Negative Thinking

November 10, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

Supreme Court round-up:

Refused to overturn a lower court decision that failed to deny that government does not have the right to refrain from excluding unstated principles that do not have . . . .

OK, I’m exaggerating. But multiple negatives are confusing, as I’ve noted before (here). How else to explain Glenn Beck’s saying that Nouriel Roubini agrees with him about inflation (transcript excerpts and video here)? Despite a low rate of inflation, Beck insists that Weimar is just around the corner, especially with the Fed’s recent “quantitative easing” (QE2).

Prices are going through the roof. Basic cost of living, food, clothing, energy, is all going up. And there will be a QE3 and QE4. . . . Leading economist Nouriel Roubini, he tweeted this: . . . : “QE2 will be followed by QE3 and QE4 as QE2 will fail to revive the real economy and to prevent deflationary pressures.” There you go.

Beck seems to think that Roubini is saying that QE2 will lead to inflation. In fact, Roubini is saying just the opposite, but he phrases that idea with a double negative: will fail to prevent deflation. It’s possible that the negative connotation of deflation also added to Beck’s apparent confusion.

As for evidence about inflation, forget official indices, Beck says, and forget the experts (except those that Beck thinks agree with him). “When will we start listening to our own guts, and to common sense?”

I couldn’t fail to disagree with him less.

Boom Box Illusion

November 10, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

Three-dimensional illusions can be public art and can even have practical uses.

This one – audio tape to boom-box tape player – is art, artifice, for art’s sake. No sociological content, but it’s just so cool.



A video with more detail on how it was done is here.

(HT: Richard Wiseman)

Who Are the Felons in Your Neighborhood?

November 8, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

Do most of us know the crime statistics for our neighborhood?

In a comment on the previous post, Bob S. asked, “If people knew how many index crimes were in their neighborhoods, do you think there would be more involvement in handling the issues before governmental interference?”

The point of my post had been that our estimates of crime are impressionistic, and those impressions are much more affected by the appearance of a neighborhood than by numbers on the police books. The “signs of crime” – abandoned cars and buildings, tough-looking groups of kids, garbage strewn on the sidewalk, etc. – are visible, and you can see them every day. When I was in the crim biz and the newspaper would publish crime statistics once or twice a year, I’d note the numbers for my precinct, and I’d clip the article and file it. A week later I wouldn’t remember whether robberies or other crimes in my neighborhood were up or down from the previous year.

That was before the Internet. Now, some cities make their crime data easily accessible. Here, for example are the crimes known to the police for the last six months in the area of Boston where my niece lives.

(Click on the image for a larger view. Or go here .)

A is for Assault, B for Breaking and Entering, R for Robbery, T for Theft, and so on. You can select the time period, and you can click on an incident for more detail.

Houston too has a user-friendly site. You choose the area of the city you want. The map shows and describes the boundaries, and it lists the zip codes in that “beat.” Another click takes you to a list of all crimes in any month you choose – type of crime and address.

At the NYPD Website, you can get data by precinct for the seven Index crimes for the most recent week. If there’s an option for other time periods and details about location, I couldn’t find it.

If you're interested, try your own city. Googling the city name and “police department” will get you there. Then see what kind of information you can get about your neighborhood.

Then there’s Bob’s question about knowledge of crime and ideas about the role of government. I don’t have good data at hand, but my guess is that most people still see crime as a matter for government, especially when crime rates are high. Individuals and businesses may adopt preventive measures, but when crime becomes a public issue, most people look to the government and its agencies – the police and courts. When people are afraid – of crime, terrorism, communism, drugs, illegal immigration, etc. – they look to the government for protection. When people think that crime rates are rising, they’re willing to grant more power to the state. It’s only when they perceive the government as incapable of protecting them that they turn to vigilantism and other non-state protection schemes. Even then, they see their activity as supplementing government action, not replacing it.

Taking Less Serious Crime Seriously

November 5, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

City Keeping Minor Crimes Under Radar

That was the headline on a front-page, above-the-fold story Tuesday’s Times. It reported that since 2002, the city and police department have stopped providing the data to the state, or presumably to just about anyone else. The NYPD readily publishes its data on “serious crime” or what the FBI calls Part I crimes.* These are also known as the “Index” offenses because they supposedly serve as an index or indicator of general levels of crime. But in addition to these seven or eight crimes (depending on whether you count arson), cities also keep statistics on Part II crimes. Here’s a page from the Phoenix Police Department report.

(Click on the image for a larger view. Or go here for the original.)

The Times couldn’t find anyone at the NYPD to justify the policy. The story does quote a City Council member who was trying to force the issue. “They basically said the public can’t handle this information.” (Apparently Jack Nicholson was on duty when she asked.)

I myself don’t know what to make of Part II numbers. Some of these less serious crimes are important, not for any direct harm that they cause but for their impact on people’s general sense of fear or safety. That feeling is not much related to rates of serious crime (murder, robbery, car theft, etc.). These crimes usually occur where few people can see them. Our sense of safety is far more affected by visible but less serious crime and even things that are not crimes. Abandoned cars, run-down buildings, street prostitutes, drug dealers, and gangs – we read these as signs of crime. These are the true index offenses – they are our indicator of how safe a neighborhood is.

The trouble is that statistics on these offenses are much more driven by what the police do than by what the offenders do. An increase in drug offenses on the books probably means that the police have decided to crack down on that crime. Look at the Phoenix data. Has there been virtually no illegal gambling in Phoenix in the last decade? Did DUIs really double from 2006 to 2008?

Cracking down on these signs of crime is the whole idea behind the “broken windows” approach. In its original version, the idea was that if the police got tough on “disorder” and “quality of life” offenses, more serious crimes would also decrease. I haven’t kept up with the research on this, but my guess is that “broken windows” enforcement has at best a modest impact on crime, but it goes a long way towards making people feel safer.


* Recently, some researchers have raised doubts about the accuracy of the NYPD’s statistics. See previous posts here and here.