most PDs had fewer cops to fight crime.

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KR's avatar

When you say "any robbery where a motor vehicle was stolen is considered a carjacking" are you defining car jacking as any time a person forcibly takes a car from the owner, or any time a car is stolen, including parked cars when the owner is not present?

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Johan Meyer's avatar

One mathematical comment: what you refer to as rolling average is called a moving average in signal processing (e.g. DSP).

The frequency transfer function is sinc (\omega T/2), times a T/2 delay (e^{-i \omega T/2}), where sinc(x)=sin(x)/x.

Edit: a bit rusty, both the delay and the sinc should have T/2, not T...

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Johan Meyer's avatar

One thing that would be interesting would be to see the mean and standard deviation of the delay between peak murder and peak carjacking, in months, using the rolling/moving average. If the data is too noisy when looking at individual agencies, perhaps the rough peak period, give or take two months, can be fitted to a Gaussian to extract a parametric peak time.

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Daniel Quackenbush's avatar

Do these carjackings include those by ICE?

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Jul 7
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Jeff Asher's avatar

Fixed, thank you!

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