Interesting. Could part of the issue be the last gasp of the baby boomer officers retiring, driven by Floyd and COVID? A sort of demographic effect? It would be interesting to see the age profile of departments - they were probably boomer heavy, reflecting the general demographics.
The universality of the effect is amazing - causes me to wonder since that would seem to imply it transcends politics.
The darkest corner is the one that holds the data that can never be collected. Are the “clearances” actually successful criminal investigations? Before or now...
Were the cops accusing black people of crimes they didn’t commit and now they don’t do that? Were “the missing clearances” misidentifications, or crimes now going unpunished? Are cops on strike? How could we know?
Well said. This is a serious problem that the criminal justice system is very resistant to dealing with, and that resistance makes gathering hard data on it almost impossible. We know people like Curtis Flowers, Keith Davis Jr, and the McMartin family existed in the past, and there continues to be reason to suspect they exist now, but it's almost impossible to get a handle on how many such people there are or might be.
None of this is helped, of course, by the fact that our overburdened systems only have the capacity to test about 5% of their own assertions.
There is no evidence that George Floyd is the cause or one of the causes. I love your analysis of facts but that reference is just a repeat of one side's talking points. A much more believable guess is that this was caused entirely or almost entirely by COVID. Horses not zebras.
This is only the second of your substacks I've read, but so far, amazing work, and thanks for doing it. Your work was recommended to me by my local county prosecutor, who is also a fan.
I forwarded this particular substack to my Senator, who is on the Judicial Committee, with an appeal to lead an effort to clean up and bring into better shape our crime data. So give that a few weeks, they'll sort it out! (May take a little longer, we'll see...)
The most interesting part, to me, is that reported rates of crime are also falling, but every theory of crime I know of expects clearance levels and crime levels to move in opposite directions.
If crime is less often caught and punished, then you'd expect crime rates to rise in response to a lower certainty of punishment. And looking at it from the other direction, if crime rates are dropping, you'd expect clearance rates to rise given the lower workload for law enforcement.
So...what gives? What explains this counterintuitive result? Is the clearance or reporting data so bad that the reality is moving in the opposite direction of the data? Or are these causalities smaller than criminal theory predicts and some other factor is driving the trends?
In my town---Guelph Canada---this came up at a breakfast meeting with the Chief of police and he said that between sending officers out to intervene in people having mental health crisis and opioid overdoses, they don't have time for much else. We've just received a big slug of money to create legal, safe sources of prescription opioids for addicts, which in addition to the existing safe injection sites and methadone clinics might get the overdoses under control---but I'm not holding my breath.
Interesting. Could part of the issue be the last gasp of the baby boomer officers retiring, driven by Floyd and COVID? A sort of demographic effect? It would be interesting to see the age profile of departments - they were probably boomer heavy, reflecting the general demographics.
The universality of the effect is amazing - causes me to wonder since that would seem to imply it transcends politics.
The darkest corner is the one that holds the data that can never be collected. Are the “clearances” actually successful criminal investigations? Before or now...
Were the cops accusing black people of crimes they didn’t commit and now they don’t do that? Were “the missing clearances” misidentifications, or crimes now going unpunished? Are cops on strike? How could we know?
Well said. This is a serious problem that the criminal justice system is very resistant to dealing with, and that resistance makes gathering hard data on it almost impossible. We know people like Curtis Flowers, Keith Davis Jr, and the McMartin family existed in the past, and there continues to be reason to suspect they exist now, but it's almost impossible to get a handle on how many such people there are or might be.
None of this is helped, of course, by the fact that our overburdened systems only have the capacity to test about 5% of their own assertions.
There is no evidence that George Floyd is the cause or one of the causes. I love your analysis of facts but that reference is just a repeat of one side's talking points. A much more believable guess is that this was caused entirely or almost entirely by COVID. Horses not zebras.
This is only the second of your substacks I've read, but so far, amazing work, and thanks for doing it. Your work was recommended to me by my local county prosecutor, who is also a fan.
I forwarded this particular substack to my Senator, who is on the Judicial Committee, with an appeal to lead an effort to clean up and bring into better shape our crime data. So give that a few weeks, they'll sort it out! (May take a little longer, we'll see...)
Appreciate the kind words and thanks for reading and sharing!
The most interesting part, to me, is that reported rates of crime are also falling, but every theory of crime I know of expects clearance levels and crime levels to move in opposite directions.
If crime is less often caught and punished, then you'd expect crime rates to rise in response to a lower certainty of punishment. And looking at it from the other direction, if crime rates are dropping, you'd expect clearance rates to rise given the lower workload for law enforcement.
So...what gives? What explains this counterintuitive result? Is the clearance or reporting data so bad that the reality is moving in the opposite direction of the data? Or are these causalities smaller than criminal theory predicts and some other factor is driving the trends?
In my town---Guelph Canada---this came up at a breakfast meeting with the Chief of police and he said that between sending officers out to intervene in people having mental health crisis and opioid overdoses, they don't have time for much else. We've just received a big slug of money to create legal, safe sources of prescription opioids for addicts, which in addition to the existing safe injection sites and methadone clinics might get the overdoses under control---but I'm not holding my breath.
Could this be part of the problem?