I recommend the recent "Ghettocide" for a narrative which fits into this analysis. Long dedicated detective work solved a homicide, but the story shows the problems encountered.
“Part of the answer is that homicide is a more serious crime than “shot a guy but he lived,” so they invested more detective hours in trying to solve the homicides.”
Never fails to amaze me how results oriented rather than process oriented people are.
Love the "Detect for America" idea. I think in general, we're going to need to get more explicit about our educational offerings and how they place jobs. Even with the internet, people seem to be unable to find high paying, low education required jobs. We ought to nudge people towards those if we want to keep wielders, plumbers, and detectives around. Even a "Here's how to become a construction worker" publicly funded online course would likely get more men in the workforce.
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.
Or you could do something that is a lot easier to do and might across all jurisdictions even where murder rates are low and having highly paid dedicated detectives sitting around doing not much while waiting for a murder of shooting to occur is not the best use of resources. You could invest in much larger rewards for confidential tips leading to the arrest of shooters whether they be murderers or not. This would probably work better in urban settings where witnesses are more likely to be found. I couldn't help but notice that none of your stats on which municipalities have higher clearance rates relative to their reward structures. That would be interesting to know.
I have been told that this modest proposal would incentivize murders to eliminate witnesses. But I think they already have that incentive.
"The shooters, after all, don’t know ex-ante whether they are going to kill their victims or not."
They don't know for sure, but anecdotally, they do take police response into account. There was a non-fatal shooting on my street last year and according to the targets, they and the rival gang both know there is a hierarchy of shootings in terms of police response. And so they do hold back from killing each other in order to avoid the cops taking to much of an interest in the case. (They also apparently take steps to avoid collateral damage because shooting a bystander generates the most police attention.)
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.
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
We actually do kind of have a seperate career path for detectives in the form of the FBI. The thing is for reasons of jurisdiction and tradition the FBI is far more concerned with white collar crime like securities fraud and insider trading(or even prostitution) than it is in increasing homicide clearance rates. This is what annoys me when I hear people in FBI circles criticize other countries that have much higher murder clearance rates but have far fewer money laundering and white collar prosecutions that the FBI specializes in.
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.
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.
I think the Detect for America thing would be great, but it should apply to regular cops as well as investigators. Intelligence is a beneficial trait for beat cops too, as is high openness.
You certainly manage to hurt an unusual number of hot buttons for one column. I would more that passing counterfeit is not a death penalty offense. It is also possible to have innocently received a counterfeit bill in the course of Commerce. This would be for courts to judge, not best police officers.
But if you want a court to judge someone for the counterfeit bill - don't you have to arrest them first?
There is a separate issue that if you make something illegal, you are authorizing officers to use force to arrest someone for it. And if officers use force, then some (hopefully tiny! but probably non-zero) percentage of the time someone is going to get hurt because people don't want to get arrested.
One argument I remember seeing in more libertarian circles is that George Floyd should never have been arrested at all, for precisely this reason - the crime was too small to warrant _potential_ force by an officer. But if Matt is correct about the shoplifting progression in San Francisco - then you may have to penalize certain things like that which could grow bigger (this is different than Broken Windows - which was to stop serious crime X you punish small crime Y - in this case the argument is that to stop large X you stop small X)
If a white guy in a business suit gave over a counterfeit bill, would he be arrested? At the worst, Froyd was a small fry distributor who could have led to the actual counterfeiter for whom the threat of arrest might have led to his cooperation.
"the threat of arrest might have led to his cooperation"
Absolutely!
However, for there to be a threat of arrest, then what he did has to be an arrestable offense.
Maybe I'm not clear what specifically you are arguing for.
Matt clearly does not endorse the death penalty for George Floyd. Floyd's death was almost universally condemned. It was clearly handled tragically incorrectly.
Do you think it should be a crime - worthy of arrest - to knowingly pass off a counterfeit bill as legitimate? If so - then there are going to be some arrests of people who unknowingly do it(because the officer believes it to be 'knowing' until the courts can determine otherwise, and to make the 'threat of arrest' credible)
Something else. That knowingly passing a counterfeit bill should be an aeratable offense, sure. But I would suppose that the default assumption would be that the bill was being passed unknowingly; that's what "counterfeit" means, the object can easily be thought to be genuine. Police would be called to start an investigation of a counterfeit operation. The point of making knowing passing an arrestable offense is to ensure cooperation in breaking the operation, not punishing and deterring the act of passing.
Proceeds? What's your idea? I'm wearing a suit and unknowingly pass a counterfeit bill? The clerk catches it and I'm embarrassed and have to help the police detective find the source of the bill. What are the "proceeds?"
I mean get some counterfeit bills and try to pass them off to cashiers in a poverty-stricken neighborhood and see what happens. If you get away with it whatever you've stolen is the proceeds. Or just give the money back to the cashier since, at least in the Floyd case, the cashier testified that he knew the money would come out of his paycheck.
Maybe you're right and they'd treat you like a victim who could help solve the case the first couple times. But if you're repeatedly passing counterfeits in the area I think you might get arrested. I'd be willing to bet that wasn't the first time in his life that George Floyd had attempted to pass counterfeits.
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.)
It’s kinda crazy that ROTC for police doesn’t yet exist
> Las Vegas boasted an impressive 87% homicide clearance rate that year.
That's because of that crackerjack CSI team they've got.
I recommend the recent "Ghettocide" for a narrative which fits into this analysis. Long dedicated detective work solved a homicide, but the story shows the problems encountered.
“Part of the answer is that homicide is a more serious crime than “shot a guy but he lived,” so they invested more detective hours in trying to solve the homicides.”
Never fails to amaze me how results oriented rather than process oriented people are.
Love the "Detect for America" idea. I think in general, we're going to need to get more explicit about our educational offerings and how they place jobs. Even with the internet, people seem to be unable to find high paying, low education required jobs. We ought to nudge people towards those if we want to keep wielders, plumbers, and detectives around. Even a "Here's how to become a construction worker" publicly funded online course would likely get more men in the workforce.
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.
Or you could do something that is a lot easier to do and might across all jurisdictions even where murder rates are low and having highly paid dedicated detectives sitting around doing not much while waiting for a murder of shooting to occur is not the best use of resources. You could invest in much larger rewards for confidential tips leading to the arrest of shooters whether they be murderers or not. This would probably work better in urban settings where witnesses are more likely to be found. I couldn't help but notice that none of your stats on which municipalities have higher clearance rates relative to their reward structures. That would be interesting to know.
I have been told that this modest proposal would incentivize murders to eliminate witnesses. But I think they already have that incentive.
"The shooters, after all, don’t know ex-ante whether they are going to kill their victims or not."
They don't know for sure, but anecdotally, they do take police response into account. There was a non-fatal shooting on my street last year and according to the targets, they and the rival gang both know there is a hierarchy of shootings in terms of police response. And so they do hold back from killing each other in order to avoid the cops taking to much of an interest in the case. (They also apparently take steps to avoid collateral damage because shooting a bystander generates the most police attention.)
"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.
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.
Below $2500, not $250...
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.
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.
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
We actually do kind of have a seperate career path for detectives in the form of the FBI. The thing is for reasons of jurisdiction and tradition the FBI is far more concerned with white collar crime like securities fraud and insider trading(or even prostitution) than it is in increasing homicide clearance rates. This is what annoys me when I hear people in FBI circles criticize other countries that have much higher murder clearance rates but have far fewer money laundering and white collar prosecutions that the FBI specializes in.
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.
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.
I think the Detect for America thing would be great, but it should apply to regular cops as well as investigators. Intelligence is a beneficial trait for beat cops too, as is high openness.
You certainly manage to hurt an unusual number of hot buttons for one column. I would more that passing counterfeit is not a death penalty offense. It is also possible to have innocently received a counterfeit bill in the course of Commerce. This would be for courts to judge, not best police officers.
But if you want a court to judge someone for the counterfeit bill - don't you have to arrest them first?
There is a separate issue that if you make something illegal, you are authorizing officers to use force to arrest someone for it. And if officers use force, then some (hopefully tiny! but probably non-zero) percentage of the time someone is going to get hurt because people don't want to get arrested.
One argument I remember seeing in more libertarian circles is that George Floyd should never have been arrested at all, for precisely this reason - the crime was too small to warrant _potential_ force by an officer. But if Matt is correct about the shoplifting progression in San Francisco - then you may have to penalize certain things like that which could grow bigger (this is different than Broken Windows - which was to stop serious crime X you punish small crime Y - in this case the argument is that to stop large X you stop small X)
If a white guy in a business suit gave over a counterfeit bill, would he be arrested? At the worst, Froyd was a small fry distributor who could have led to the actual counterfeiter for whom the threat of arrest might have led to his cooperation.
"the threat of arrest might have led to his cooperation"
Absolutely!
However, for there to be a threat of arrest, then what he did has to be an arrestable offense.
Maybe I'm not clear what specifically you are arguing for.
Matt clearly does not endorse the death penalty for George Floyd. Floyd's death was almost universally condemned. It was clearly handled tragically incorrectly.
Do you think it should be a crime - worthy of arrest - to knowingly pass off a counterfeit bill as legitimate? If so - then there are going to be some arrests of people who unknowingly do it(because the officer believes it to be 'knowing' until the courts can determine otherwise, and to make the 'threat of arrest' credible)
Or are you arguing something else?
Something else. That knowingly passing a counterfeit bill should be an aeratable offense, sure. But I would suppose that the default assumption would be that the bill was being passed unknowingly; that's what "counterfeit" means, the object can easily be thought to be genuine. Police would be called to start an investigation of a counterfeit operation. The point of making knowing passing an arrestable offense is to ensure cooperation in breaking the operation, not punishing and deterring the act of passing.
Ok, I understand your point now.
I'm inclined to agree in principle.
Why don't you put a suit on, try it out a few dozen times and see? Donate the proceeds to charity if it makes you feel guilty.
Proceeds? What's your idea? I'm wearing a suit and unknowingly pass a counterfeit bill? The clerk catches it and I'm embarrassed and have to help the police detective find the source of the bill. What are the "proceeds?"
I mean get some counterfeit bills and try to pass them off to cashiers in a poverty-stricken neighborhood and see what happens. If you get away with it whatever you've stolen is the proceeds. Or just give the money back to the cashier since, at least in the Floyd case, the cashier testified that he knew the money would come out of his paycheck.
Maybe you're right and they'd treat you like a victim who could help solve the case the first couple times. But if you're repeatedly passing counterfeits in the area I think you might get arrested. I'd be willing to bet that wasn't the first time in his life that George Floyd had attempted to pass counterfeits.
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.