Did Stop and Frisk Work?

I don't have time to fact check every statement that was made by both Trump and Clinton at last night's presidential debate. I really don't need to since there are plenty of people out there who are. I do have time to share data I already have. And what I already have pertains to this moment from Trump.

Now, whether or not in a place like Chicago you do stop and frisk, which worked very well, Mayor Giuliani is here, worked very well in New York. It brought the crime rate way down. But you take the gun away from criminals that shouldn't be having it.

About a year ago, I pulled crime rates for the top five largest cities in the United States, plus the national average for the years 1985 to 2012. The data comes from the FBI's Uniform Crime Reporting Statistics. The FBI apparently has data for 2013, 2014, and 2015. It's just not available in this database. For 2014 and 2015, I have some data collected by fivethirtyeight.com. I need to update my data set, but the years I need aren't relevant to the current question.

The current question is this: did stop and frisk have any affect on violent crime rates in New York City?

Let's start with Murder and non negligent manslaughter. The chart below summarizes the data. I've highlighted the years that stop and frisk policies were in effect.

In looking at this chart, two things jump out at me. First by the time stop and frisk was in use, the crime wave in New York City had largely receded. The second thing I notice is that crime rates were down for the other four top cities as nationally. (The average shown in the chart is for the top 60 U.S. cities, not just the top five. This means that crime went down everywhere regardless of policy.

What remains now is to see if these patterns hold true for other types of crime. That's a task for a different evening. It's getting late and I have a day job.

Mass Shootings

The Homomonument (yes, that's what it's called) in Amsterdam.

In June I went to Amsterdam for work. A few dozen yards from the house where Anne Frank hid from the Nazi's is a Dutch gay memorial. By the time I took this picture it had been barely two weeks since the Orlando night club shooting. Writing this article many weeks later, I still don't know what to say about either the Orlando shooting or about the outpouring of support for the victims shown at this monument.

But I can do what I usually do; I can try to understand. In no particular order, here's a few things I've learned.

What is a Mass Killing?

That may seem like a silly question to ask until you realize that different sources give it different definitions. Several web sites including http://massshooting.org/ and http://www.shootingtracker.com/ define a mass killing as a shooting incident with four or more victims. The Investigative Assistance for Violent Crimes Act of 2012 defines a mass shooting as 3 or more killings in a single incident.

The definition matters because any comparison of stats from different sources has to use the same definitions for comparisons between data sets to be valid.

We’re Not the Only Country to Suffer Mass Shootings

In fact, we’re not even the worst country for mass shootings. This probably surprises you as much as it surprises me. America out-guns our European counterparts in sheer numbers, but that’s a function of size rather than chaos. If you look at the death rate per million people, the good old US of A comes in 11th. For once I’m glad we don’t excel. The Netherlands, where I took the photos in this post, ranks 13th.

This information comes, however, with a caveat. The several articles I’ve found making this claim attribute their data to the Rampage Shooting Index from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. I haven’t been able to locate the index on their website, meaning I’m not yet able to make judgement about its voracity.

Many Incidents are Ended by Unarmed Individuals

This is the most counter-intuitive thing I learned. A 2014 FBI study of active shooter incidents between 2000 and 2013 found that in 21 of the 160 incidents studied, the active shooter was stopped by an unarmed citizens.

This one also has a caveat. Active shooter incidents is a slightly broader but overlapping category than a mass shooting. It seems likely that active shooter incidents could have become mass shootings had they not been halted.

Active and Mass Shootings are Increasing Worldwide

This jumps out at you from the graphs in the FBI data set. Security Magazine agrees. It reports using a rolling five year total. The total from 2009 to 2013 was 413, compared to 373 for 2008 to 2012.

From a gay memorial in Amsterdam

Conclusion

As with other things I've tried to research my efforts have once again been thwarted by an inability to see much real unbiased research into the subject. An outfit called Journalist Resources has helpfully put out a list of articles related to mass shootings. Helpful though this seems, I can’t actually read any of it for less than $35 per article. With sixteen articles listed, I would need well over $450 to be conversant in this issue. That’s assuming these are the studies I need to read. The articles in that list are typical of what I found wherever I looked. Even looking beyond abstracts to judge what research might be relevant would cost thousands of dollars.

Racial Bias by Police?

Do you think there's widespread bias and violence by police officers against blacks and other minorities? What you suspect and what you can prove are two different things.

In the midst of much lamented acts of police violence and equally lamentable reprisal comes a paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research titled An Empirical Analysis of Racial Differences in Police Use of Force. Among the media and related punditry are some claiming this study as ‘proof’ of the absence of racism in policing.

Yet the paper itself shows why that conclusion may be erroneous, starting with a frank notice on page one that it’s a working paper that hasn’t been peer reviewed. Other caveats start on page 7. (Page 7 of the PDF actually displays the number 5 on it’s bottom.) Caveats include problems with their source data and a concern that their methodology is inadequate. Snopes.com catalogs many other problems noted by critics and others.

I know what my gut's telling me about the veracity of the NERB paper. If this were an opinion piece I'd share that opinion. A New York Time story on the paper opens with the unequivocal “a new study confirms”. If the Times actually believes that then they need to either read more carefully or acquire a better understanding of how scientific research works. If they understand how science works, they're editorializing. in which case their whole article should on the opinion section, not posted as news.