Also, percentage increases are misleading. Its much more enlightening to see the actual numbers. Like police shootings of Black people. Seems scary, but when you dig in the numbers are like 14 people a year. Sure, every death is bad, but this is hardly a national crisis. The same can be said of the rise in Asian hate crime. Some actual numbers from the Sullivan substack (which I highly recommend): "ere’s a word cloud of the victims of hate crimes in NYC in 2020. You can see that anti-Asian hate crimes are dwarfed by those against Jews, and many other minorities. And when you hear about a 150 percent rise in one year, it’s worth noting that this means a total of 122 such incidents in a country of 330 million, of which 19 million are Asian. Even if we bring this number up to more than 3,000 incidents from unreported and far less grave cases, including “shunning”, it’s small in an aggregate sense. A 50 percent increase in San Francisco from 2019 - 2020, for example, means the number of actual crimes went from 6 to 9."
How about being more humble and waiting to see full police coverage whenever a cut video is posted online? Or not jumping to conclusions and assuming ACAB! Or how about many Democrats not encouraging this sort of thing? In fact, if one follows the details of the George Floyd case as more information came out, I am convinced that this is exactly what the conclusion would be. Its complicated. The police officer may even get acquitted, based on the evidence I have seen that is does not seem out of the question. This seems to be the case with the vast majority of these videos - as the facts come in, the narrative seems to be opposite of what the public was lead to believe, or atleast much more complicated. Now you may say this was to be expected, given the emotional impact of the video. But news sources made it 100x worse. I still cant find say a police officers point of view given in the major media networks like NY Times. Its why I gravitated to substacks now.
Lastly, I just subscribed to your substack and thanks for all you do. Police officers are under appreciated in this political environment and want to extend my sincerest thanks.
If you watch the full video footage of the Floyd incident and listen to the interview, he makes points that directly rebut your claim. Just going off memory, he mentioned rightly that you can see Floyd lift up his head a few times, and thus the pressure on him was not that hard. He mentioned he had a hard time breathing 7x before even being placed the on ground. So the trouble breathing cant be attributed to the pressure. He even ASKED to be placed on the ground. He had no damage on the kneck or throat area from autopsy (again, rebutting the claim the pressure was too much). Even so, this is kind of secondary. The question is what was the proper procedure and in that jurisdiction, the proper procedure was to do exactly as Chauvin did. Im not saying I know definitively whether he should be innocent or not, my point, as a civilian, is to say ITS COMPLICATED. And at the very least, it doesn't look to be race motivated. This is how 99% of the BLM videos turn out to be too, btw. I realize it takes courage in this political environment to say these things, but I expect atleast substack writers to do so.
Maybe. But from interviews Ive seen, even that is debatable. Here is an enlightening interview of a former state and federal prosecutor George Parry, who at one time headed the Police Brutality and Misconduct Unit of the Philadelphia Police Department, giving more of the details. https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2020/09/what-killed-george-floyd.php
The police caught Robert Aaron Long while he was driving to Florida to kill everyone at a pornography company. Had he not been stopped and succeeded in doing so, it seems very likely that a majority of his victims in total would have been non-Asian. We have a skewed data set because, thank goodness, he didn't get to finish his murderous spree.
He was driving to Florida in his Hyundai. Do people who despise Koreans and kill them because they are Korean drive Hyundais?
I’m currently reading Ghettoside, which is a quick and fascinating true crime / social commentary book that adds depth to the issue of under/over policing. It zeroes in on the incredibly high murder rate among black boys/men, and why the conviction rate is so low.
I’d come to feel that the problem is beyond our abilities to solve, so it’s nice that Matty has proposed some solutions.
Could I ask a probably-dumb question? This sentence from the text looks wrong to me:
"If you accept the racists’ view that the only way to express concern about the rising tide of murder is to embrace racism, then this leaves you with a problem."
Surely Matt meant "If you accept the anti-racists view...", yes?
I think he means a racist would say, "see, all xxx people are bad, like I have been telling you--come to the dark side!" But yes, anti-racists seem to have the same view, that expressing concern has the same effect.
Your pro-police stance is one of the things you’re just completely wrong on Matt. To every reasonable person acting in good faith to understand the argument, “defund the police” was obviously and always about diverting some funding from police to fund a desperately needed expansion of other first responders better equipped to handle most of the things police are currently asked to respond to.
Police only spend a pathetically small fraction of their time responding to criminal acts. Here’s a NYT article with some statistics:
Precisely because police spend such a tiny amount of time on criminal acts you should be supportive of the defund the police movement so the police have more time to do what they’re best equipped to handle. But even then I wouldn’t hold my breath. For obvious incentives, the favorite activity of many police departments is to spend their day issuing tickets for minor traffic and civil code violations to raise revenue for the state…to pay the police.
This article is too meta. It seeks to explain the discourse rather than explaining facts. It could be summarized as "murders are up so more Asians are being murdered and many Asians feel targeted." If Yglesias really thinks he needs to explain why cracking down on violent crime is good, he should stop debating straw men.
What does this chart do to the lead/crime thesis? I was skeptical of the claims of the "Ferguson effect" increasing crime rates a few years ago, though it was clear that the decline since the '90s had at least stalled. But if there really has been a few years of slight increase now, perhaps leading into a big increase, and if this doesn't turn out to be some weird artifact of the mixed covid response in the United States, then that seems big.
If Matt were a Democratic congressman and provided this as an op-ed in The NY Times (I’m skeptical they would run it) we would be hearing a tidal wave of his colleagues calling for his resignation. They wouldn’t merely say I disagree and here why (totally fair) but they would instead call for his resignation and then an apology and after Matt is “educated” maybe he can be redeemed.
Depending on his district, this might well attract a primary challenger. But I just don't see this as anywhere near what plenty of Democratic congresspeople say without getting much attention.
It's worth checking out Oaklandside's reporting on asian american violence in Oakland. They did a really great deep dive on the topic, and found that as far as they could tell from the data it wasn't significantly different that other years (but it's still a serious problem). Really nice reporting and worth checking out on this topic: https://oaklandside.org/2021/02/12/oakland-chinatown-policing-hate-crimes-community/
For me a big takehome from this is a constant theme on this newsletter about "re-discovering the wisdom of the ancients." In this case older Democrats spent the entirety of the high-crime 90s fending off allegations that they were too soft on crime. A lot of times, they probably went too far--for example the mandatory minimum bonanza that took hold across the country really screwed over a lot of defendants.
But I think it's really worth considering that the same political impetus that led New York to elect Giuliani and led Democrats to run a lot of DAs for important offices is still there... it's just that crime hasn't been a big issue for a while. Big cities are blue enough that I expect even crime becoming a big issue would now largely result in different Democrats being elected. But I do worry about how the Democratic party and associated groups have basically decided that it's fine for "cop" to be considered a quality line of attack within Democratic politics at the national level (look at Klobuchar and Harris).
Tearing down the politicians who probably have the best shot at rebutting the "soft on crime" attack in case crime becomes a big problem seems not great. This also seems different to the way things were handled in the 00s--in 2006 Democrats took a lot of pride in promoting veterans of the Iraq war and previous wars to insulate themselves from the charge of being insufficiently "pro-troop." The "anti-troop" attack by the GOP was a total joke, but it still made sense to diffuse it if all you had to do was run candidates with a particular biography. These days, Democrats seem happy to do very little to rebut the charge of being "anti-cop" even though police officers are pretty popular with the public and Democrats have gotten a reputation for being too soft on crime for decades.
I do think it's worth exploring the police slowdown with a little more depth than "the cops got pouty and held a strike". The prevailing thought in police departments is that being proactive when you are not handling calls for service is a good thing, but that you are at significantly higher liability risk if you, the officer, are the inciting actor rather than a responding one. The legality of your actions hinge much more on your personal ability to articulate reasonable suspicious and if things go sideways, the headline will be "cop shoots man for [whatever initial crime she was investigating was]". Now because the american legal system is so adversarial, much of how we communicate what is and isn't acceptable at the fringes of police work is done through lawsuits, district attorney & mayoral rhetoric, and pre-emptive, liability focused police department policy. So if the rhetoric from the DA becomes "I will prosecute cops who harrass people", it is a defacto statement that cops are to slow down or discontinue proactive efforts, lest they get charged with murder for something that would have been legal last year.
A good example I hear a lot of (and which Peter Moskos wrote a bit about in his blog) is the Freddie Gray death. The DA sent a memo to the Baltimore Police asking them to enforce knife and gun crime in an area. This filters down to beat cops, who are told to look out for potentially illegal knives and to enforce these rules more strictly. they stop someone for this, he runs and is arrested, and later dies. The DA turns around and charges every cop involved, including officers who never laid hands on him nor saw him in distress, with murder. This tells cops "even if the bosses tell you to be proactive, if anything goes wrong and your name is even tangentially related, you are opening yourself up to prison time because you did what you were told".
I think a clearer answer here is that we have to be much better at saying what we want cops to be doing when they are free. Do we want cops to investigate, patrol and try to actively seek out crime? Or do we want cops who watch crime happen and wait for a 911 call? Do we like the crime benefits of more agressive policing, or do we like the civil litigation protections of a reactive force?
I previously worked as a non-sworn employee at a department that had fully, if unenthusiastically, embraced this mindset, and man does it lead to bad outcomes. The liability aversion meant officers spent 90% of their downtime hiding in parking lots watching YouTube or writing "reports" at the station. When calls came in, it was the imperative of the dispatchers and officers to find a way to make it someone else's problem, either by being very annoying about jurisdiction (there was significant overlap between a city and county agency in the area and as such, what side of the sidewalk you were on could change the jurisdiction) or trying to downgrade crime, or refusing to authorize a code 2 response so the crime would be over before cops got there, or just generally discouraging officers from charging or arresting anyone for anything unless it was a "good felony" since it would just waste everyone's time driving to jail. I once had some employees under me witness a serious car vs pedestrian accident less than a block from the station, and when they reported it, the dispatchers admonished them for reporting something that was technically on city property. These relatively untrained employees were left to manage a major injury car accident scene for almost 10 minutes before the city could spare a car while our agency kept empty parking lots secure (but hey, has the driver been drunk and fought the cops, at least it would have been the city's problem!). This rigorous hatred of proactivity bled into the department culture and made officers much more bitter, since they felt like no one wanted them to do cop stuff anyway, so they often half-assed what they had to do (the bosses want me to make this someone else's problem, the DA doesn't care if my investigation is good or just a crayon drawing because he's dropping it anyway, the community is pissed I dared harrass a person of color for simply taking his borrowed gun collection for a drive around the block, so fuck it, my report is trash and I'm not going to go asking questions). All of this hurts community relations and makes worse police work at every level (that cop who stopped doing investigations becomes a detective) but it's the inevitable conclusion of de-policing through selective lawsuits and vague anti-police rhetoric, rather than clear standards that are held to even when it isn't pretty.
"sensitive sensors that can hear gunfire (and whether it’s semiautomatic)"
This doesn't make any sense- semi-automatic is a characteristic of a firearm, not of shots fired. If you take a semi-automatic firearm and fire one shot, it's semi-automatic gunfire. The paper classifies single shots and semi-automatic shots, but it should really just be single shots and multiple shots. Semi-automatic is quite the magic buzzword sometimes
Is there any data yet (comparing reopening, schools, whatever) to tease out how much of the crime increase is a function of COVID and COVID-related issues? To the extent all or most of this is a one-off, then it's a one-off and there is nothing to glean from it other than "pandemic very very bad."
Crime was creeping up a bit pre-COVID but nothing like what we saw in 2020. It may be that, for April 2021, the best way to reduce crime is to "open up no matter what with COVID" but thanks to vaccination that dilemma should go away by summer. This just feels like an area where causation is very important, only because there was a huge one-off cause of a lot of things that will go away in large part very soon.
Also, percentage increases are misleading. Its much more enlightening to see the actual numbers. Like police shootings of Black people. Seems scary, but when you dig in the numbers are like 14 people a year. Sure, every death is bad, but this is hardly a national crisis. The same can be said of the rise in Asian hate crime. Some actual numbers from the Sullivan substack (which I highly recommend): "ere’s a word cloud of the victims of hate crimes in NYC in 2020. You can see that anti-Asian hate crimes are dwarfed by those against Jews, and many other minorities. And when you hear about a 150 percent rise in one year, it’s worth noting that this means a total of 122 such incidents in a country of 330 million, of which 19 million are Asian. Even if we bring this number up to more than 3,000 incidents from unreported and far less grave cases, including “shunning”, it’s small in an aggregate sense. A 50 percent increase in San Francisco from 2019 - 2020, for example, means the number of actual crimes went from 6 to 9."
How about being more humble and waiting to see full police coverage whenever a cut video is posted online? Or not jumping to conclusions and assuming ACAB! Or how about many Democrats not encouraging this sort of thing? In fact, if one follows the details of the George Floyd case as more information came out, I am convinced that this is exactly what the conclusion would be. Its complicated. The police officer may even get acquitted, based on the evidence I have seen that is does not seem out of the question. This seems to be the case with the vast majority of these videos - as the facts come in, the narrative seems to be opposite of what the public was lead to believe, or atleast much more complicated. Now you may say this was to be expected, given the emotional impact of the video. But news sources made it 100x worse. I still cant find say a police officers point of view given in the major media networks like NY Times. Its why I gravitated to substacks now.
Lastly, I just subscribed to your substack and thanks for all you do. Police officers are under appreciated in this political environment and want to extend my sincerest thanks.
If you watch the full video footage of the Floyd incident and listen to the interview, he makes points that directly rebut your claim. Just going off memory, he mentioned rightly that you can see Floyd lift up his head a few times, and thus the pressure on him was not that hard. He mentioned he had a hard time breathing 7x before even being placed the on ground. So the trouble breathing cant be attributed to the pressure. He even ASKED to be placed on the ground. He had no damage on the kneck or throat area from autopsy (again, rebutting the claim the pressure was too much). Even so, this is kind of secondary. The question is what was the proper procedure and in that jurisdiction, the proper procedure was to do exactly as Chauvin did. Im not saying I know definitively whether he should be innocent or not, my point, as a civilian, is to say ITS COMPLICATED. And at the very least, it doesn't look to be race motivated. This is how 99% of the BLM videos turn out to be too, btw. I realize it takes courage in this political environment to say these things, but I expect atleast substack writers to do so.
Maybe. But from interviews Ive seen, even that is debatable. Here is an enlightening interview of a former state and federal prosecutor George Parry, who at one time headed the Police Brutality and Misconduct Unit of the Philadelphia Police Department, giving more of the details. https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2020/09/what-killed-george-floyd.php
The police caught Robert Aaron Long while he was driving to Florida to kill everyone at a pornography company. Had he not been stopped and succeeded in doing so, it seems very likely that a majority of his victims in total would have been non-Asian. We have a skewed data set because, thank goodness, he didn't get to finish his murderous spree.
He was driving to Florida in his Hyundai. Do people who despise Koreans and kill them because they are Korean drive Hyundais?
I’m currently reading Ghettoside, which is a quick and fascinating true crime / social commentary book that adds depth to the issue of under/over policing. It zeroes in on the incredibly high murder rate among black boys/men, and why the conviction rate is so low.
I’d come to feel that the problem is beyond our abilities to solve, so it’s nice that Matty has proposed some solutions.
Could I ask a probably-dumb question? This sentence from the text looks wrong to me:
"If you accept the racists’ view that the only way to express concern about the rising tide of murder is to embrace racism, then this leaves you with a problem."
Surely Matt meant "If you accept the anti-racists view...", yes?
I think he means a racist would say, "see, all xxx people are bad, like I have been telling you--come to the dark side!" But yes, anti-racists seem to have the same view, that expressing concern has the same effect.
Your pro-police stance is one of the things you’re just completely wrong on Matt. To every reasonable person acting in good faith to understand the argument, “defund the police” was obviously and always about diverting some funding from police to fund a desperately needed expansion of other first responders better equipped to handle most of the things police are currently asked to respond to.
Police only spend a pathetically small fraction of their time responding to criminal acts. Here’s a NYT article with some statistics:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/19/upshot/unrest-police-time-violent-crime.html
Precisely because police spend such a tiny amount of time on criminal acts you should be supportive of the defund the police movement so the police have more time to do what they’re best equipped to handle. But even then I wouldn’t hold my breath. For obvious incentives, the favorite activity of many police departments is to spend their day issuing tickets for minor traffic and civil code violations to raise revenue for the state…to pay the police.
This article is too meta. It seeks to explain the discourse rather than explaining facts. It could be summarized as "murders are up so more Asians are being murdered and many Asians feel targeted." If Yglesias really thinks he needs to explain why cracking down on violent crime is good, he should stop debating straw men.
What does this chart do to the lead/crime thesis? I was skeptical of the claims of the "Ferguson effect" increasing crime rates a few years ago, though it was clear that the decline since the '90s had at least stalled. But if there really has been a few years of slight increase now, perhaps leading into a big increase, and if this doesn't turn out to be some weird artifact of the mixed covid response in the United States, then that seems big.
If Matt were a Democratic congressman and provided this as an op-ed in The NY Times (I’m skeptical they would run it) we would be hearing a tidal wave of his colleagues calling for his resignation. They wouldn’t merely say I disagree and here why (totally fair) but they would instead call for his resignation and then an apology and after Matt is “educated” maybe he can be redeemed.
Depending on his district, this might well attract a primary challenger. But I just don't see this as anywhere near what plenty of Democratic congresspeople say without getting much attention.
Can you provide an example of a Democrat pushing back on the white anti-Asian hate crime narrative?
It's worth checking out Oaklandside's reporting on asian american violence in Oakland. They did a really great deep dive on the topic, and found that as far as they could tell from the data it wasn't significantly different that other years (but it's still a serious problem). Really nice reporting and worth checking out on this topic: https://oaklandside.org/2021/02/12/oakland-chinatown-policing-hate-crimes-community/
For me a big takehome from this is a constant theme on this newsletter about "re-discovering the wisdom of the ancients." In this case older Democrats spent the entirety of the high-crime 90s fending off allegations that they were too soft on crime. A lot of times, they probably went too far--for example the mandatory minimum bonanza that took hold across the country really screwed over a lot of defendants.
But I think it's really worth considering that the same political impetus that led New York to elect Giuliani and led Democrats to run a lot of DAs for important offices is still there... it's just that crime hasn't been a big issue for a while. Big cities are blue enough that I expect even crime becoming a big issue would now largely result in different Democrats being elected. But I do worry about how the Democratic party and associated groups have basically decided that it's fine for "cop" to be considered a quality line of attack within Democratic politics at the national level (look at Klobuchar and Harris).
Tearing down the politicians who probably have the best shot at rebutting the "soft on crime" attack in case crime becomes a big problem seems not great. This also seems different to the way things were handled in the 00s--in 2006 Democrats took a lot of pride in promoting veterans of the Iraq war and previous wars to insulate themselves from the charge of being insufficiently "pro-troop." The "anti-troop" attack by the GOP was a total joke, but it still made sense to diffuse it if all you had to do was run candidates with a particular biography. These days, Democrats seem happy to do very little to rebut the charge of being "anti-cop" even though police officers are pretty popular with the public and Democrats have gotten a reputation for being too soft on crime for decades.
I do think it's worth exploring the police slowdown with a little more depth than "the cops got pouty and held a strike". The prevailing thought in police departments is that being proactive when you are not handling calls for service is a good thing, but that you are at significantly higher liability risk if you, the officer, are the inciting actor rather than a responding one. The legality of your actions hinge much more on your personal ability to articulate reasonable suspicious and if things go sideways, the headline will be "cop shoots man for [whatever initial crime she was investigating was]". Now because the american legal system is so adversarial, much of how we communicate what is and isn't acceptable at the fringes of police work is done through lawsuits, district attorney & mayoral rhetoric, and pre-emptive, liability focused police department policy. So if the rhetoric from the DA becomes "I will prosecute cops who harrass people", it is a defacto statement that cops are to slow down or discontinue proactive efforts, lest they get charged with murder for something that would have been legal last year.
A good example I hear a lot of (and which Peter Moskos wrote a bit about in his blog) is the Freddie Gray death. The DA sent a memo to the Baltimore Police asking them to enforce knife and gun crime in an area. This filters down to beat cops, who are told to look out for potentially illegal knives and to enforce these rules more strictly. they stop someone for this, he runs and is arrested, and later dies. The DA turns around and charges every cop involved, including officers who never laid hands on him nor saw him in distress, with murder. This tells cops "even if the bosses tell you to be proactive, if anything goes wrong and your name is even tangentially related, you are opening yourself up to prison time because you did what you were told".
I think a clearer answer here is that we have to be much better at saying what we want cops to be doing when they are free. Do we want cops to investigate, patrol and try to actively seek out crime? Or do we want cops who watch crime happen and wait for a 911 call? Do we like the crime benefits of more agressive policing, or do we like the civil litigation protections of a reactive force?
"he runs and is arrested, and later dies" is an ...interesting... way of describing what happened to Freddie Gray.
I previously worked as a non-sworn employee at a department that had fully, if unenthusiastically, embraced this mindset, and man does it lead to bad outcomes. The liability aversion meant officers spent 90% of their downtime hiding in parking lots watching YouTube or writing "reports" at the station. When calls came in, it was the imperative of the dispatchers and officers to find a way to make it someone else's problem, either by being very annoying about jurisdiction (there was significant overlap between a city and county agency in the area and as such, what side of the sidewalk you were on could change the jurisdiction) or trying to downgrade crime, or refusing to authorize a code 2 response so the crime would be over before cops got there, or just generally discouraging officers from charging or arresting anyone for anything unless it was a "good felony" since it would just waste everyone's time driving to jail. I once had some employees under me witness a serious car vs pedestrian accident less than a block from the station, and when they reported it, the dispatchers admonished them for reporting something that was technically on city property. These relatively untrained employees were left to manage a major injury car accident scene for almost 10 minutes before the city could spare a car while our agency kept empty parking lots secure (but hey, has the driver been drunk and fought the cops, at least it would have been the city's problem!). This rigorous hatred of proactivity bled into the department culture and made officers much more bitter, since they felt like no one wanted them to do cop stuff anyway, so they often half-assed what they had to do (the bosses want me to make this someone else's problem, the DA doesn't care if my investigation is good or just a crayon drawing because he's dropping it anyway, the community is pissed I dared harrass a person of color for simply taking his borrowed gun collection for a drive around the block, so fuck it, my report is trash and I'm not going to go asking questions). All of this hurts community relations and makes worse police work at every level (that cop who stopped doing investigations becomes a detective) but it's the inevitable conclusion of de-policing through selective lawsuits and vague anti-police rhetoric, rather than clear standards that are held to even when it isn't pretty.
"sensitive sensors that can hear gunfire (and whether it’s semiautomatic)"
This doesn't make any sense- semi-automatic is a characteristic of a firearm, not of shots fired. If you take a semi-automatic firearm and fire one shot, it's semi-automatic gunfire. The paper classifies single shots and semi-automatic shots, but it should really just be single shots and multiple shots. Semi-automatic is quite the magic buzzword sometimes
Especially considering that you can fire shots with very little delay with a double-action revolver.
> tinder for violence
I knew following this blog was a good way to get startup ideas
Is there any data yet (comparing reopening, schools, whatever) to tease out how much of the crime increase is a function of COVID and COVID-related issues? To the extent all or most of this is a one-off, then it's a one-off and there is nothing to glean from it other than "pandemic very very bad."
Crime was creeping up a bit pre-COVID but nothing like what we saw in 2020. It may be that, for April 2021, the best way to reduce crime is to "open up no matter what with COVID" but thanks to vaccination that dilemma should go away by summer. This just feels like an area where causation is very important, only because there was a huge one-off cause of a lot of things that will go away in large part very soon.
Are you booked with Glenn Loury yet?