posted
Welp! We can stop looking at abortion as the primary cause of the drop in crime rates, at least for New York.
Posts: 14316 | Registered: Jul 2005
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posted
Ahh, gotcha. I wasn't familiar with that, so your gag seemed so bizarre it had me wondering 'Was that some sort of political commentary?' and then 'Wait, BB wouldn't make a remark like that, then 'But what did it mean?!'
Posts: 17164 | Registered: Jun 2001
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posted
I skimmed the second half of the article looking for "total numbers" or something, and just saw the individual stories. DOES this meaningfully impact the idea that crime rates have dropped noticeably in the past two decades?
Posts: 4136 | Registered: Aug 2008
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posted
Wouldn't it have to be a nationwide problem? I mean we are talking about serious negligence and falsified reporting across nearly every single state.
Posts: 14316 | Registered: Jul 2005
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posted
I think just having it be a genuine problem in NYC would be enough to make me pretty sad and re-evaluate some things.
Posts: 4136 | Registered: Aug 2008
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posted
I think it's almost a given that this is a serious nationwide problem. Not that I mean every precinct everywhere does it, but as a society we're not especially interested in long-term proactive approaches to crime, either in rehabilitation or policy. We ARE fascinated by easily reported, easily read titillating statistics, and we have a habit of basing funding, elections, and promotions on that sort of thing.
To me, that spells out that there will just be statistical corruption like this, or rather a tendancy towards it.
Posts: 17164 | Registered: Jun 2001
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posted
Guys, this is most definitely *not* in itself conclusive evidence of anything on a national scale. I think you all need to keep that in mind. If you want to scale this situation up to cover the whole country,you'll be ignoring everything about this case that brought it to national attention in the first place.
Posts: 9912 | Registered: Nov 2005
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quote:Originally posted by Orincoro: Guys, this is most definitely *not* in itself conclusive evidence of anything on a national scale. I think you all need to keep that in mind. If you want to scale this situation up to cover the whole country,you'll be ignoring everything about this case that brought it to national attention in the first place.
posted
I actually live in NYC, so I was specifically interested in how big a deal it was on the local scale. Depending on how bad the numbers actually are, it may actually cause me to re-evaluate small but significant portions of my worldview.
Posts: 4136 | Registered: Aug 2008
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posted
This case, if itself? No, certainly not. But it should be noted the exposing factor here wasn't systemic, it was a tough, brave, persecuted whistleblower. His success, ears after his first effort which was itself after years of misconduct, was in spite of local criminal justice systems, not because of it.
So when I say 'national problem', I don't mean for example 'majority of precincts are corrupt or negligent', I just mean it is probably a problem throughout our nation. Because you don't discover this sort of thing except rarely unless you're objective, persistent, and looking for it.
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Dan, as a small government semi-libertarian type, I'm surprised to hear you sticking up for the reliability of that segment of the government which gets to use force Posts: 17164 | Registered: Jun 2001
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posted
Rakeesh, you're forgetting my "deeply optimistic" and "allergic to conspiracy theories" descriptors, though! That second one is especially important.
But no, seriously, this story is repulsive, of course! And now that you've clarified that you just mean that it could easily be a problem in other cities, sure, it probably could.
Nevertheless, barring evidence, I'm totally unwilling to assume that this sort of despicable fraud is systemic to police departments in general.
Certainly I know of plenty of cops that are publicly disgusted with very trivial examples in this vein, to the extent that I have a hard time believing they would bite their tongue and be complicit in systematically gaming the numbers (especially when that gaming includes suppressing real victims).
To think otherwise is where it starts straying into conspiracy theory territory, to me.
Posts: 3580 | Registered: Aug 2005
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