11 ms·

NYC major crime complaints fell when cops took a break from ‘proactive policing’

147 points by spideymans 5y ago

nanis 5y ago
> The scientists found that civilian complaints of major crimes dropped by about 3% to 6% during the slowdown. 1. Why call the cops if you know they won't do anything? 2. Relatedly, why "snitch" when you know there won't be any cops around?
- kevingadd 5y ago
  I think you'll find many residents of many cities will call the cops even though they know the cops usually won't do anything.
  - treeman79 5y ago
    Ages ago when I was a kid, our house was constantly being robbed. No city police in a town of 50,000 County police who took an hour or more to show up finally told my dad to get a gun and explained how we should move the body to make it look like we were being attacked. So that we didn’t get arrested. So yea we moved promptly.
    - WesolyKubeczek 5y ago
      And now I want a Youtube tutorial...
    - vimy 5y ago
      Why was there no police?
      - BitwiseFool 5y ago
        More importantly, why wasn't there a social worker to show up first? /s
      - treeman79 5y ago
        A few years some parents left their kid home alone while on vacation. Neighbors knew family had gone vacation and saw movement at night. Jumpy cop, dark house, sudden movement, dead kid... Family got big payout, City dismantled the police department.
      - actually_a_dog 5y ago
        Plenty of rural areas will only be serviced by a county sheriff, and there may not be that many officers. I grew up in a place like that. You could drive around forever where I grew up and never see a cop.
  - CobrastanJorji 5y ago
    Well, sure, because the insurance company's first question will be "is there a police report."
    - whatgoodisaroad 5y ago
      A police report != a 911 call from a legal standpoint (to my non lawyer knowledge).
      - vanattab 5y ago
        But it is the first step if you need a report written.
        kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
        You can walk to a station and do it in person. That won't be logged in the 911 database.
        colechristensen 5y ago
        It really isn’t. Where I am it is a form on a website.
      - nanis 5y ago
        I don't know anything about NYC, but, normally, a police report actually involves the police writing down some names. So, one lives in a high crime area and one notices that the police are no longer around, one has strong incentives not to go on the record about this or that crime.
  - teawrecks 5y ago
    I think their point is that it could explain the 3-6% drop. But yes, the other 94-97% of people still call.
- temp8964 5y ago
  The title suggests a causation on this 4.5% change? Paywalled, I didn’t read the article.
  - kevingadd 5y ago
    The article does say the study attempted to control for those variables, yeah.
  - nanis 5y ago
    > “While we cannot entirely rule out the effects of under-reporting,” the authors wrote, “our results show that crime complaints decreased, rather than increased, during a slowdown in proactive policing, contrary to deterrence theory.” Original research is here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-017-0211-5 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-017-0211-5 Both authors are political scientists who are highly unlikely to have a command of econometrics. I am not sure if they took into account the panel nature of the data and in those circumstances where authors focus solely on either the cross-section or the time-series nature of the process, it is not uncommon for "results" to be nonsense.
- tus89 5y ago
  what does the word proactive mean to you?
  - Aeolun 5y ago
    You arrest people before they can commit the offence. I think there was a documentary about this a few years ago called Minority Report.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- bkirwi 5y ago
  FWIW, this is addressed in the article and the paper it covers: the slowdown involved reduced "proactive policing" -- "systematic and aggressive enforcement of low-level violations" -- but the observed drop is in major crimes like burglary and assault. The authors also do some work to control for the overall crime reporting rate.
  - falcrist 5y ago
    I'm a bit confused... Everyone is assuming that the police wouldn't respond to calls during this period, but the article doesn't suggest that this was the case. Even looking through articles in 2014 and 2015 doesn't provide me with any evidence that police weren't showing up to crime scenes... just that they weren't doing the "proactive policing" thing. Am I missing something here?
    - nanis 5y ago
      Showing up after the crime has been committed is not the same as being around to deter crime.
      - falcrist 5y ago
        I'm specifically talking about showing up when crimes were reported, not whether they were deterring crimes.
- 5faulker 5y ago
  The apathy is real
- jstrH 5y ago
  Yeah exactly; the stats are made up since the state induces snitching over petty nonsense to meet quotas, and earn trust of snitches for the times they’re actually useful. Statistical achievement is a hollow basis for social organization.
pope_meat 5y ago
Police are like hammers that see everything as nails. It's just not working.
kevingadd 5y ago
Good example of how sometimes a strategy you apply can prove itself necessary but only because it's addressing a problem it creates. Sometimes you have to just grit your teeth and try a new approach to see if it's going to be an improvement
- SubiculumCode 5y ago
  I'm not sure why you got the hammer, your comment is exactly correct. Overpolice->More crime->Oh No we Need more Policing->More Crime->...->...
nickff 5y ago
>"“While we cannot entirely rule out the effects of under-reporting,” the authors wrote, “our results show that crime complaints decreased, rather than increased, during a slowdown in proactive policing, contrary to deterrence theory.”" >"Each week during the slowdown saw civilians report an estimated 43 fewer felony assaults, 40 fewer burglaries and 40 fewer acts of grand larceny. And this slight suppression of major crime rates actually continued for seven to 14 weeks after those drops in proactive policing — which led the researchers to estimate that overall, the slowdown resulted in about 2,100 fewer major-crimes complaints." The fact that assaults, robberies, and burglaries aren't being reported would seem to indicate that people just weren't bothering to contact the police, because they knew the police would not help. Murder, rape, and (hospital-reported) shooting rates dropping would be more indicative that less policing would reduce crime.
- kevingadd 5y ago
  Are you suggesting rape and murder have the same causes as assaults and burglaries? The article describes the claim that "proactive policing" creates pressures that would lead to (among other issues) assaults and robberies. Why would removing those pressures reduce the frequency of rape?
  - nickff 5y ago
    I'm suggesting that assaults and burglaries tend to be under-reported, and would be more 'marginalized' by under-policing. I think the reporting rate for rape and murder is much higher (and less variable) than those of burglary and assault.
    - ipaddr 5y ago
      I would suggest the other way around. Many women don't report.
      - Mirioron 5y ago
        While that's true, assault is also very commonly not reported. I don't think I even realized before the age of 25 that I could report someone for hitting me. If something broke then I would think of it, but if it just hurt then no. With that being said aggravated assault accounted for 68.2% of violent crime in 2019 according to the FBI.[0] [0] https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-2019/topic-pages/violent-crime https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-...
koolba 5y ago
The only major crime statistic that I’ll trust is the murder rate. It’s the only one that can’t be faked. Petty crime goes unreported. Arrest and conviction rates can be gamed. But you can’t hide people dying.
- runnerup 5y ago
  Yes you can, just rule it a suicide or accident. I've seen a likely murder in mountain view misclassified as a diabetes-related accidental drowning.
  - MegaButts 5y ago
    Yeah, I've actually seen this happen enough times that I believe it's more common than people think. I don't have statistics, but I've noticed multiple people die under mysterious circumstances (including a close friend) and they were usually ruled a suicide, even when the family objected.
  - unethical_ban 5y ago
    Well, that's a "technically" while still missing the point. It is much more difficult to meaningfully shift murder rate numbers via mass mis-reporting, compared to other statistics.
    - haimez 5y ago
      I don’t think you’ve meaningfully proved that claim. The point was that you can, in fact, quite easily game stats even for murder. I’ll add this[1] as another example. [1] - https://www.vox.com/world/2015/12/13/9989250/japan-crime-conviction-rate https://www.vox.com/world/2015/12/13/9989250/japan-crime-con...
    - runnerup 5y ago
      To steelman this argument, I'd say it's hard to hide "excess deaths" across all causes lumped together. Although during covid we probably even managed to do that by reducing miles driven and presumably # of road deaths.
amatecha 5y ago
https://archive.is/rrBsp https://archive.is/rrBsp
Rebelgecko 5y ago
From the "correlation is not causation" school of thought, I immediately had 3 thoughts: 1. The # of phone calls to the police about a crime are not necessarily indicative of how common that crime is. If people think the police won't do anything, they're less likely to bother calling (I see this often in my area with things like stolen bikes and catalytic converters... people often don't bother getting a police report unless their insurance requires it). 2. Throughout the 2010s the crime rate trended downward 3. Crime rates can have seasonal variations (but this can vary based upon location and type of crime) Skimming through the paper, #1 wasn't addressed at all. For #2, the paper compared the 2015 data against 2014. I don't think they did anything to compensate for annual trends in crime rate. In other words, if the crime rate in Des Moines, Iowa lowered at the same time, is that actually a ripple effect from NYPD's actions? Or are both cities just part of a larger downward trend that we saw coming out of the 2009 recession? For #3, they actually took temperature and precipitation into account which was cool.
- syops 5y ago
  I haven’t read the paper and by your admission you haven’t either. You skimmed it. Do you find it reasonable to believe that you could come up with potential objections to the paper that the authors didn’t also think about? You made a claim in #1 about the likelihood of people calling police when they think police won’t do anything about it. That claim sounds plausible but is it correct? Do know of studies on this? If you, a non expert, can think immediately of three thoughts then it seems highly likely the authors - who spent effort and time on the topic - also thought about these same thoughts. Maybe these things aren’t addressed because it’s obvious to them that these aren’t valid objections and it’s obvious to their target audience.
  - coryrc 5y ago
    I get my car broken into biyearly. After the first time, I don't report because it's a waste of time. Same when bicycles are stolen from my friends. I don't need a study to say the sky is blue.
    - 5y ago
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
anigbrowl 5y ago
(2017) This is a good and interesting story but it's not new information, nor does it seem to have been updated with more recent data.
SubiculumCode 5y ago
Tickets and such for minor violations, impounds, etc, all these can represent a major financial hit to a struggling family or young adult. I have worried for a long time that over-policing causes more crime than it prevents, and it generates distrust of the police as a group that is there to make your life trouble rather than keep you safe. There is just an incredible amount of research confirming that over-enforcement of petty infractions accumulates into community economic hardship, crime, and instability.
- spideymans 5y ago
  >Tickets and such for minor violations, impounds, etc, all these can represent a major financial hit to a struggling family or young adult. A very minor mistake - the kind of mistake I'm sure we've all made at some point - can easily send the life of a poor person spiralling out of control. Get thrown in jail for a night, you could lose your job. If you lose your job, you will miss rent. If you miss rent, the lack of social safety net means you're essentially screwed. It's even worse if you're find or a parent. It's no mystery why people in this situation would turn to crime.
exogeny 5y ago
I've lived in a few different major cities and NYC for the last decade, and I can definitely say I have never seen more broken, ineffective policing than here. It's truly ridiculous. Your experience, obviously, may vary. Multiple instances of police openly threatening citizens. Phones ripped out of hands and smashed onto the ground, for the mere crime of filming an interaction. During the BLM protests, every single act of instigation and provocation that I witnessed was started by the police. I don't know what the answer is. But it is very clear the police here are a paramilitary jackboot squad, and that the city and the strength of their union protects them. They have almost complete impunity, and they see normal, everyday citizens as the enemy. I fear that we're in for more trouble now that we've elected an ex-cop Mayor of the city. (For background, I'm a tall, white man. I can't imagine how bad it would be if I wasn't.)
- sjm 5y ago
  Yeah it really feels like the NYPD has a lot of contempt for the city they operate in, politically, socially, culturally. I saw the same thing at every protest I attended — when there were no cops around, it was extremely peaceful. I only ever saw it get ugly when cops were harassing people, pushing people around, or trying to basically shut down protests by blocking off surrounding streets and trying to close in on protesters.
  - JumpCrisscross 5y ago
    > NYPD has a lot of contempt for the city they operate in A lot of New York cops live outside the areas they patrol. The ones who live in the city are overrepresented on Staten Island. That said, for every peaceful protest last summer there were unprovoked nighttime riots which seemed to occur more when the cops were somewhere else.
    - addicted 5y ago
      My sister lives on 6th Ave. cops would congregate right outside her building before the protests so she could observe the entire process. The cops were deliberately ignoring the rioters while strong arming the largely peaceful protestors. She has videos of 50 cops standing while someone broke into a store (by throwing a rock through the glass window), picked up a POS system, and runs, with not a single cop twitching, while just a few hours earlier you had their lieutenant or whatever come kneel with the protesters and as soon as the higher ups left, cops attack 100 lb women from behind as they were walking away. They were deliberately attacking peaceful protestors and deliberately ignoring looters and rioters. You could also see on the signal app which was tracking these gangs of kids who were looting major stores like Macy’s, as well as protestors, and the cops were always where the protestors were and never where the rioters, who were only a few blocks behind, were. It was a very blatant attempt by the NYPD to make the protests appear violent by encouraging looting while discouraging peaceful protesting.
throwaway0a5e 5y ago
This same effect has been seen in cities where the police go on "strike" by not proactively enforcing all the petty crime laws that the city makes money on, notably Baltimore.
nemo44x 5y ago
Didn’t “The Wire” already show this? The police decided not to enforce any drug dealing related law so long as it was done in a confined area. This not only made crime go “down” but also resulted in less auxiliary crime since the market was safe and plentiful and because dealers were not being taken out there weren’t turf wars for corners to sell on.
- searealist 5y ago
  The wire is a fictional TV show. It doesn't show anything about the real world.
dirkg 5y ago
Police in the US are thugs. They were created to protect property of the rich, and have never been legally obligated to 'protect and serve'. They steal more money than criminals in 'asset seizure' which is legalized theft, murder more innocent people, are literally above the law and cannot be punished thanks to nonsense like 'qualified immunity', and yet are worshipped as heroes, are always complaining and demanding more funds while being completely ineffective and dangerous to people, and the media perpetuates the 'risk their lives' myth.
- gremloni 5y ago
  They really are terrible. I don’t know why it’s so hard to completely fire the current crop of corrupt police in a bunch of cities and start over — it’s a low skilled position with good benefits, pay and is counterintuitively safe. It’s probably the police unions and to be honest it’s one of the few unions that deserves to be busted. Get the cops on individual liability insurance like nurses and get rid of the union.
cletus 5y ago
So you need to look no further than NYC's gravity knife fiasco to see what's wrong with politics and policing. For reference, a "gravity knife" is something originally issued to paratroopers. They could get stuck in trees and need to cut themselves out of their chutes. They needed a knife they could use with limited mobility. The traditional gravity knife had a button that released the knife that fell into place and locked by force of gravity. These became popular later and evolved, most notably into the spring-loaded switch blade. To combat this and crime in the 70s and 80s, NYC clamped down on so-called gravity knives, which the law defined as anything that could be opened with one hand. This law was clearly abused. NYPD officers would forcefully try and open a knife with one hand, claim it was a gravity knife and the owner would be charged. With a prior arrest this may be upsold to a felony. This was such a problem for many professions that needed a knife for their job, most notably stagehands on Broadway and custodians. One custodian walking home at night ended up with a 5 year prison sentence with an upsold felony charge. And of course minorities were overly targeted with this law. Through the 2010s reform was repeatedly attempted. Twice this was vetoed by Cuomo at the behest of the Manhattan DA. Cuomo at this time I'm convinced still thought he could be president some day (to be fair, he probably could still be if he switched parties based on recent evidence) so courted the "law and order" crowd and political support from the police unions (who opposed reform) and the DA. Vague reasons were given for the veto. Eventually this did pass but there still seems to be problems with that. So let's outline the problems here: 1. A so-called Democratic governor choosing personal ambition over targeted minorities; 2. Arrest targets within the NYPD that drive police to meet those targets; 3. Police unions wanting more ways to randomly charge people for doing their job just in case they wanted to; and 4. Targeting of minorities, likely because they were poor (and couldn't thus afford legal representation and were also more likely to have a criminal record so the charges would stick). For me I was glad to see Cuomo go but frankly I couldn't stand the guy long before the sexual harassment allegations came to light. It seems like every issue I looked into Cuomo landed on the wrong side of it and personal political gain seemed to be the reason. For example, NYC property tax reform and congestion charging for private vehicles in Manhattan.
- look_lookatme 5y ago
  An important addendum is that if you leave any part of the knife exposed (such as knife on the inside of pocket, but clip on the outside) that is considered "brandishing" and can trigger a stop by the police. This is a common pretext for a stop and frisk. When I lived there I switched to a Case folding knife so I wouldn't accidentally run afoul of this law.
zone411 5y ago
A random paper on crime and policing from 2017 covering two months in one city that shows a small difference in some types of crimes (complaints of felony assault, burglary, grand larceny) but not others (murder, rape, robbery, grand theft auto) and it's on Hacker News? How? Looking at the graph of the period after this slowdown, the crime also appears to be down year-over-year by about the same amount as during the slowdown.
scythe 5y ago
From the linked article: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-017-0211-5 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-017-0211-5 >In sharp contrast to this trend, evidence shows that arrests by the Detective Bureau increased significantly during the slowdown. This result is highly relevant to one of our theoretical mechanisms, since the Detective Bureau is charged with intensive investigations, rather than proactive policing. Further confirming that the slowdown’s effects were localized to proactive policing, we find no evidence that ‘Major crime arrests’ were significantly affected by the slowdown when we condition our estimates on ‘Major crime complaints’. This paragraph appears to rule out many of the "armchair" objections being raised in the comments. If it is a robust finding, it would imply that some "proactive policing" arrests are effectively a nuisance to prosecutors and detectives as they work to combat severe criminality. Nonetheless, I was surprised to see how much confidence the authors report with such limited data. They are not shy about saying "our results imply..." (cf. suggest) and go on to assert the existence of a "vicious feedback between proactive policing and major crime" It's one study, in one city, over a brief time period. Further work is needed to see if the results generalize.
andyxor 5y ago
not sure what to make of the recent resurgence of anti-police articles (from 2017?) I'd think the current explosion of violent crime in all the major US cities should be enough to put an end to this insanity. Go and explain the idea of "less policing" to that beaten and robbed grandma in Oakland, or to the mother of that girl who got shot by a stray bullet in Chicago. My guess is BLM is steadily losing support with general public thus the attempt to resuscitate this dying fad.
tamaharbor 5y ago
All well and good, but as a former resident and frequent visitor to NYC, I can assure you is is quickly returning to its late 1970s - early 1980’s shithole status.

147 points by spideymans 5y ago

> The scientists found that civilian complaints of major crimes dropped by about 3% to 6% during the slowdown. 1. Why call the cops if you know they won't do anything? 2. Relatedly, why "snitch" when you know there won't be any cops around?

kevingadd 5y ago
I think you'll find many residents of many cities will call the cops even though they know the cops usually won't do anything.
- treeman79 5y ago
  Ages ago when I was a kid, our house was constantly being robbed. No city police in a town of 50,000 County police who took an hour or more to show up finally told my dad to get a gun and explained how we should move the body to make it look like we were being attacked. So that we didn’t get arrested. So yea we moved promptly.
  - WesolyKubeczek 5y ago
    And now I want a Youtube tutorial...
  - vimy 5y ago
    Why was there no police?
    - BitwiseFool 5y ago
      More importantly, why wasn't there a social worker to show up first? /s
    - treeman79 5y ago
      A few years some parents left their kid home alone while on vacation. Neighbors knew family had gone vacation and saw movement at night. Jumpy cop, dark house, sudden movement, dead kid... Family got big payout, City dismantled the police department.
    - actually_a_dog 5y ago
      Plenty of rural areas will only be serviced by a county sheriff, and there may not be that many officers. I grew up in a place like that. You could drive around forever where I grew up and never see a cop.
- CobrastanJorji 5y ago
  Well, sure, because the insurance company's first question will be "is there a police report."
  - whatgoodisaroad 5y ago
    A police report != a 911 call from a legal standpoint (to my non lawyer knowledge).
    - vanattab 5y ago
      But it is the first step if you need a report written.
      - kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
        You can walk to a station and do it in person. That won't be logged in the 911 database.
      - colechristensen 5y ago
        It really isn’t. Where I am it is a form on a website.
    - nanis 5y ago
      I don't know anything about NYC, but, normally, a police report actually involves the police writing down some names. So, one lives in a high crime area and one notices that the police are no longer around, one has strong incentives not to go on the record about this or that crime.
- teawrecks 5y ago
  I think their point is that it could explain the 3-6% drop. But yes, the other 94-97% of people still call.
temp8964 5y ago
The title suggests a causation on this 4.5% change? Paywalled, I didn’t read the article.
- kevingadd 5y ago
  The article does say the study attempted to control for those variables, yeah.
- nanis 5y ago
  > “While we cannot entirely rule out the effects of under-reporting,” the authors wrote, “our results show that crime complaints decreased, rather than increased, during a slowdown in proactive policing, contrary to deterrence theory.” Original research is here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-017-0211-5 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-017-0211-5 Both authors are political scientists who are highly unlikely to have a command of econometrics. I am not sure if they took into account the panel nature of the data and in those circumstances where authors focus solely on either the cross-section or the time-series nature of the process, it is not uncommon for "results" to be nonsense.
tus89 5y ago
what does the word proactive mean to you?
- Aeolun 5y ago
  You arrest people before they can commit the offence. I think there was a documentary about this a few years ago called Minority Report.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
bkirwi 5y ago
FWIW, this is addressed in the article and the paper it covers: the slowdown involved reduced "proactive policing" -- "systematic and aggressive enforcement of low-level violations" -- but the observed drop is in major crimes like burglary and assault. The authors also do some work to control for the overall crime reporting rate.
- falcrist 5y ago
  I'm a bit confused... Everyone is assuming that the police wouldn't respond to calls during this period, but the article doesn't suggest that this was the case. Even looking through articles in 2014 and 2015 doesn't provide me with any evidence that police weren't showing up to crime scenes... just that they weren't doing the "proactive policing" thing. Am I missing something here?
  - nanis 5y ago
    Showing up after the crime has been committed is not the same as being around to deter crime.
    - falcrist 5y ago
      I'm specifically talking about showing up when crimes were reported, not whether they were deterring crimes.
5faulker 5y ago
The apathy is real
jstrH 5y ago
Yeah exactly; the stats are made up since the state induces snitching over petty nonsense to meet quotas, and earn trust of snitches for the times they’re actually useful. Statistical achievement is a hollow basis for social organization.

pope_meat 5y ago

Police are like hammers that see everything as nails. It's just not working.

kevingadd 5y ago

Good example of how sometimes a strategy you apply can prove itself necessary but only because it's addressing a problem it creates. Sometimes you have to just grit your teeth and try a new approach to see if it's going to be an improvement

SubiculumCode 5y ago
I'm not sure why you got the hammer, your comment is exactly correct. Overpolice->More crime->Oh No we Need more Policing->More Crime->...->...

nickff 5y ago

>"“While we cannot entirely rule out the effects of under-reporting,” the authors wrote, “our results show that crime complaints decreased, rather than increased, during a slowdown in proactive policing, contrary to deterrence theory.”" >"Each week during the slowdown saw civilians report an estimated 43 fewer felony assaults, 40 fewer burglaries and 40 fewer acts of grand larceny. And this slight suppression of major crime rates actually continued for seven to 14 weeks after those drops in proactive policing — which led the researchers to estimate that overall, the slowdown resulted in about 2,100 fewer major-crimes complaints." The fact that assaults, robberies, and burglaries aren't being reported would seem to indicate that people just weren't bothering to contact the police, because they knew the police would not help. Murder, rape, and (hospital-reported) shooting rates dropping would be more indicative that less policing would reduce crime.

kevingadd 5y ago
Are you suggesting rape and murder have the same causes as assaults and burglaries? The article describes the claim that "proactive policing" creates pressures that would lead to (among other issues) assaults and robberies. Why would removing those pressures reduce the frequency of rape?
- nickff 5y ago
  I'm suggesting that assaults and burglaries tend to be under-reported, and would be more 'marginalized' by under-policing. I think the reporting rate for rape and murder is much higher (and less variable) than those of burglary and assault.
  - ipaddr 5y ago
    I would suggest the other way around. Many women don't report.
    - Mirioron 5y ago
      While that's true, assault is also very commonly not reported. I don't think I even realized before the age of 25 that I could report someone for hitting me. If something broke then I would think of it, but if it just hurt then no. With that being said aggravated assault accounted for 68.2% of violent crime in 2019 according to the FBI.[0] [0] https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-2019/topic-pages/violent-crime https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-...

koolba 5y ago

The only major crime statistic that I’ll trust is the murder rate. It’s the only one that can’t be faked. Petty crime goes unreported. Arrest and conviction rates can be gamed. But you can’t hide people dying.

runnerup 5y ago
Yes you can, just rule it a suicide or accident. I've seen a likely murder in mountain view misclassified as a diabetes-related accidental drowning.
- MegaButts 5y ago
  Yeah, I've actually seen this happen enough times that I believe it's more common than people think. I don't have statistics, but I've noticed multiple people die under mysterious circumstances (including a close friend) and they were usually ruled a suicide, even when the family objected.
- unethical_ban 5y ago
  Well, that's a "technically" while still missing the point. It is much more difficult to meaningfully shift murder rate numbers via mass mis-reporting, compared to other statistics.
  - haimez 5y ago
    I don’t think you’ve meaningfully proved that claim. The point was that you can, in fact, quite easily game stats even for murder. I’ll add this[1] as another example. [1] - https://www.vox.com/world/2015/12/13/9989250/japan-crime-conviction-rate https://www.vox.com/world/2015/12/13/9989250/japan-crime-con...
  - runnerup 5y ago
    To steelman this argument, I'd say it's hard to hide "excess deaths" across all causes lumped together. Although during covid we probably even managed to do that by reducing miles driven and presumably # of road deaths.

amatecha 5y ago

https://archive.is/rrBsp https://archive.is/rrBsp

Rebelgecko 5y ago

From the "correlation is not causation" school of thought, I immediately had 3 thoughts: 1. The # of phone calls to the police about a crime are not necessarily indicative of how common that crime is. If people think the police won't do anything, they're less likely to bother calling (I see this often in my area with things like stolen bikes and catalytic converters... people often don't bother getting a police report unless their insurance requires it). 2. Throughout the 2010s the crime rate trended downward 3. Crime rates can have seasonal variations (but this can vary based upon location and type of crime) Skimming through the paper, #1 wasn't addressed at all. For #2, the paper compared the 2015 data against 2014. I don't think they did anything to compensate for annual trends in crime rate. In other words, if the crime rate in Des Moines, Iowa lowered at the same time, is that actually a ripple effect from NYPD's actions? Or are both cities just part of a larger downward trend that we saw coming out of the 2009 recession? For #3, they actually took temperature and precipitation into account which was cool.

syops 5y ago
I haven’t read the paper and by your admission you haven’t either. You skimmed it. Do you find it reasonable to believe that you could come up with potential objections to the paper that the authors didn’t also think about? You made a claim in #1 about the likelihood of people calling police when they think police won’t do anything about it. That claim sounds plausible but is it correct? Do know of studies on this? If you, a non expert, can think immediately of three thoughts then it seems highly likely the authors - who spent effort and time on the topic - also thought about these same thoughts. Maybe these things aren’t addressed because it’s obvious to them that these aren’t valid objections and it’s obvious to their target audience.
- coryrc 5y ago
  I get my car broken into biyearly. After the first time, I don't report because it's a waste of time. Same when bicycles are stolen from my friends. I don't need a study to say the sky is blue.
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anigbrowl 5y ago

(2017) This is a good and interesting story but it's not new information, nor does it seem to have been updated with more recent data.

SubiculumCode 5y ago

Tickets and such for minor violations, impounds, etc, all these can represent a major financial hit to a struggling family or young adult. I have worried for a long time that over-policing causes more crime than it prevents, and it generates distrust of the police as a group that is there to make your life trouble rather than keep you safe. There is just an incredible amount of research confirming that over-enforcement of petty infractions accumulates into community economic hardship, crime, and instability.

spideymans 5y ago
>Tickets and such for minor violations, impounds, etc, all these can represent a major financial hit to a struggling family or young adult. A very minor mistake - the kind of mistake I'm sure we've all made at some point - can easily send the life of a poor person spiralling out of control. Get thrown in jail for a night, you could lose your job. If you lose your job, you will miss rent. If you miss rent, the lack of social safety net means you're essentially screwed. It's even worse if you're find or a parent. It's no mystery why people in this situation would turn to crime.

exogeny 5y ago

I've lived in a few different major cities and NYC for the last decade, and I can definitely say I have never seen more broken, ineffective policing than here. It's truly ridiculous. Your experience, obviously, may vary. Multiple instances of police openly threatening citizens. Phones ripped out of hands and smashed onto the ground, for the mere crime of filming an interaction. During the BLM protests, every single act of instigation and provocation that I witnessed was started by the police. I don't know what the answer is. But it is very clear the police here are a paramilitary jackboot squad, and that the city and the strength of their union protects them. They have almost complete impunity, and they see normal, everyday citizens as the enemy. I fear that we're in for more trouble now that we've elected an ex-cop Mayor of the city. (For background, I'm a tall, white man. I can't imagine how bad it would be if I wasn't.)

sjm 5y ago
Yeah it really feels like the NYPD has a lot of contempt for the city they operate in, politically, socially, culturally. I saw the same thing at every protest I attended — when there were no cops around, it was extremely peaceful. I only ever saw it get ugly when cops were harassing people, pushing people around, or trying to basically shut down protests by blocking off surrounding streets and trying to close in on protesters.
- JumpCrisscross 5y ago
  > NYPD has a lot of contempt for the city they operate in A lot of New York cops live outside the areas they patrol. The ones who live in the city are overrepresented on Staten Island. That said, for every peaceful protest last summer there were unprovoked nighttime riots which seemed to occur more when the cops were somewhere else.
  - addicted 5y ago
    My sister lives on 6th Ave. cops would congregate right outside her building before the protests so she could observe the entire process. The cops were deliberately ignoring the rioters while strong arming the largely peaceful protestors. She has videos of 50 cops standing while someone broke into a store (by throwing a rock through the glass window), picked up a POS system, and runs, with not a single cop twitching, while just a few hours earlier you had their lieutenant or whatever come kneel with the protesters and as soon as the higher ups left, cops attack 100 lb women from behind as they were walking away. They were deliberately attacking peaceful protestors and deliberately ignoring looters and rioters. You could also see on the signal app which was tracking these gangs of kids who were looting major stores like Macy’s, as well as protestors, and the cops were always where the protestors were and never where the rioters, who were only a few blocks behind, were. It was a very blatant attempt by the NYPD to make the protests appear violent by encouraging looting while discouraging peaceful protesting.

throwaway0a5e 5y ago

This same effect has been seen in cities where the police go on "strike" by not proactively enforcing all the petty crime laws that the city makes money on, notably Baltimore.

nemo44x 5y ago

Didn’t “The Wire” already show this? The police decided not to enforce any drug dealing related law so long as it was done in a confined area. This not only made crime go “down” but also resulted in less auxiliary crime since the market was safe and plentiful and because dealers were not being taken out there weren’t turf wars for corners to sell on.

searealist 5y ago
The wire is a fictional TV show. It doesn't show anything about the real world.

dirkg 5y ago

Police in the US are thugs. They were created to protect property of the rich, and have never been legally obligated to 'protect and serve'. They steal more money than criminals in 'asset seizure' which is legalized theft, murder more innocent people, are literally above the law and cannot be punished thanks to nonsense like 'qualified immunity', and yet are worshipped as heroes, are always complaining and demanding more funds while being completely ineffective and dangerous to people, and the media perpetuates the 'risk their lives' myth.

gremloni 5y ago
They really are terrible. I don’t know why it’s so hard to completely fire the current crop of corrupt police in a bunch of cities and start over — it’s a low skilled position with good benefits, pay and is counterintuitively safe. It’s probably the police unions and to be honest it’s one of the few unions that deserves to be busted. Get the cops on individual liability insurance like nurses and get rid of the union.

cletus 5y ago

So you need to look no further than NYC's gravity knife fiasco to see what's wrong with politics and policing. For reference, a "gravity knife" is something originally issued to paratroopers. They could get stuck in trees and need to cut themselves out of their chutes. They needed a knife they could use with limited mobility. The traditional gravity knife had a button that released the knife that fell into place and locked by force of gravity. These became popular later and evolved, most notably into the spring-loaded switch blade. To combat this and crime in the 70s and 80s, NYC clamped down on so-called gravity knives, which the law defined as anything that could be opened with one hand. This law was clearly abused. NYPD officers would forcefully try and open a knife with one hand, claim it was a gravity knife and the owner would be charged. With a prior arrest this may be upsold to a felony. This was such a problem for many professions that needed a knife for their job, most notably stagehands on Broadway and custodians. One custodian walking home at night ended up with a 5 year prison sentence with an upsold felony charge. And of course minorities were overly targeted with this law. Through the 2010s reform was repeatedly attempted. Twice this was vetoed by Cuomo at the behest of the Manhattan DA. Cuomo at this time I'm convinced still thought he could be president some day (to be fair, he probably could still be if he switched parties based on recent evidence) so courted the "law and order" crowd and political support from the police unions (who opposed reform) and the DA. Vague reasons were given for the veto. Eventually this did pass but there still seems to be problems with that. So let's outline the problems here: 1. A so-called Democratic governor choosing personal ambition over targeted minorities; 2. Arrest targets within the NYPD that drive police to meet those targets; 3. Police unions wanting more ways to randomly charge people for doing their job just in case they wanted to; and 4. Targeting of minorities, likely because they were poor (and couldn't thus afford legal representation and were also more likely to have a criminal record so the charges would stick). For me I was glad to see Cuomo go but frankly I couldn't stand the guy long before the sexual harassment allegations came to light. It seems like every issue I looked into Cuomo landed on the wrong side of it and personal political gain seemed to be the reason. For example, NYC property tax reform and congestion charging for private vehicles in Manhattan.

look_lookatme 5y ago
An important addendum is that if you leave any part of the knife exposed (such as knife on the inside of pocket, but clip on the outside) that is considered "brandishing" and can trigger a stop by the police. This is a common pretext for a stop and frisk. When I lived there I switched to a Case folding knife so I wouldn't accidentally run afoul of this law.

zone411 5y ago

A random paper on crime and policing from 2017 covering two months in one city that shows a small difference in some types of crimes (complaints of felony assault, burglary, grand larceny) but not others (murder, rape, robbery, grand theft auto) and it's on Hacker News? How? Looking at the graph of the period after this slowdown, the crime also appears to be down year-over-year by about the same amount as during the slowdown.

scythe 5y ago

From the linked article: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-017-0211-5 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-017-0211-5 >In sharp contrast to this trend, evidence shows that arrests by the Detective Bureau increased significantly during the slowdown. This result is highly relevant to one of our theoretical mechanisms, since the Detective Bureau is charged with intensive investigations, rather than proactive policing. Further confirming that the slowdown’s effects were localized to proactive policing, we find no evidence that ‘Major crime arrests’ were significantly affected by the slowdown when we condition our estimates on ‘Major crime complaints’. This paragraph appears to rule out many of the "armchair" objections being raised in the comments. If it is a robust finding, it would imply that some "proactive policing" arrests are effectively a nuisance to prosecutors and detectives as they work to combat severe criminality. Nonetheless, I was surprised to see how much confidence the authors report with such limited data. They are not shy about saying "our results imply..." (cf. suggest) and go on to assert the existence of a "vicious feedback between proactive policing and major crime" It's one study, in one city, over a brief time period. Further work is needed to see if the results generalize.

andyxor 5y ago

not sure what to make of the recent resurgence of anti-police articles (from 2017?) I'd think the current explosion of violent crime in all the major US cities should be enough to put an end to this insanity. Go and explain the idea of "less policing" to that beaten and robbed grandma in Oakland, or to the mother of that girl who got shot by a stray bullet in Chicago. My guess is BLM is steadily losing support with general public thus the attempt to resuscitate this dying fad.

tamaharbor 5y ago

All well and good, but as a former resident and frequent visitor to NYC, I can assure you is is quickly returning to its late 1970s - early 1980’s shithole status.