Thursday, August 18, 2011

Crazy, man!

Stats say MD's crime rate hit a 35-year-low, and no one knows why. ... but it would seem to disprove once & for all a causal connection between crime and the economy, non? ... and already the DPP is using the stats to retroactively defend parole officers' massive caseloads.
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8 comments:

ppatin said...

I'm still a fan of the argument from Freakonomics that Roe v. Wade led to a reduction in crime.

Thu Aug 18, 09:21:00 AM EDT
Maurice Bradbury said...

but Roe v Wade was 38 years ago.. if that was true wouldn't you expect the reduction to come when the not-born would have been teenagers instead of 30-somethings?

Thu Aug 18, 09:40:00 AM EDT
ppatin said...

Maybe the effect is cumulative over multiple generations? One generation of teenagers doesn't have kids, so now we're hitting the point where a second generation of sociopathic teenagers would start robbing/assaulting/murdering people if their parents hadn't been aborted?

In all seriousness I don't believe that legalized abortion is the big reason we have less crime. I think it made a positive contribution, but obviously there are lots of factors at play. Here's an idea that a lot of people won't like BTW. We often hear about how the US's sky high incarceration rate is horrible, but maybe locking lots of people up for long stretches of time works?

Thu Aug 18, 10:22:00 AM EDT
Maurice Bradbury said...

To describe the kind of sentences a would-be gun-toting home-robbing carjack artists get in this town as "long stretches" is a bit much... seems like they have to commit about a dozen crimes and violate parole about the same number of times to serve actual time. ... has the incarceration rate from the city dockets really gone up by that much between, like, 2006 and 2009? I don't think so, not under Jessamy's tenure. Did Bernstein's election and signs of a restless electorate spook exceptionally lenient judges into starting to hand out harder time? Did GunStat start to work? .. I think you ought to get down to the CJCC and ask some questions, PP!

Thu Aug 18, 01:23:00 PM EDT
Maurice Bradbury said...

.. in all seriousness, I nominate technology. The declines seem to favor the jurisdictions that can afford the newest & best stuff. Consider all of the info one could access instantaneously in 2010 vs 1975. .. though as with everything else, BMore is about 10 years behind the times.

Thu Aug 18, 01:32:00 PM EDT
ppatin said...

mj:

I was referring to our national incarceration rate, since crime has been dropping all across the country for years at the same time as our prison population explodes.

The country's incarceration rate is often treated as a huge public policy disaster, but I think the more complex truth is that it does have at least some benefits along with obvious drawbacks. Of course if we took a more sensible approach to drugs we could probably reduce our prison population while handing out longer sentences to carjackers, home invaders, etc.

Thu Aug 18, 01:35:00 PM EDT
Michael Lantz said...

The reason the crime rate is very low because the aging baby boomer aren't out commiting crimes like they were in the 1960's and 1970's.There are alot of crimes that go unreported as well.

Tue Aug 23, 06:59:00 PM EDT
John Galt said...

I support Lantz's position. Crime is not accurately reported in Baltimore, and even when it is, the police massage the numbers to make the aggregate work.

That's part of how CompStat works: assemble the numbers and then tell the district commanders to make the totals go down.

Guess what? They demand it at roll call the next day and ... voila!.... it happens.

Compare the city's crime stats to the volume of 911 police calls over a period of years. One has gone way down. The other,... not so much. Not really at all.

see stats from a few years back here.

So,... if the neighborhood is so much friggin' better... why is that phone ringin' off the hook all night long at dispatch?

Now, you could hypothesize that maybe crank calls are on the rise, but I don't see that and neither does any officer I know. The calls are sufficiently real that patrol cars are on 911s nonstop all night long.

Anyone up for requesting the last couple of years' police 911 call from BCityPD Planning & Research?

Wed Aug 24, 10:43:00 AM EDT

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