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Showing posts with label Crime. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Crime. Show all posts
The Economist magazine misreads Gary Becker's economics of crime paper

The Economist magazine misreads Gary Becker's economics of crime paper

For Gary Becker the point of criminal penalties was not to drive crime rates towards zero. The point was to make sure that the criminals internalized the cost of committing crime. You may speed to get a relative to hospital on time. You might steal food when you are starving. According to Becker, the penalties shouldn't be so high that people won't do those crimes. The point is similar for firms, even the anti-trust crimes that the Economist discusses. After all, antitrust violations can be efficiency creating even if the government doesn't recognize that possibility as often as it should. Becker was arguing that there was likely a non-zero optimal amount of crime and it was not for the reasons that the Economist magazine says regarding false conviction, though that might also play a role.
Indeed, Mr Becker’s crime calculus might lead to the conclusion that fines should be as draconian as possible—seizing all a wrongdoer’s assets, for example. Anything lower reduces the expected cost of criminality, without doing anything to improve the probability of detection. (Treating whistleblowers leniently is consistent with this logic: letting them off punishment raises the odds of truth-telling, and therefore of detection.) There are plenty of arguments against ultra-high fines, however. One is that false convictions carry too high a cost. Another is that fines of this sort could cripple firms, reducing competition. . . .

Destructive Flash Mob at Walmart in Jacksonville Florida

Do these individuals realize that they will drive businesses out of minority neighborhoods? Many people will pay higher prices from this destruction. One wonders if Obama's rhetoric that businesses are these greedy people who haven't worked hard encourages this type of behavior. This Walmart was apparently just two miles from a house party that police had broken up earlier in the evening. A newspaper story is available here:
A huge house party broken up by police in a North Jacksonville subdivision didn't end there Saturday night as hundreds of young partygoers ignited a flash mob at the Lem Turner Road Walmart Supercenter.

They caused havoc that was recorded and posted on YouTube until Tuesday afternoon, while one person reported being shot during the party.

The Sheriff's Office said investigations into both are "active and ongoing." The shooting is being investigated by the aggravated battery unit detectives while patrol officers follow up on the Walmart incident.

Walmart spokeswoman Dianna Gee said she learned of the incident Saturday night, then spoke with the shift manager at the 12100 Lem Turner Road store. She said the YouTube video is being reviewed, and that the employees did as they were trained by steering clear of the chaos and calling police.

"The actions of these teenagers was deplorable and put at risk the safety of innocent bystanders, staff and customers," Gee said. "We are committed to assisting law enforcement in any way we can to identify the people responsible for the commotion, including acts of vandalism and thefts at the store." . . .

"Record US heatwave blamed for spike in murders"

"Record US heatwave blamed for spike in murders"

Surely it has long been recognized that there are fewer murders during winters than summers, but are there even more murders when there are heat waves? There is not a lot of data mentioned here, but it would be worth accounting for this in monthly crime regressions.  From the UK Telegraph: 

Temperatures rose beyond 104F (40C) in cities from Kentucky to Pennsylvania, with a record 107F (41.7C) registered briefly in Washington DC.
Some 16 murders have been recorded in New York City over the past five days, roughly twice the average rate. One city councilman described the city as a "brewing cauldron". . . .

Latest NICS data

Source available here.  Note that between 2008 and 2011, while NICS checks rose 29.4 percent, violent crime rates have dropped significantly.

Violent Crime 457.5 to 387.5 per 100,000 people, a 15% drop
Murder 5.4 to 4.7 per 100,000 people, a 13% drop
Rape 29.7 to 26.4 per 100,000 people, an 11% drop
Robbery 145.7 to 114.3 per 100,000 people, a 22% drop
Aggravated Assault 276.7 to 242.2 per 100,000 people, a 14% drop

Some data on how NICS checks have changed over time before and after Obama became president.



Data available here.
A link between drug gangs and murder in Puerto Rico?

A link between drug gangs and murder in Puerto Rico?

From Fox News:
As is common in areas that see a spike in drug trafficking, violence in Puerto Rico has also skyrocketed. The Caribbean averages one murder every 7.5 hours, and half of them are linked to drug trafficking. . . .
Apparently, the claim is that Puerto Rico had a murder rate of 26.4 per 100,000 in 2010, which is about five times higher than the US rate.  


Murder: PR: 26.4 per 100,000 US: 4.8
Robbery: PR: 176.8 per 100,000 US: 119.1
Rape: PR: 1.1 per 100,000 US: 27.5
Aggravated Assault: PR: 73.8 per 100,000 US: 252.3
Burglary: PR: 479.9 per 100,000 US: 699.6
Theft: PR: 729.5 per 100,000 US: 2,003.5
Auto theft: PR:182.8 per 100,000 US: 238.8 
MLive Media Group does an important investigation into data problems with justifiable homicide data

MLive Media Group does an important investigation into data problems with justifiable homicide data

I have long been concerned about the problems with the FBI's justifiable homicide data, so it is nice to see John Barnes at MLive Media Group do a careful investigation of this data.  
Officially, there were 117 justifiable homicides involving civilians in Michigan from 2000 to 2010. Another 95 were killed by police, according to the statistics.
One reason those numbers are low is simple, MLive’s investigation found.
Police are reporting the cases as criminal homicides. When it’s later determined to be justifiable, they don’t change the easy-to-recode electronic records. It’s as simple as changing a “1” to a “4.”
That was the case in Kalamazoo County, where FBI statistics show only one justifiable homicide between 2000 and 2010. There were eight, three by civilians and five by police, MLive found.
“It’s all a data-input problem,” Kalamazoo Public Safety Chief Jeff Hadley said. “What happens is when the initial reports are generated, it’s coded as a homicide. It never gets recoded.” . . .
See also this piece from Monday. 

A study on crime by police

I am often asked about crime rates by police.  I have always assumed that the number is quite low, but there are very few hard numbers on this question.  Here are some numbers over a three year period from January 1, 2005 through December 31, 2007.  There were 569,149 full-time law enforcement employees in 2006.  With about 703 police crimes per year, there was a rate of 124 per hundred thousand full-time law enforcement employees (see page 421 in "Exit Strategy: An Exploration of Late-Stage Police Crime" by Stinson, Liederbach and Freiburger).  


Of particular interest is weapons violations.  118/569,149=0.007%
Compare that to firearms violations of concealed handgun permit holders in Florida.  Between October 1, 1987 and July 31, 2011, there were 168 revocations for firearms related violations in Florida.  Over that period of time permits were issued to over 2 million permit holders.  168/2 million = 0.008%
But that isn't really a fair comparison for permit holders because the violation rate for officers is an annual rate and the rate for permit holders is over the entire period of time.  In a 2011 Fox News piece, I made this calculation:
Over the last 38 months, only four permit holders have had their permit revoked for a firearms related violation -- an annual revocation rate of 0.0003%. . . . 
0.007% or 0.0003% are both extremely low and the violations might not be comparable in that the private individuals might run into problems that a police officer (even one off duty might not run into), but the rate for police is still 23 times higher.


The rate of forceable rape and sodomy is 12.4 per 100,000 per year.  By contrast, the forcible rape rate for the general population was 30.9 in 2006.

The aggravated assault rate for officers was 13.8 per 100,000 per year.  By contrast, the rate for the general population was 287.5 in 2006.

Also of interest was this statement in the paper.


The conviction rate among officers who were arrested with 18 or more years of service was 89.1%, whereas the conviction rate for officers who were arrested with 17 years or less of service was 77.5%.  . . .

As expected, the rate of crime for younger officers is a lot higher than for older ones.

Thanks to Patrick J. Friedrich for this info.  The dissertation is available here.

2,000 convicted criminals have been exonerated since 1989. Sounds impressive, right?

2,000 convicted criminals have been exonerated since 1989. Sounds impressive, right?

Well, this isn't as impressive as many believe.  The Huffington Post has this story here:
More than 2,000 inmates and ex-cons have been exonerated since 1989, according to the database that aims to track all wrongful convictions in the United States. More than 100 had been sentenced to death.
"This is a beginning," said University of Michigan Law School professor Samuel Gross, one of the database's creators. "One of my great hopes is that this will lead us to learn more about exonerations."
The database, which was developed with members of Northwestern University's Center on Wrongful Conviction, focused on 873 individual cases. The researchers also identified 13 major police scandals that falsely netted 1,170 other people, although these are not included in the database because they are the results of a collective exoneration based on problems in individual agencies. . . . 
But here is the problem.  How many criminals are we talking about? We are talking about exonerations over 23 years, but the period over which the crimes many have occurred would have taken place over a much longer period of time. These data are for 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, and 2006 for Table 29.


Murder 11,201 + 12,418 +  12,955 + 13,480 + 13,435 = 63,489
Rape 20,088 + 21,418 + 22,584  + 23,307 + 24,535 = 111,932
Robbery 112,300 + 126,725 + 129,403 + 126,715 + 125,605 = 620,748
Agg Assault 408,488 + 421,215 + 429,969 + 433,945 + 447,948 = 2,141,565  


If this was the rate over 23 years, the number of arrests would equal 13,513,576, but given 
how much higher crime rates were back then, the annual rate would be much higher.


At 13.5 million arrests and say 90 percent conviction rate, the total convictions would be  
12.1 million.  2,000 out of 12.1 million (which again is an underestimate because of the
fact that the crimes that were eligible for exoneration were over a much longer period of
time) is only a mistake rate of 0.0165 percent.  That seems like a remarkably low mistake
rate to me.

For murders alone, a similar analysis implies 292,049 arrests.  At a conviction rate of 90
percent, that implies 264,844.  100  divided by 264,844 comes to a rate of only 0.038% 
(but the upward bias problem mentioned above is even greater here because people are 
in prison for murder over such a long period of time).
Should an arrest record show up in criminal background checks?

Should an arrest record show up in criminal background checks?

My guess is that employers don't put as much weight on an arrest as they do a conviction.  On the other hand, employers might not have to be convince as much as a court does before they believe that there is a serious problem.  If someone has been arrested multiple times but not convicted, an employer might still legitimately conclude that there is a serious problem.  In any case, Georgia's Republican lawmakers are moving to expunge criminal records of information on arrests.  From Fox News:


For 13 years, a Georgia woman has lived under the shadow of a child abuse investigation, though police cleared her of any wrongdoing.  The welts and bruises on her daughter's body turned out to be an allergic reaction to antibiotics. But the investigation showed up on criminal background checks, restricting her access to jobs, housing and even her daughter's school.
"I used to have to call ahead and let them know I was coming," said Theresa, who asked to keep her last name unpublished. "I always had to get a clearance if I wanted to participate in certain activities."
Late last year, Theresa was able to remove the investigation from public criminal records with the help of Ashley Deadwyler, an attorney with the Georgia Justice Project, a non-profit advocacy group that provides criminal defense for the indigent.
Lawmakers are now trying to ensure other Georgians don't have to go through the same ordeal, with a piece of legislation that advanced Tuesday in the Capitol.   GJP Executive Director Doug Ammar said many others still face this problem, because Georgia gives district attorneys discretion over whether to allow the restriction of arrest records, even if there's no conviction. . . .

Jailed for 56 days for offensive comments? Unbelievably, yes.


The notion that the government can determine whether your speech is offensive and throw you in jail is scary.  You can read articles from the BBC and other sources and not find what it was that this 21 year old man actually said.  From the BBC:

A student who admitted posting racially offensive comments on Twitter about footballer Fabrice Muamba has been jailed for 56 days.
Swansea University student Liam Stacey, 21, from Pontypridd, admitted inciting racial hatred over remarks about the Bolton Wanderers player, who collapsed during a FA Cup tie at Tottenham.
A district judge in Swansea called the comments "vile and abhorrent".
Muamba, 23, who suffered a cardiac arrest, is still in intensive care.
Sentencing Stacey at Swansea Magistrates' Court, District Judge John Charles told him: "In my view, there is no alternative to an immediate prison sentence.
"It was not the football world who was praying for [Muamba].... everybody was praying for his life."
Stacey broke down in tears as he was led away to begin his jail term.
As he passed the public gallery, he was briefly embraced by friends and his parents.
A second year biology student at Swansea, Stacey was arrested after his comments on the social networking site were reported by other users. . . . .

So what was the initial quote:
"LOL. F*** Muamba. He's dead!!! #haha."
In response to people being upset Mr. Stacey made two other posts.  The second one could be construed as racist, though it wasn't made directly at Mr. Muamba.


Crime down after Supreme Court overturns city gun bans



What about the claim that accidental gun injuries are rising? Despite the claim, I think that it is very hard for anyone to say that accidental gun injuries have been rising. Indeed, the general trend has been clearly downward.














Well, gun injuries are not very well tracked, but accidental gun deaths are falling.






Just a note on the claim that 30,000 people die each year from guns.

Latest numbers
8,775 firearms 2010
554 accidents 2009
18,735 suicides 2009
Total: 28,064

percent suicides: 67%

Even those few studies that say that gun bans reduce gun suicides don't find that they change total suicides.

Some nutty comments on the Fox News piece by Media Matters. Media Matters doesn't seem to understand that you can get some benefit from loosening gun control laws and still want to loosen them even more to get more benefits. I know that it is a deep concept for Media Matters. One big benefit from the Supreme Court decision is that over 70,000 DC residents who have registered long guns could now use them for self defense.
Newest Op-ed piece: Death of a Long-Gun Registry

Newest Op-ed piece: Death of a Long-Gun Registry

My piece with Gary Mauser at National Review Online starts this way:

Despite spending a whopping $2.7 billion on creating and running a long-gun registry, Canadians never reaped any benefits from the project. The legislation to end the program finally passed the Parliament on Wednesday. Even though the country started registering long guns in 1998, the registry never solved a single murder. Instead it has been an enormous waste of police officers’ time, diverting their efforts from patrolling Canadian streets and doing traditional policing activities.
Gun-control advocates have long claimed that registration is a safety issue, and their reasoning is straightforward: If a gun has been left at a crime scene and it was registered to the person who committed the crime, the registry will link the crime gun back to the criminal.
Nice logic, but reality never worked that way. Crime guns are very rarely left at the crime scene, and when they are left at the scene, they have not been registered — criminals are not stupid enough to leave behind a gun that’s registered to them. Even in the few cases where registered crime guns are left at the scene, it is usually because the criminal has been seriously injured or killed, so these crimes would have been solved even without registration.
The statistics speak for themselves. . . . .
DC's phony crime closure rates

DC's phony crime closure rates

This is one way to increase the closure rate. Put solved cases from many years in the numerator and only this year's cases in the denominator. From the Washington Post:

For the past two months, D.C. Police Chief Cathy L. Lanier has touted the city’s astronomically high homicide closure rate — 94 percent for 2011 — and warned anyone contemplating murder in the District to think twice.

“Your risk of being caught is pretty high if you commit a homicide in D.C.,” Lanier told The Washington Post in December.

The closure rate she presents for the District is 154 percent higher than Boston’s and at least 104 percent higher than Baltimore’s, and it gives residents reason to believe that D.C. police have been remarkably successful at solving homicide cases under her watch.

But an examination of District homicides found that the department’s closure rate is a statistical mishmash that makes things seem much better than they are. The District had 108 homicides last year, police records show. A 94 percent closure rate would mean that detectives solved 102 of them. But only 62 were solved as of year’s end, for a true closure rate of 57 percent, according to records reviewed by The Post.

D.C. police achieved the high closure rate last year by including about 40 cases from other years that were closed in 2011. . . .
A really surprisingly sympathetic piece on guns from NPR

A really surprisingly sympathetic piece on guns from NPR

What do you do when you can't depend on the police for protection? NPR addresses this question in a piece on Mexico's gun control laws, though it does bring in some digs on gun ownership.

In Mexico, where criminals are armed to the teeth with high-powered weapons smuggled from the United States, it may come as a surprise that the country has some of the most restrictive gun laws in the world.

Law-abiding Mexicans who want a gun to defend themselves have no good options. Either they fight government red tape to get a legal permit, or they buy one on the black market.

After an outbreak of violence, one embattled community in northern Mexico called Colonia LeBaron has begun to ask if it's time for the country to address its gun laws. . . .

The cold-blooded murders of Benjamin LeBaron and Luis Widmar galvanized the community, Julian LeBaron says. It prompted them to take a stance that is familiar to Second Amendment advocates in the U.S., but one that is taboo in Mexico.

"I think there would be less violence if there were more guns, in the sense that I could barge in here and do whatever I want, knowing that this guy doesn't have a gun," says Jose Widmar, the brother of slain Luis.

Today, if the gangsters return, the LeBaron colony is locked and loaded. . . .


Thanks to Ajit Pai for this link.
Remember how Chicago murder rate fell last year? Well, don't look to arrests for murder being the cause

Remember how Chicago murder rate fell last year? Well, don't look to arrests for murder being the cause

"Only 30 Percent Of Last Year’s Murders Have Been Solved"

Murders in Chicago were down last year, but it’s a different story when it comes to the number of murders actually solved.

As WBBM Newsradio’s Steve Miller reports, the murder clearance rate – the number of homicides that were solved the same year – has slipped. . . .
How useful are NYC's crime numbers?

How useful are NYC's crime numbers?

From the New York Times "NYPD Leaves Offenses Unrecorded to Keep Crime Numbers Down" (Al Baker and Joseph Goldstein, December 30, 2011):

Crime victims in New York sometimes struggle to persuade the police to write down what happened on an official report. The reasons are varied. Police officers are often busy, and few relish paperwork. But in interviews, more than half a dozen police officers, detectives and commanders also cited departmental pressure to keep crime statistics low.

While it is difficult to say how often crime complaints are not officially recorded, the Police Department is conscious of the potential problem, trying to ferret out unreported crimes through audits of emergency calls and of any resulting paperwork.

As concerns grew about the integrity of the data, the police commissioner, Raymond W. Kelly, appointed a panel of former federal prosecutors in January to study the crime-reporting system. The move was unusual for Mr. Kelly, who is normally reluctant to invite outside scrutiny.

The panel, which has not yet released its findings, was expected to focus on the downgrading of crimes, in which officers improperly classify felonies as misdemeanors.

But of nearly as much concern to people in law enforcement are crimes that officers simply failed to record, which one high-ranking police commander in Manhattan suggested was “the newest evolution in this numbers game.” . . .


The article then contains a long list of examples where crimes weren't recorded by the police. This next point is something that every economist would understand;

Despite the new guidelines, some critics say subtle tweaks in police protocol offer opportunities to avoid taking reports. In 2009, the department came up with a new policy that might seem inconsequential: Robbery victims would have to go to the station house to give their reports directly to a detective or patrol supervisor.

The intent was to get an investigator on the case as quickly as possible, but one police commander said supervisors were aware that another consequence could be that fewer crimes would be reported.

The policy was restored to its original form last year, with uniformed officers once again allowed to take the initial report of a robbery. “A police report wouldn’t get made because they make you wait in the police station for hours,” one commander said. Eventually, he added, the crime victim would give up and leave.
Bernd Debusman: "American riddle: more guns, less violence?"

Bernd Debusman: "American riddle: more guns, less violence?"

Bernd is an interesting guy. Here is the beginning of his take on some of the recent crime data. His whole article is available here at Reuters and it is worth reading:

Gun ownership in the United States is up. Violent crime is down. Is this a matter of cause and effect?

The question merits pondering on the January 8 anniversary of the Arizona mass shooting which killed six people, severely injured a member of congress, Gabrielle Giffords, and rekindled the seemingly endless on-and-off debate over gun regulations . . . .

Judging from the background checks gun dealers filed to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), that number jumped by around 1.5 million in December, thanks partly to a spurt of buying around Christmas. For Arizona gun enthusiasts who left firearms out of their Christmas giving, gun shows in Tucson and Phoenix provide another shopping opportunity on the Giffords shooting anniversary.

Advocates of tighter restrictions on firearms have long insisted that more guns equal more violence but a series of FBI statistics released in 2011 makes one wonder about that assumption. Gun sales have risen by twelve percent nationally over the last three years, initially spurred by mistaken fears that President Barack Obama would push for tighter controls. In the same period, violent crime (murder, rape, robbery and aggravated assault) dropped steadily and now stands at a 37-year low.

Does this vindicate the school of thought that holds that armed citizens are the best defense against crime? “The numbers are consistent with what I’ve been saying for a long time,” says John Lott, author of a controversial 1997 study entitles More Guns, Less Crime. “When bans on guns, as in Chicago and Washington DC, were lifted, murders actually declined,” he said in an interview. (Washington recorded 145 murders in 2009 and 132 in 2010). . . .
Obama administration changing the definition of rape

Obama administration changing the definition of rape

There are a range of sexual assaults that go from misdemeanor to felonies. Changing the FBI's definition of what it counts as rape doesn't seem particularly productive. It doesn't change what is actually happening to determining whether someone will be prosecuted for a felony or a misdemeanor. All it changes is what the national numbers that are reported to the public by the FBI include. What matters to most people when they hear the annual reports is whether murder, rape, robbery, and aggravated assault have increased or decreased. Changing the definition of rape for these reports probably means that for a few years we really won't accurately know how the number of rapes are changing from year to year. From The Hill newspaper:

The Uniform Crime Report’s previous definition of rape, first adopted in 1929, was much narrower in scope and was limited only to forcible penile penetration of a vagina, according to the DOJ.

The new definition of rape is: “The penetration, no matter how slight, of the vagina or anus with any body part or object, or oral penetration by a sex organ of another person, without the consent of the victim,” according to the DOJ. . . .
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