I'd bet that Maine's high clearance rate is skewed by the totally insane number of murders in Cabot Cove and the efforts of Jessica Fletcher to solve them.
I usually hesitate to dismiss people's arguments out of hand, but are we taking people like Bouie too seriously here? At this point, it seems like there's just a segment of the progressive wing whose political agenda is basically "tear down lots of systems." Not that their intentions are bad-- I think they genuinely want to improve lives. But they just won't be happy if you try to help people in a way that doesn't obliterate existing systems.
My experience in reading stuff online is that this specific breed of progressives rarely engage with any arguments based on statistical data/published studies that go against their political objectives. They just have a different epistemology in which that data is trumped by some sort of collective narrative. On the other hand, there are probably tons of left-leaning people (like me) who find this epistemology ridiculous, but a lot of these people probably also don't buy into the "tear systems down" view of the world.
So my question is who's the marginal person that we're trying to persuade here? A lot of people who would buy into data-based evidence maybe don't need too much convincing anyway, whereas the people who need to be convinced won't believe the data. I'd love to see MY's take on the competing types of epistemology that we now have on the left wing. (The right wing, of course, is completely gone on this front.)
This post is a mix of some really great ideas, and one really bad solution. When I read it in my email and clicked on the comment box, the first thing I thought was I wonder what is Graham going to have to say. If anyone doesn’t subscribe to a sub stack, they need to go do it right now.
You can tell what sort of cop shows that Matt watches. He is watching NCIS and not “The Rookie” or even CSI when it comes to how Detectives actually solve crimes.
I know a few police officers and detectives. One of the benefits of being a veteran and relatively conservative.
Identifying the criminal is more based on core police knowledge. Knowing the players. It’s rarely a mystery who did it. Gang banger one was shot in the driveway. Well, it was probably gang banger 2 since that was the one Gamgbanger 1 shot at last weekend. Or at least his friend. Because Group A has been moving in on Group Bs corner.
It doesn’t involve forensics or social psychology. Besides, the forensics are performed by technicians not police officers anyway.
All that forensics stuff is what you need to convict somebody, not necessarily solve the crime.
I’m going to guess, that a large number of unsolved murders, or actually solved, or at least the police have a suspicion. There’s just no evidence. No witnesses. The gun has been hidden. No ballistics. Even the victims injured friend won’t rat shooter out.
But this basically just duplicates what Graham said below as far as how bad idea it is to have a dual track system system.
Patrolling and detecting are really just complementary skills, with one leading to the other. Both do something.
Officers and enlisted are not like this at all. First of all, officers don’t actually do anything, with the exception of pilots..They’re basically management, with just enough training to be familiar with the people they’re leading. A more apt comparison would be Jr enlisted verse senior enlisted (privates vs sergeants)
Having said all that, Matt is pretty much spot on on almost all the other subjects. I wasn’t aware about the $950 shoplifting misdemeanor limit in California, but that makes sense. As someone who generally looks down on San Francisco and their self-made problems, all I can do is shrug. Elections have consequences.
Anyway, Matt Yglesias, if you are reading this… You really should read Graham’s substack. I know you’re a busy guy, but you’ve actually got some really smart people in your comments. I am not one of them.
And one antidote .I grew up in the mid cities of Los Angeles county. Downey specifically. Back then, and even then today, Downey was always a more nicer / upscale city compared to its bordering cities. We were surrounded by Paramount, Compton, Southgate, Bell Gardens, pico Rivera, Bellflower, and Santa Fe Springs. This was back in the 80s, and pretty much every one of those cities I listed had gangs. Downey had none. To get to the point, Besides for Johnny broilers and the old Lockheed plant, Downey was famous in the area for having really dick cops. The city was small enough that if you were driving through there or hanging out and you didn’t belong, the Downey cops would definitely pull you over if you looked the least bit suspicious.
30 years later, Downey is actually still pretty nice. It’s nickname now, is the Mexican Beverly Hills. That’s where a lot of successful Latinos have settled. And, I have heard that but from a friend who still lives there, that the cops still have a reputation for being dicks.
Anyway, I’m getting ready to go to Argentina for work. Yes, I know it’s officially closed, but it’s open for critical work, so I got a special visa. Hope everyone has a great day.
Once again, forgive any grammatical errors, I am dictating this on my phone while still laying in bed, and my eyes suck.
" I wasn’t aware about the $950 shoplifting misdemeanor limit in California, but that makes sense. As someone who generally looks down on San Francisco and their self-made problems, all I can do is shrug. Elections have consequences."
What's the misdemeanor limit in your state? I'll give you a head start - it's $2500 in Texas and $1000 in Wyoming.
I think all in all Matt’s actually getting pretty beat up on this post. His to pass for cops saying there’s a way worse mistake. But having kids, turns all of us into conservatives… Even Matt
The differential clearance rates between various cities are interesting, but I want to see them cross-checked against false conviction rates.
We know that police departments, like other bureaucracies, can always respond to numerical goals with malicious compliance. You, the reformer, think you have told them to convict more murderers. They, the bureaucracy, hear that you have incentivized the production of more murder-convictions, whether they get the right guy or not.
There's got to be follow-up, to make sure that the departments and prosecutors are not juking the stats. And the exoneration of innocent convicts has to lead to consequences for the people who put them away, if they cut any corners.
Otherwise, you are simply replacing the old false negatives (uncleared cases) with a boatload of false positives (frame-ups).
Granted, any diagnostic system will make some errors in both directions, and there's got to be an acceptable rate of each. The best departments are probably going to miss some convictions, but the worst will be full of passionate intensity to meet the new quotas.
So, I like the proposal for reform. And reformers need to anticipate unintended consequences.
I see your general point, but matching the clearance rate against false convictions doesn't tell you anything meaningful. One is telling you whether the police made an arrest, while the other indicates whether the prosecutor prosecuted the wrong guy. It doesn't mean the police aren't doing their job--which is to develop the probable cause necessary to make the arrest--if it turns out later that the prosecutor is unable to prove the case beyond a reasonable doubt.
There's also the issue that "proving" a false conviction is an affirmative effort requiring significant investment and resources. So the false conviction "rate" is likely a weak correlate with the actual false positive rate that may exist.
Separately, one question I actually have about clearance rates is how they account for the possibilities of different/multiple suspects being arrested--when is the case "cleared"?
How exactly do you identify "false convictions?" Most of the ones I've heard of involved performing newly available tests on forensic evidence. You also have deathbed confessions of the real perp, but those take decades.
You've made a good start on answering your own question: new evidence, new testimony are both useful.
Sometimes you can also investigate the work of particular bad actors. If we know that a cop perjured himself in these two cases, then it is worth seeing if anyone else was put away on his word.
'If we know that a cop perjured himself in these two cases'
If we know that cop perjured himself in two cases, they should be doing hard time in gen pop in at least a medium security prison for 5-10 years. The solution to police misconduct is the same as to criminal misconduct- arrest the bad guys, swift & severe consequences, make an example out of them. It's also the one reform that police unions can't squirm their way out of. No union contract can forbid arrest & prosecution.... Law and order, I say
which is all fine and good, but you are unlikely to ever identify the majority of false convictions. indeed, finding false convictions could be an indication of good police and prosecutors keeping an open mind rather than covering their asses. i am very reluctant to judge jurisdictions by the number of false convictions identified, there should be consequences for individuals who perjure themselves of fabricate evidence
I know one of the things that I think Radley Balko has talked about is that DNA evidence provided a massive opportunity to look at how false convictions happened and reform things - basically "new way of checking old evidence that wasn't thought possible before" shows up. That sort of thing should be used heavily to try to find areas where we've been doing the wrong thing (like "bite mark matching" which are apparently pretty much bunk) and address them.
This also should be cross-checked against crime rates for the area. Make sure it's working not just in convicting murders — which is very important — but also in reducing crime.
Ever since it was invented in Victorian England, the modern police force was always designed as a blue collar career. The level of training is sometimes minimal. The FBI which has "investigation" right in its name only hires from people with both police experience and college degrees. Solving crimes is way more work than mere patrolling and breaking up bar fights. As with other public sector jobs, you get what you pay for. Sometimes less.
You might flip on over to the Graham Factor (it's a free substack, y'all) and read this week's guest columns before you start talking about how easy the job of patrol is.
The data that I want to see is the extent to which murders are being committed by people who have already had significant, recent contact with the criminal justice system - like, they're awaiting trial on a gun possession or assault charge, or they were released quickly after a previous carjacking. In DC at least, this seems like a thing -- and not one that's a function of police quality, but rather of decisions around bail, minors, and prosecution.
It’s easier to solve a crime if you have detailed intelligence files on the area, including on people who have not committed any crimes themselves. It’s easier to solve a crime if there’s a lot of video footage of the area where the crime was committed. It’s easier to solve a crime if people can be compelled to cooperate with investigators, and if it is considered a crime to lie to investigators.
There are downsides to these things as well. simply pouring money into manpower or OT without improving the tools available to investigators has its own problems—mainly encouraging a parade of interrogations fishing for someone who happens to be in a fragile enough state that they will give a weak confession and generate a clearance.
All a long winded way of saying that the main reason we don’t have effective investigators is that we are not super comfortable with effective investigators. We actually have a lot of roadblocks to investigation built into the foundation of our legal system. They are supposed to safeguard our ‘freedom’ or some such.
Matt Y seems to have spent a lot of time reading research and data, but near zero time talking to actual police officers. He comes across as very confident in his opinions on a subject that he only understand superficially.
Graham's posted the following: "To be honest, I don't put a lot of stock in city-to-city comparisons of clearance rates. "Clearance" does not include just arrests. It also includes "clearance by exception." If this is the a valid point of view on clearance, then it undermines the main building block of MY's argument.
There's 3 or 4 comments below where people "want to see the data". My professional job title is "data scientist"; I want to see the data, too. But it drives me crazy when people skip straight to seeing the data without doing the work on understanding what the data actually represents. Talking to subject matter experts, especially those who actually created the data set, is a crucial first step, and it feels like MY isn't doing that when it comes to policing.
This is bogus spitballing about "the data". MY's point is that there is variation in the data around clearance rates, and we can learn from that. That's a pretty banal point that in general wouldn't even need examples. Turns out if you look at examples - there's variation!
It would not be shocking to learn that there is variance around any natural process. What would be shocking is to learn that in fact clearance rates are pretty consistent. You want to prove that underlying the differences between Wisconsin and Maine are due to "clearance by exception" - go for it. But the onus is on you.
No the onus isn't fully on one side or the other. If you're going to pull up data to argue that some police departments are vastly more effective than others then it's fair to ask if you've done enough work verifying that data.
My take is that Yglesias could do some more due diligence in this area, because unlike in his transport / Amtrak pieces, he seems to have spent very little time talking to actual police commanders or non-academic law enforcement experts.
I agree, though, that even without seeing the data there are likely to be real variations in clearance rates. But I do need either good data, or reliable subject matter experts, to know which specific departments should be emulated and which should be improved. I'm not convinced that Maine's clearance rate is clear evidence of superior policing just because a housing policy / transportation policy writer told me so.
I *know* what the data represents for what I'm looking for, because I read the newspaper - it represents a particular set of policies we've adopted toward bail and minors and some decisions made by our prosecutors. The reason I want to see the data is because I don't know what the *scale* of the effect of these decisions actually is. And when I see "I want to see the data", I mean "I would like for someone to put together the data", since I don't believe what I'm asking for actually exists, at which point I would also be happy to hear from whoever put it together.
Sorry - it probably reads like I'm calling you or others out for wanting data. Like I said - I also want to see the data!
I just also want the data validated by people much closer to it before I read arguments built on top of the data.
In other words if someone put together national statistics on people charged with murder and their contact with law enforcement, I'd also want some people to try to pick that data apart and find holes or flaws in it. Is it entered in a consistant way across jurisdictions? Are we missing regions or time periods in the reporting? Who is actually linking the data from trials to police reports, and how is that link being done?
I'd be really careful about drawing conclusions until I had answers to those questions. And collecting opinions from people involved in the process would be just as important as getting the data in the first place. I didn't come away from MY's article feeling like he had done much of those things.
One of the things I noticed back when everyone was worrying about the valorization of police in tv shows, is that almost all tv and movie cops are detectives. Other than like the show Blue Bloods. But, detectives are like, what 5% of cops?
I remember a few years ago with the popularity of the show Bones, there were a bunch of students in college hoping to be forensic anthropologists, who were disappointed to find out the were, like, only a few people with that job in the entire state. But if we could create a college major in criminology that focused on investigations, that actually had good career outcomes, I'm sure there'd be many students interested in it.
I think this goes back to severity vs certainty. The issue with San Francisco is not that shoplifting isn't a felony, its that its not prosecuted. A felony just mean a much heavier penalty.
If you made shoplifting a class B misdemeanor, but 80% of those who did it were caught, convicted, and served 6 months in jail, I think shoplifting would drop dramatically. You don't need to put people away for 10 years for stealing an iphone. Locking them up for 3-6 months would make it bad enough that most people wouldn't do it. On the other hand, if the DA decides not to prosecute shoplifting, it doesn't matter if its a felony or misdemeanor, there won't be any penalty for doing it.
I’m sure there is, but below $250 is a category with much less cool stuff to steal than below $950. Most states will have a cutoff like this but $950 sounds high.
Below $250 you’re limited to things like clothing, shoes, liquor, some computer monitors, phone accessories, some car parts/tires, small home appliances, etc. Some of that is cool but the resale value may not be worth the effort.
Below $950? Laptops, TVs, car tires, bikes, speakers, smartphones, water heaters, fancy shop tools, generators, etc, all in addition to the below-$250 stuff.
So, below $950 the juice could be worth the squeeze for criminals at a large scale.
I'm going to assume most people have no idea what their state's misdemeanor theft cutoff is and when they read that California increased it they figure it must be some crazy liberal idea. Not that CA moved closer to TX and WY.
I'm reading that statement as Prop 47 was a California law that increased crime - how would Texas and Wyoming passing a Prop 47 be expected to decrease crime then? What am I missing here?
If Texas passed Prop 47 it would dramatically increase the penalty for theft. That people haven’t noticed that TX’s penalty’s for theft are extremely lax compared to CA makes me think there is more to this story.
I don't know who to attribute this quote to, but Yuval Noah Harari says it often in interviews ... "Things are better than ever before. Things are still quite bad. Things can get much worse."
So much about this policing debate seems to be anchored to just one of these three states.
So does proactive policing work? It seems yes. Are there downstream consequences for the "hot spot" communities? Seems plausible although likely more a set of near-term vs. long-term tradeoffs. Could radical change to the structure and goals of existing police departments lead to near-term disruption and worsening conditions (i.e., what Matt proposes)? Also seems likely. Does this make me more of an incrementalist? Yes.
Rape clearance rates are much lower than murder clearance rates. In 2019, only 136 men began Georgia prison sentences for rape. Conversely, about 70,600 girls are born every year in Georgia. This leaves two possibilities: 1) only 0.2% of women are raped during their lifetimes or 2) the clearance rate sucks.
Many rapes go unreported, but the authorities do an abysmal job with the rapes that are reported. Only 1/3 of reported rapes are prosecuted, and only 1/6 of prosecuted rapes are prosecuted end in conviction. Rape is a difficult crime to prosecute because it typically occurs between acquaintances, so there is rarely forced entry or other circumstantial evidence corroborating the victim. It's usually just a swearing contest.
I'm not sure how much good additional detectives would do here. A swearing contest is just a swearing contest and, in many cases, investigation just can't shed much light on what happened in private. The solution is more prosecutions and the problem is the career incentives of prosecutors. Prosecutors don't want to bring big cases that are hard to win. Furthermore, when a crime carries a long sentence, jurors will hold prosecutors to a very high standard and indulge fairly small doubts about guilt. I strongly believe that the prosecution of acquaintance rape should be more like the prosecution of drunk driving: more prosecutions, lower penalties. There should be no shame in losing a rape trial. If more rapes are reported repeat assailants will have long rap sheets. Former victims can testify as "similar transactions" witnesses in Georgia even if no conviction occurred. If a critical mass of women come forward and have their voices heard, the repeat offenders will be ferreted out and convictions will increase.
Right now, the median sentence for rape is zero years in prison. Pursuing one or two-year sentences plus registration as a sex offender would be a vast improvement.
We could do a *lot* to clear the shameful lack of rape convictions simply by running DNA tests on the backlog of rape kits lying around evidence rooms.
now take it a step further. why do take kits go untested when crime labs routinely analyze drug samples in low level drug cases and even blood samples in dui cases? it’s not just a resource constraint. prosecutors hate bringing rape prosecutions.
A positive drug sample or blood test is enough to convict. A positive rape kit just proves that intercourse occurred. It doesn't prove lack of consent.
Sure, but a pattern of many positive rape kits from many jurisdictions with one guy's DNA and many women alleging rape should do a lot to corroborate their testimony.
I doubt that a judge is going to allow a bunch of other allegations in a trial, so that info is probably not going to help. That's what the judge is there to do- referee the trial & not allow some 'evidence' as prejudicial
Yes, and prosecutors in turn say that they would be more willing to bring them if they could get jurors to convict. The root problem is societal attitudes towards rape and women's autonomy -- even the prosecutors' reluctance is to some extent downstream from that.
I have a hard time believing "societal attitudes" are solicitous of rape. Most men and virtually all women are anti-rape. The issue is, most men are also understandably afraid of being falsely accused. Most sexual relationships end awkwardly. Any man who has sex risks being accused of rape. There really is no way of knowing with great certainty what happened during an alleged acquaintance rape. If there is forced entry or brutal injuries or an eye or ear witness, its possible to be pretty sure what happened. But many instances are "he said she said." in which case the woman is probably telling the truth, the man is probably a rapist, but its really hard to know for sure.
Lowering the stakes would permit more prosecutions to be brought.
Interesting post but I did want to raise one question about the recommendation to do more benchmarking of police departments, or as Matt puts it, "be more like this other department over here."
Having dealt with lots of crappy data, I do wonder about the wide range in clearing murder cases across cities, states, etc. that Matt cites. Perhaps these data reported to the UCR are perfectly reliable, but hmm. . . After all, as far as I know, there's no uniform rigorous way of defining and reporting case clearance across police jurisdictions, and it wouldn't surprise me if the varying ways departments do it lead to incommensurate results across jurisdictions. (This is touched on a bit in the article on "Clearance Rates and Criminal Investigations" in the Encyclopedia of Political Science (https://books.google.com/books?id=HIE_zF1Rv7MC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false vol 1, starting at page 182).
Matt cites the Murder Accountability Project and presumably those people know what they're doing. But when I look at their post "Do Most Murders Go Unsolved in Your Town?" (http://www.murderdata.org/) and I see a chart of the trendline for percentage of major police departments that fail to clear most homicides. For the late 1960s, the percentage of such departments is effectively zero and then it increases pretty much in a straight line to around 75% currently. Really? Police departments have gotten that much worse at solving murders? Or are the data across time not that reliable?
No knock on these people, but data reliability and comparability are tough nuts to crack, so the reader always has to approach some things with at least a smidgen of skepticism.
I'd bet that Maine's high clearance rate is skewed by the totally insane number of murders in Cabot Cove and the efforts of Jessica Fletcher to solve them.
I was going to say that they’ve fallen off a bit according to this film: https://youtu.be/uWM1U_kd0rE
I usually hesitate to dismiss people's arguments out of hand, but are we taking people like Bouie too seriously here? At this point, it seems like there's just a segment of the progressive wing whose political agenda is basically "tear down lots of systems." Not that their intentions are bad-- I think they genuinely want to improve lives. But they just won't be happy if you try to help people in a way that doesn't obliterate existing systems.
My experience in reading stuff online is that this specific breed of progressives rarely engage with any arguments based on statistical data/published studies that go against their political objectives. They just have a different epistemology in which that data is trumped by some sort of collective narrative. On the other hand, there are probably tons of left-leaning people (like me) who find this epistemology ridiculous, but a lot of these people probably also don't buy into the "tear systems down" view of the world.
So my question is who's the marginal person that we're trying to persuade here? A lot of people who would buy into data-based evidence maybe don't need too much convincing anyway, whereas the people who need to be convinced won't believe the data. I'd love to see MY's take on the competing types of epistemology that we now have on the left wing. (The right wing, of course, is completely gone on this front.)
Bouie is stuck in his 1890's history and cannot or will not see the reality of 2021.
This post is a mix of some really great ideas, and one really bad solution. When I read it in my email and clicked on the comment box, the first thing I thought was I wonder what is Graham going to have to say. If anyone doesn’t subscribe to a sub stack, they need to go do it right now.
You can tell what sort of cop shows that Matt watches. He is watching NCIS and not “The Rookie” or even CSI when it comes to how Detectives actually solve crimes.
I know a few police officers and detectives. One of the benefits of being a veteran and relatively conservative.
Identifying the criminal is more based on core police knowledge. Knowing the players. It’s rarely a mystery who did it. Gang banger one was shot in the driveway. Well, it was probably gang banger 2 since that was the one Gamgbanger 1 shot at last weekend. Or at least his friend. Because Group A has been moving in on Group Bs corner.
It doesn’t involve forensics or social psychology. Besides, the forensics are performed by technicians not police officers anyway.
All that forensics stuff is what you need to convict somebody, not necessarily solve the crime.
I’m going to guess, that a large number of unsolved murders, or actually solved, or at least the police have a suspicion. There’s just no evidence. No witnesses. The gun has been hidden. No ballistics. Even the victims injured friend won’t rat shooter out.
But this basically just duplicates what Graham said below as far as how bad idea it is to have a dual track system system.
Patrolling and detecting are really just complementary skills, with one leading to the other. Both do something.
Officers and enlisted are not like this at all. First of all, officers don’t actually do anything, with the exception of pilots..They’re basically management, with just enough training to be familiar with the people they’re leading. A more apt comparison would be Jr enlisted verse senior enlisted (privates vs sergeants)
Having said all that, Matt is pretty much spot on on almost all the other subjects. I wasn’t aware about the $950 shoplifting misdemeanor limit in California, but that makes sense. As someone who generally looks down on San Francisco and their self-made problems, all I can do is shrug. Elections have consequences.
Anyway, Matt Yglesias, if you are reading this… You really should read Graham’s substack. I know you’re a busy guy, but you’ve actually got some really smart people in your comments. I am not one of them.
And one antidote .I grew up in the mid cities of Los Angeles county. Downey specifically. Back then, and even then today, Downey was always a more nicer / upscale city compared to its bordering cities. We were surrounded by Paramount, Compton, Southgate, Bell Gardens, pico Rivera, Bellflower, and Santa Fe Springs. This was back in the 80s, and pretty much every one of those cities I listed had gangs. Downey had none. To get to the point, Besides for Johnny broilers and the old Lockheed plant, Downey was famous in the area for having really dick cops. The city was small enough that if you were driving through there or hanging out and you didn’t belong, the Downey cops would definitely pull you over if you looked the least bit suspicious.
30 years later, Downey is actually still pretty nice. It’s nickname now, is the Mexican Beverly Hills. That’s where a lot of successful Latinos have settled. And, I have heard that but from a friend who still lives there, that the cops still have a reputation for being dicks.
Anyway, I’m getting ready to go to Argentina for work. Yes, I know it’s officially closed, but it’s open for critical work, so I got a special visa. Hope everyone has a great day.
Once again, forgive any grammatical errors, I am dictating this on my phone while still laying in bed, and my eyes suck.
" I wasn’t aware about the $950 shoplifting misdemeanor limit in California, but that makes sense. As someone who generally looks down on San Francisco and their self-made problems, all I can do is shrug. Elections have consequences."
What's the misdemeanor limit in your state? I'll give you a head start - it's $2500 in Texas and $1000 in Wyoming.
Good point. I just checked. 1000 in Idaho. I guess the difference is prosecuting.
In Idaho, misdemeanor shoplifting is punishable by up to one year in jail.
Looks like California is the same.
So it looks like the whole difference is how the district attorney decides to prosecute.
In which case, elections have consequences.
But once again, good point out, I thank you for educating me.
https://www.sfexaminer.com/news/data-shows-chesa-boudin-prosecutes-fewer-shoplifters-than-predecessor/
That very well might be the case. That doesn’t change the fact that many of you fell for Matt’s false right wing taking point without question. :-)
I think all in all Matt’s actually getting pretty beat up on this post. His to pass for cops saying there’s a way worse mistake. But having kids, turns all of us into conservatives… Even Matt
The differential clearance rates between various cities are interesting, but I want to see them cross-checked against false conviction rates.
We know that police departments, like other bureaucracies, can always respond to numerical goals with malicious compliance. You, the reformer, think you have told them to convict more murderers. They, the bureaucracy, hear that you have incentivized the production of more murder-convictions, whether they get the right guy or not.
There's got to be follow-up, to make sure that the departments and prosecutors are not juking the stats. And the exoneration of innocent convicts has to lead to consequences for the people who put them away, if they cut any corners.
Otherwise, you are simply replacing the old false negatives (uncleared cases) with a boatload of false positives (frame-ups).
Granted, any diagnostic system will make some errors in both directions, and there's got to be an acceptable rate of each. The best departments are probably going to miss some convictions, but the worst will be full of passionate intensity to meet the new quotas.
So, I like the proposal for reform. And reformers need to anticipate unintended consequences.
I see your general point, but matching the clearance rate against false convictions doesn't tell you anything meaningful. One is telling you whether the police made an arrest, while the other indicates whether the prosecutor prosecuted the wrong guy. It doesn't mean the police aren't doing their job--which is to develop the probable cause necessary to make the arrest--if it turns out later that the prosecutor is unable to prove the case beyond a reasonable doubt.
There's also the issue that "proving" a false conviction is an affirmative effort requiring significant investment and resources. So the false conviction "rate" is likely a weak correlate with the actual false positive rate that may exist.
Separately, one question I actually have about clearance rates is how they account for the possibilities of different/multiple suspects being arrested--when is the case "cleared"?
How exactly do you identify "false convictions?" Most of the ones I've heard of involved performing newly available tests on forensic evidence. You also have deathbed confessions of the real perp, but those take decades.
You've made a good start on answering your own question: new evidence, new testimony are both useful.
Sometimes you can also investigate the work of particular bad actors. If we know that a cop perjured himself in these two cases, then it is worth seeing if anyone else was put away on his word.
'If we know that a cop perjured himself in these two cases'
If we know that cop perjured himself in two cases, they should be doing hard time in gen pop in at least a medium security prison for 5-10 years. The solution to police misconduct is the same as to criminal misconduct- arrest the bad guys, swift & severe consequences, make an example out of them. It's also the one reform that police unions can't squirm their way out of. No union contract can forbid arrest & prosecution.... Law and order, I say
which is all fine and good, but you are unlikely to ever identify the majority of false convictions. indeed, finding false convictions could be an indication of good police and prosecutors keeping an open mind rather than covering their asses. i am very reluctant to judge jurisdictions by the number of false convictions identified, there should be consequences for individuals who perjure themselves of fabricate evidence
I know one of the things that I think Radley Balko has talked about is that DNA evidence provided a massive opportunity to look at how false convictions happened and reform things - basically "new way of checking old evidence that wasn't thought possible before" shows up. That sort of thing should be used heavily to try to find areas where we've been doing the wrong thing (like "bite mark matching" which are apparently pretty much bunk) and address them.
This also should be cross-checked against crime rates for the area. Make sure it's working not just in convicting murders — which is very important — but also in reducing crime.
In general, I think we need more fine-grain studies of individual departments and fewer generalizations about "policing in America."
Ever since it was invented in Victorian England, the modern police force was always designed as a blue collar career. The level of training is sometimes minimal. The FBI which has "investigation" right in its name only hires from people with both police experience and college degrees. Solving crimes is way more work than mere patrolling and breaking up bar fights. As with other public sector jobs, you get what you pay for. Sometimes less.
You might flip on over to the Graham Factor (it's a free substack, y'all) and read this week's guest columns before you start talking about how easy the job of patrol is.
The data that I want to see is the extent to which murders are being committed by people who have already had significant, recent contact with the criminal justice system - like, they're awaiting trial on a gun possession or assault charge, or they were released quickly after a previous carjacking. In DC at least, this seems like a thing -- and not one that's a function of police quality, but rather of decisions around bail, minors, and prosecution.
It’s easier to solve a crime if you have detailed intelligence files on the area, including on people who have not committed any crimes themselves. It’s easier to solve a crime if there’s a lot of video footage of the area where the crime was committed. It’s easier to solve a crime if people can be compelled to cooperate with investigators, and if it is considered a crime to lie to investigators.
There are downsides to these things as well. simply pouring money into manpower or OT without improving the tools available to investigators has its own problems—mainly encouraging a parade of interrogations fishing for someone who happens to be in a fragile enough state that they will give a weak confession and generate a clearance.
All a long winded way of saying that the main reason we don’t have effective investigators is that we are not super comfortable with effective investigators. We actually have a lot of roadblocks to investigation built into the foundation of our legal system. They are supposed to safeguard our ‘freedom’ or some such.
Matt Y seems to have spent a lot of time reading research and data, but near zero time talking to actual police officers. He comes across as very confident in his opinions on a subject that he only understand superficially.
Graham's posted the following: "To be honest, I don't put a lot of stock in city-to-city comparisons of clearance rates. "Clearance" does not include just arrests. It also includes "clearance by exception." If this is the a valid point of view on clearance, then it undermines the main building block of MY's argument.
There's 3 or 4 comments below where people "want to see the data". My professional job title is "data scientist"; I want to see the data, too. But it drives me crazy when people skip straight to seeing the data without doing the work on understanding what the data actually represents. Talking to subject matter experts, especially those who actually created the data set, is a crucial first step, and it feels like MY isn't doing that when it comes to policing.
This is bogus spitballing about "the data". MY's point is that there is variation in the data around clearance rates, and we can learn from that. That's a pretty banal point that in general wouldn't even need examples. Turns out if you look at examples - there's variation!
It would not be shocking to learn that there is variance around any natural process. What would be shocking is to learn that in fact clearance rates are pretty consistent. You want to prove that underlying the differences between Wisconsin and Maine are due to "clearance by exception" - go for it. But the onus is on you.
No the onus isn't fully on one side or the other. If you're going to pull up data to argue that some police departments are vastly more effective than others then it's fair to ask if you've done enough work verifying that data.
My take is that Yglesias could do some more due diligence in this area, because unlike in his transport / Amtrak pieces, he seems to have spent very little time talking to actual police commanders or non-academic law enforcement experts.
I agree, though, that even without seeing the data there are likely to be real variations in clearance rates. But I do need either good data, or reliable subject matter experts, to know which specific departments should be emulated and which should be improved. I'm not convinced that Maine's clearance rate is clear evidence of superior policing just because a housing policy / transportation policy writer told me so.
I *know* what the data represents for what I'm looking for, because I read the newspaper - it represents a particular set of policies we've adopted toward bail and minors and some decisions made by our prosecutors. The reason I want to see the data is because I don't know what the *scale* of the effect of these decisions actually is. And when I see "I want to see the data", I mean "I would like for someone to put together the data", since I don't believe what I'm asking for actually exists, at which point I would also be happy to hear from whoever put it together.
Sorry - it probably reads like I'm calling you or others out for wanting data. Like I said - I also want to see the data!
I just also want the data validated by people much closer to it before I read arguments built on top of the data.
In other words if someone put together national statistics on people charged with murder and their contact with law enforcement, I'd also want some people to try to pick that data apart and find holes or flaws in it. Is it entered in a consistant way across jurisdictions? Are we missing regions or time periods in the reporting? Who is actually linking the data from trials to police reports, and how is that link being done?
I'd be really careful about drawing conclusions until I had answers to those questions. And collecting opinions from people involved in the process would be just as important as getting the data in the first place. I didn't come away from MY's article feeling like he had done much of those things.
One of the things I noticed back when everyone was worrying about the valorization of police in tv shows, is that almost all tv and movie cops are detectives. Other than like the show Blue Bloods. But, detectives are like, what 5% of cops?
I remember a few years ago with the popularity of the show Bones, there were a bunch of students in college hoping to be forensic anthropologists, who were disappointed to find out the were, like, only a few people with that job in the entire state. But if we could create a college major in criminology that focused on investigations, that actually had good career outcomes, I'm sure there'd be many students interested in it.
Do you have a link on that?
No, pure anecdotal evidence from me (I had a friend teaching anthropology), but Jim seems to have found something.
I remember that article! This one?
By Michael Alison Chandler
https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/magazine/women-at-forefront-of-booming-forensic-science-field/2012/07/27/gJQAkASRPX_story.html
"California voters who worried about mass incarceration voted to turn shoplifting offenses under $950 into misdemeanors"
Correct me if I'm wrong but in Texas thefts below $2500 are classified as misdemeanors, right? I think there may be more to this story.
I think this goes back to severity vs certainty. The issue with San Francisco is not that shoplifting isn't a felony, its that its not prosecuted. A felony just mean a much heavier penalty.
If you made shoplifting a class B misdemeanor, but 80% of those who did it were caught, convicted, and served 6 months in jail, I think shoplifting would drop dramatically. You don't need to put people away for 10 years for stealing an iphone. Locking them up for 3-6 months would make it bad enough that most people wouldn't do it. On the other hand, if the DA decides not to prosecute shoplifting, it doesn't matter if its a felony or misdemeanor, there won't be any penalty for doing it.
I’m sure there is, but below $250 is a category with much less cool stuff to steal than below $950. Most states will have a cutoff like this but $950 sounds high.
Below $250 you’re limited to things like clothing, shoes, liquor, some computer monitors, phone accessories, some car parts/tires, small home appliances, etc. Some of that is cool but the resale value may not be worth the effort.
Below $950? Laptops, TVs, car tires, bikes, speakers, smartphones, water heaters, fancy shop tools, generators, etc, all in addition to the below-$250 stuff.
So, below $950 the juice could be worth the squeeze for criminals at a large scale.
I'm going to assume most people have no idea what their state's misdemeanor theft cutoff is and when they read that California increased it they figure it must be some crazy liberal idea. Not that CA moved closer to TX and WY.
Below $2500, not $250...
Thanks Alexandre!. Jeff, did you think Texas's limit was $250? It's $2,500.
https://statutes.capitol.texas.gov/SOTWDocs/PE/htm/PE.31.htm
Interesting to note that to get to the level of first degree felony in Texas you have to steal something worth more than $300,000.
No, I misread it.
Both New York State and Wyoming have a $1,000 cutoff. Somehow I don't think CA making its laws more like Texas and Wyoming is the problem.
So you're saying Texas and Wyoming should make their laws more like California to decrease crime?
Explain how that was suggested, implied or just follows from Graham's last post?
"That said, Prop 47 did increase petty crime, "
I'm reading that statement as Prop 47 was a California law that increased crime - how would Texas and Wyoming passing a Prop 47 be expected to decrease crime then? What am I missing here?
If Texas passed Prop 47 it would dramatically increase the penalty for theft. That people haven’t noticed that TX’s penalty’s for theft are extremely lax compared to CA makes me think there is more to this story.
Yes I can see the ad now - “Texas should reform its uber liberal misdemeanor theft limit and be more like draconian California.”
I don't know who to attribute this quote to, but Yuval Noah Harari says it often in interviews ... "Things are better than ever before. Things are still quite bad. Things can get much worse."
So much about this policing debate seems to be anchored to just one of these three states.
So does proactive policing work? It seems yes. Are there downstream consequences for the "hot spot" communities? Seems plausible although likely more a set of near-term vs. long-term tradeoffs. Could radical change to the structure and goals of existing police departments lead to near-term disruption and worsening conditions (i.e., what Matt proposes)? Also seems likely. Does this make me more of an incrementalist? Yes.
Solving murders is a "boring" way to reduce crime? Based on the popularity of podcasts and TV shows I'd say there is huge public interest.
Get a couple of rival TV producers to fund different cities, start real reality shows, and see if anyone can de-throne Dick Wolff.
There is not a huge public interest in the type of murders that actually happen in cities. They are very, very depressing and boring.
Rape clearance rates are much lower than murder clearance rates. In 2019, only 136 men began Georgia prison sentences for rape. Conversely, about 70,600 girls are born every year in Georgia. This leaves two possibilities: 1) only 0.2% of women are raped during their lifetimes or 2) the clearance rate sucks.
Many rapes go unreported, but the authorities do an abysmal job with the rapes that are reported. Only 1/3 of reported rapes are prosecuted, and only 1/6 of prosecuted rapes are prosecuted end in conviction. Rape is a difficult crime to prosecute because it typically occurs between acquaintances, so there is rarely forced entry or other circumstantial evidence corroborating the victim. It's usually just a swearing contest.
I'm not sure how much good additional detectives would do here. A swearing contest is just a swearing contest and, in many cases, investigation just can't shed much light on what happened in private. The solution is more prosecutions and the problem is the career incentives of prosecutors. Prosecutors don't want to bring big cases that are hard to win. Furthermore, when a crime carries a long sentence, jurors will hold prosecutors to a very high standard and indulge fairly small doubts about guilt. I strongly believe that the prosecution of acquaintance rape should be more like the prosecution of drunk driving: more prosecutions, lower penalties. There should be no shame in losing a rape trial. If more rapes are reported repeat assailants will have long rap sheets. Former victims can testify as "similar transactions" witnesses in Georgia even if no conviction occurred. If a critical mass of women come forward and have their voices heard, the repeat offenders will be ferreted out and convictions will increase.
Right now, the median sentence for rape is zero years in prison. Pursuing one or two-year sentences plus registration as a sex offender would be a vast improvement.
We could do a *lot* to clear the shameful lack of rape convictions simply by running DNA tests on the backlog of rape kits lying around evidence rooms.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theatlantic.com/amp/article/594046/
now take it a step further. why do take kits go untested when crime labs routinely analyze drug samples in low level drug cases and even blood samples in dui cases? it’s not just a resource constraint. prosecutors hate bringing rape prosecutions.
A positive drug sample or blood test is enough to convict. A positive rape kit just proves that intercourse occurred. It doesn't prove lack of consent.
Sure, but a pattern of many positive rape kits from many jurisdictions with one guy's DNA and many women alleging rape should do a lot to corroborate their testimony.
I doubt that a judge is going to allow a bunch of other allegations in a trial, so that info is probably not going to help. That's what the judge is there to do- referee the trial & not allow some 'evidence' as prejudicial
Yes, and prosecutors in turn say that they would be more willing to bring them if they could get jurors to convict. The root problem is societal attitudes towards rape and women's autonomy -- even the prosecutors' reluctance is to some extent downstream from that.
I have a hard time believing "societal attitudes" are solicitous of rape. Most men and virtually all women are anti-rape. The issue is, most men are also understandably afraid of being falsely accused. Most sexual relationships end awkwardly. Any man who has sex risks being accused of rape. There really is no way of knowing with great certainty what happened during an alleged acquaintance rape. If there is forced entry or brutal injuries or an eye or ear witness, its possible to be pretty sure what happened. But many instances are "he said she said." in which case the woman is probably telling the truth, the man is probably a rapist, but its really hard to know for sure.
Lowering the stakes would permit more prosecutions to be brought.
*rape kits
I was going to say -- if they clear the backlog of take kits, MY is going away for a long, long time.
Think this shows our society doesn't agree on what constitutes rape.
Interesting post but I did want to raise one question about the recommendation to do more benchmarking of police departments, or as Matt puts it, "be more like this other department over here."
Having dealt with lots of crappy data, I do wonder about the wide range in clearing murder cases across cities, states, etc. that Matt cites. Perhaps these data reported to the UCR are perfectly reliable, but hmm. . . After all, as far as I know, there's no uniform rigorous way of defining and reporting case clearance across police jurisdictions, and it wouldn't surprise me if the varying ways departments do it lead to incommensurate results across jurisdictions. (This is touched on a bit in the article on "Clearance Rates and Criminal Investigations" in the Encyclopedia of Political Science (https://books.google.com/books?id=HIE_zF1Rv7MC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false vol 1, starting at page 182).
Matt cites the Murder Accountability Project and presumably those people know what they're doing. But when I look at their post "Do Most Murders Go Unsolved in Your Town?" (http://www.murderdata.org/) and I see a chart of the trendline for percentage of major police departments that fail to clear most homicides. For the late 1960s, the percentage of such departments is effectively zero and then it increases pretty much in a straight line to around 75% currently. Really? Police departments have gotten that much worse at solving murders? Or are the data across time not that reliable?
No knock on these people, but data reliability and comparability are tough nuts to crack, so the reader always has to approach some things with at least a smidgen of skepticism.
"Police Science." D'oh.