Cop Killers – The UCR vs.The Wire

September 1, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

Is it OK for social scientists to use statistics in a misleading way when they write for the general public?

Peter Moskos is a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. His Cop in the Hood is based partly on his work as a police officer in Baltimore. Here’s the lede from a piece he wrote in the Washington Post with Neill Franklin, also a former Baltimore cop.

Peter Moskos and Stanford "Neill" Franklin - Time to Legalize Drugs - washingtonpost.com via kwout

They follow this with:

In many ways, Dante Arthur was lucky. He lived. Nationwide, a police officer dies on duty nearly every other day. [emphasis added]

Let’s see – 365 days a year. That makes nearly 180 such deaths each year.

I’ve been out of the crim biz for a while, but that number sounded high to me. So I went to the UCR. Sure enough, in 2007, 140 police officers died in the line of duty. As Moskos and Franklin say, nearly one every other day.

But 83 of those officers died in accidents, only 57 were homicide victims – one every 6 days. Still a lot. But how many of those were drug-related? The UCR has the answer:

One.

Nor was 2007 unusual. In the decade ending 2007, 1300 police officers died on the job. About 550 of these were in felonies, not accidents. And of these, 27 were drug-related. Three a year is still too many, but it’s a far cry from one every other day.


Maybe I should have looked at a DVD of The Wire instead of the UCR.

Officer Arthur will not appear in this table of the UCR. It counts only deaths. So I looked at data on assaults on police officers. There were 59,000 non-fatal assaults on police officers, nearly a third of them in “disturbances,” i.e., fights (at home, in bars, etc.). Curiously, the UCR does not have a separate category for drugs in these tables. In the Arrest category, it has Robbery, Burglary, and Other, which must include drugs. In that Other category, 174 assaults were with guns.

Total Assaults	59,201
Disturbance	18,789
Other Arrest	8,935
Firearm	174

Using the drugs/other ratio from the table on deaths (about 1/3), we get about 60 non-fatal shootings (like that of Officer Arthur) in 2007 – one tenth of one percent of all assaults on police officers.

Moskos and Franklin argue that federal laws should allow states to make the manufacture and distribution of drugs legal and regulated rather than criminal. The authors make several good arguments against current drug laws, which have created many problems that legalization might ameliorate. But I’m skeptical as to whether legalization would make much of a difference in police safety.

Cause and Responsibility

August 30, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

Causation is a tricky problem, especially when any degree of distance separates a causal factor from the actual behavior we are trying to prove, and especially when that causal factor is social – a structure, a culture – rather than individual. Moral responsibility is a different matter, less subject to the rigors of scientific proof.

When Dr. Tiller, who did late term abortions, was assassinated, Operation Rescue disclaimed any moral responsibility for the crime although they had long been calling for the doctor to be “brought to justice.” At the time (in this blog post) , I was reminded of the assassination of Thomas Becket by Henry II’s knights. I should have added that King Henry, at least, later took responsibility for the crime.

Now we have a pastor in Arizona who, shortly before Obama made a local appearance, preached a sermon with prayers for the death of Obama.

Tempe pastor prays for president's death via kwout

One of Anderson’s parishioners was Chris Broughton, who showed up at demonstration in Phoenix outside where Obama was speaking. Broughton was carrying an AR-15 assault rifle.
Broughton didn’t shoot. But somebody else might. Rick Sanchez on CNN says

A CNN source with very close to the U.S. Secret Service confirmed to me today that threats on the life of the president of the United States have now risen by as much as 400 percent since his inauguration, 400 percent death threats against Barack Obama — quote — “in this environment” go far beyond anything the Secret Service has seen with any other president.

An “environment” is not legally responsible for any specific act. It would also be difficult, if not impossible, to show which individuals created the environment. That’s the wonderful thing about thinking only in terms of individuals and ignoring social forces. It allows you to disclaim all responsibility.

Red Jock, Blue Jock

August 29, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

The US Open starts today. Not the real stuff, but the qualifying rounds for unknowns hoping for a spot in the draw. You can walk into the Tennis Center, no charge, and see some good matches. Who knows, you might see Federer or Venus working out on a practice court.

And after a long day swatting a little yellow ball back and forth, there’s nothing pro tennis players like better than to give money to the Democrats, even more than Nascar drivers give to Republicans (in absolute dollars, not in Red/Blue percentages).

Newsmeat has the data on presidential contributions from the sports world since 1978, and Andrew Gelman converted it into this nifty chart.

The numbers are slightly misleading. The big contributions come from the owners and executives, not the athletes (are Nascar drivers athletes?). Steinbrenner, Modell, Wilpon, et. al., have ponied up hundreds of thousands of dollars, and in a couple of cases, millions. The contributions of most of the players we see on the screen rarely spill out of four figures.

Andre Agassi gave $189,500, 95% to Democrats.

Good for Agassi. And his colleagues. I always did like tennis.

If you want to find me at the Open, check the men’s doubles matches. Why? See this (ungated, at least for the moment).

Status Politics Again – Looking Back From the Future

August 26, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

The news photos of health care reform protestors – invariably described as “angry” – remind me of the photos and footage of the angry protestors in Little Rock over a half century ago.

The boy in the picture on the right must be in his sixties today. When he sees this photo now, what does he think of himself, or of his parents or whoever it was that got him to carry the sign? And all those other protesters – how many years did it take, I wonder, for their anger to turn to embarrassment or even shame? Or are they still proud of their efforts to keep black children from going to school with white children?

And now we have people angrily protesting an attempt to ensure that all Americans have health care. How will these protesters feel in ten or twenty years when they look back? What will their children or grandchildren think when they see these pictures 50 years from now?


These protests are status politics (an earlier post on this is here). They are about the symbolic meaning of a policy rather than its actual consequences. Whatever fantasies about “race mixing” may have haunted the white protesters in Little Rock, in their more rational moments, they could not really have believed that desegregating schools would have some real effect on their kids’ education or lives. Instead, desegregation was a statement that they and their ideas had lost their status in US society.

In the same way, I find it hard to believe that the people screaming about Hitler, socialism, death panels, and the rest really want to keep 40+ million Americans uninsured and to keep US health care the least cost-effective in the world. Their protests, like those of the segregationists, are about “the government.” The government, in this sense, is the symbolic representation of the country. The message they heard in desegregation and hear now in “Obamacare” is that their position in the country is no longer the dominant one.