The Crime Drop – a Personal View

November 7, 2015
Posted by Jay Livingston

With all the talk about a “Ferguson Effect” and crime on the rise (both disputed by the Obama administration), I had a personal reminder of how far we’ve come since the bad old days when crime rates were much higher. I should start by saying that I live between Needle Park and “Death Wish.”

(Click on an image for a slightly larger view.)

 In the 1971 film “The Panic in Needle Park,” Al Pacino is a junkie hanging out with other junkies in what is and was officially known as Verdi Square. 

In the 1974 film “Death Wish,” Charles Bronson lives in an apartment building at Riverside Dr. and 75th St. It is in that apartment that vicious criminals break in, beat his wife savagely (she soon dies) and rape his daughter (she becomes catatonic.). Bronson becomes a vigilante, scoring his first kill when a mugger attacks him in Riverside Park.*

In the 1980s, my car was broken into twice (I park on the street). The bad guys smashed the window and checked the glove compartment for anything valuable. Car radios were often taken but mine never was. Car theft was rampant. One evening I saw a man standing next to a spot where only a couple hours earlier he had parked his car. Now it was gone. Word was to avoid Riverside Drive. Cars parked there were more likely targets.

That was then.  The crime I was a victim of – breaking into a car and stealing stuff – is classified as “theft” or “larceny” for purposes of crime statistics.

(The data is for New York State – I couldn’t quickly find NYC data –  but since the City accounts for more than half the crime, this graph reflects the actual trend. If anything, the real drop in NYC was greater than what the state data shows.)

This week I was reminded of those days when I would see shattered glass on the street – evidence of car break-ins. Last weekend, my son borrowed the car, and when he returned, he found a parking spot right across from Charles Bronson’s “Death Wish” apartment building (see the map above). I didn’t need the car, so it wasn’t till Friday that I went to move it and discovered that he had left the passenger-side window half open.

Fearing the worst, I quickly checked the glove compartment. Everything was there – maps, cell phone charger. Ditto the trunk – beach chairs, bike rack. I sniffed the car for signs that a homeless person might have camped there, but no. In five days, the only intruders were a few leaves that had blown in.

Things change, and sometimes for the better.

As for Needle Park, this is what it looks like today.

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* The park scene is shot 15 blocks uptown from his apartment, mostly because of the photogenic stone stairway down to the park.

What’s Up Doc? (or What’s Uptalk?)

November 4, 2015
Posted by Jay Livingston

What’s up with Matthew Yglesias and uptalk?

On The Weeds, the new podcast from Vox, Matt Yglesias, Ezra Klein, and Sarah Kliff talk politics and policy for an hour or more. The talk is often informed by research and data even to the point of wonkitude (anyone for Consumer Price Index vs. Chained Consumer Price Index?). But what struck me on listening for the first time was not the content. It was Yglesias’s uptalk or upspeak. Here he is discussing gerrymandering and the drawing of Congressional district lines.


(transcript)

Because what the Democratic incumbents had been doing?
they’d been doubling down on safety for themselves?
and the independent commission forced the Democratic incumbents?
to take on districts that were a little bit riskier?
I mean still D-leaning?
because it’s California?
But so they picked seats up.

When I read the transcript by itself – no audio – I hear it without the rising inflections mid-sentence.

Here’s another example just few moments a later.



(transcript)

I mean, I think the Canadian case is interesting because one subtle psychological thing they do?
is the districts have to have names?
rather than numbers?
and so that that encourages, I think, subtly but really an idea of community coherence?
because you get districts with names like Edmonton Centre.

I think that what they do there
with that naming?
with that sort of principle? right
that the district should represent a place,
and the place should be something you can give a name to?
because it should have some kind of tangible relationship?
I think that lines up very well with the way most people think it should be done?
Y’know I think it’s like authentic to the values?
of the American people?
I also think it’s a little bit dumb?
because it allows for a ton of disproportionality?
And actually Canadian elections?
have awful disproportionality?
in part because they have multiple parties?
running in these seats?

Where did Yglesias acquire this inflection? Possibly it’s generational, and younger ears hear nothing noteworthy in Yglesias’s speech. Yglesias is under 40. I am well over 40. But the other two podcasters, Klein and Kliff, are younger than Yglesias but are not uptalkers. Or is it regional? I had thought that uptalk had started in California in the 1970s. But Yglesias grew up in New York city in the 1980s and has remained on the East Coast.

What is the meaning of these rising intonations? They don’t suggest uncertainty, nor do they seem to be asking “are you with me on this?” Some linguists see them as ways of saying, “I’m not finished with this sentence, so don’t interrupt me.” That’s one reason uptalk is more prevalent among women – they want to forestall interruptions from men. 

I’m not complaining (uptalk – not that there’s anything wrong with that). The time for handwringing over uptalk as the end of civilization as we know it has come and gone. I’m just curious as to why Ezra Klein, the Californian, speaks with barely a trace of uptalk, and Matthew Yglesias, the New Yorker, saturates his speech with it.

Which Side Are You On?

October 29, 2015
Posted by Jay Livingston

When it comes to rule-breakers and rule enforcers, which side you are on seems to depend on the rule-breaker and the rule.

National Review had a predictable response to the video of a school officer throwing a seated girl to the floor. Most of the response when the video went viral was revulsion. But not at National Review. David French (here) said it clearly:

I keep coming to the same conclusion: This is what happens when a person resists a lawful order from a police officer to move. The arrested student at Spring Valley High School should have left her seat when her teacher demanded that she leave. She should have left when the administrator made the same demand. She should have left when Fields made his first, polite requests. She had no right to stay. She had no right to end classroom instruction with her defiance. Fields was right to move her, and he did so without hurting her. The fact that the incident didn’t look good on camera doesn’t make his actions wrong.

This has been the general response on the right to nearly all the recently publicized incidents of the police use of force. If law enforcement tells you to do something, and then you don’t do it, it’s OK for the officer to use force, and if you get hurt or killed, it’s your fault for not complying, even if you haven’t committed an offense.

That’s the general response. There are exceptions, notably Cliven Bundy. In case you’d forgotten, Bundy is the Nevada cattle rancher who was basically stealing – using federal lands for grazing his cattle and refusing to pay the fees.  He’d been stiffing the United States this way for many years. When the Federales finally arrested him and rounded up his cattle, a group of his well armed supporters challenged the feds. Rather than do what law enforcers in other publicized accounts do when challenged by someone with a gun – shoot to kill –  the Federal rangers negotiated.

Bundy was clearly breaking the law. Legally, as even his supporters acknowledged, he didn’t have a leg to stand on. So the view from the right must have been that he should do what law enforcement said. But no. 

Here is National Review’s Kevin Williamson:

This is best understood not as a legal proceeding but as an act of civil disobedience. . . As a legal question Mr. Bundy is legless. But that is largely beside the point.

What happened to “This is what happens when a person resists a lawful order”? The law is now “beside the point.” To Williamson, Bundy is a “dissident,” one in the tradition of Ghandi, Thoreau, and fugitive slaves.

Not all dissidents are content to submit to what we, in the Age of Obama, still insist on quaintly calling “the rule of law.” Every fugitive slave, and every one of the sainted men and women who harbored and enabled them, was a law-breaker, and who can blame them if none was content to submit to what passed for justice among the slavers?

(The equation with fugitive slaves became something of an embarrassment later when Bundy opined that those slaves were better off as slaves than are Black people today who get government subsidies. Needless to say, Bundy did not notice that the very thing he was demanding for himself was a government handout – free grazing on government lands.)

The high school girl refused the teacher’s request that she give up her cell phone and then defied an order from the teacher and an administrator to leave the classroom.  Cliven Bundy’s supporters “threatened government employees and officials, pointed firearms at law enforcement officers, harassed the press, called in bomb scares to local businesses, set up roadblocks on public roads, and formed lists (complete with photos and home addresses) of their perceived enemies.” [Forbes]

A Black schoolgirl thrown to the floor by a weightlifting cop twice her size — cop right, rule-breaker wrong. A rural White man with White male supporters threatening Federal law enforcers — cops wrong, rule-breakers right.

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* More than one video has since emerged. This one – part of a newscast– clearly shows the officer flipping the girl, still in her chair/desk, backward onto the floor and then dragging her out of the chair and across the floor.

Reporting Risk

October 27, 2015
Posted by Jay Livingston

Thoughts of Mrs. S, my sister-in-law’s mother, rarely cross my mind. My brother’s wedding was the only time I ever met her. But as I read yesterday’s headlines about bacon, sausage, hot dogs, etc.  – “Processed Meat Causes Cancer” – I recalled the one salient fact about her that I knew: For lunch every day of her adult life, Mrs. S ate a hot dog. She died at age 86, having outlived most women in her cohort.

I’m using anecdotal evidence here not to refute the scientific reporting from the International Agency for Cancer Research and W.H.O. I’m not James Inhofe using a snowball in late February to demonstrate that global warming is a hoax. But those headlines do raise the problem of how to report scientific findings.

To many people, the word “cause” implies a nearly certain relationship. Gravity causes the apple to fall. Every time. The stronger the gravitational force, the harder they fall. So “Hot dogs cause cancer” means that if you eat hot dogs, you’ll get cancer. The more hot dogs you eat, the sooner and more severe the cancer.

Some headlines used the more cautious “linked to” instead of “cause.” But that too gets it wrong. It suggests that we have mere correlation with no sure cause.

The accurate headlines talked about risk. Or as the New York Times cautiously put it, “Meat Is Linked to Higher Cancer Risk.”

(Click on the image for a larger and perhaps crisper view of the bacon.)

But what is risk?  The way I explain it to intro students early in the semester is this: Risk is a way of talking about the individual as though she were a lot of people. The research shows that eating a lot of processed food increases the risk of cancer by about 18%. The overall risk of colorectal cancer in the US is about 50 per 1000. That is, if there were 1000 of you, 50 of would get cancer. Now if those thousand yous scarfed down the bacon and hot dogs, 59 yous out of the 1000 would get cancer. Your raised your risk 5rom 50 to 59 per 1000, or from 5.0% to 5.1%

Of course there’s only one of you. Either you get cancer or you don’t. You don’t get fifty one-thousandths of cancer or fifty-nine one-thousandths of cancer.

The headlines were also misleading in another way. The IARC report was not about a newly discovered increase in risk. It was about certainty. Their review of the existing research led them to put processed meats in their highest category of certainty: “causes cancer.” Non-processed red meat was in the next category: “probably causes cancer.” That increased risk for processed meats – from 5.0% to 5.1% – may have been small relative to other things you might do, like smoking cigarettes or working with asbestos, but the IARC was now sure that sausage and bacon caused that risk to increase.    

Maybe the headline should have been:      

Scientists Now Sure That Processed Meats
Cause a Small Increase in the Risk of Cancer

As for Mrs. S, she died of lung cancer. It was the cigarettes* that finally did her in, not the hot dogs – or the Ho Hos, brownies, and chocolate candy that usually followed.

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* Cigarettes have long been in the category of causes that we’re certain about. The raising of  processed meats to that same category led some news sources to the utterly wrong interpretation.
“Just two rashers of bacon a day raises your risk of cancer: Health chiefs put processed meat at same level as cigarettes” said the Daily Mail

The Guardian was worse: “Processed meats rank alongside smoking as cancer causes – WHO”

Technically defensible but totally misleading.
 
Other headlines around the Internet were just plain wrong. To cite one of many,
“World Health Organization: Bacon, sausage as bad a cigarettes” WRAL.com (a Raleigh, NC radio station).

Nonsense. Cigarettes are far more harmful. They increase the risk of lung cancer not by 18% but by 2500%.