The Cobbian early warning system is on medium alert. I'm probably getting a couple days ahead of the Kwaku Network but I suspect the NYT's story on Stop & Frisk is going to raise some eyebrows and voices.
Here are the paragraphs to beware:
Mr. Spitzer first dug into the issue of street stops after the Diallo shooting and found that Hispanics and blacks were being disproportionately targeted. After adjusting for varying crime rates among racial groups, his analysis found that blacks were stopped 23 percent more often than whites. Hispanics were stopped 39 percent more often than whites.
In the wake of those findings, the city signed a law allowing the Council to collect the Police Department’s stop-and-frisk data on a quarterly basis. Separately, the federal class-action lawsuit, Daniels v. City of New York, alleged that the police habitually used racial profiling in stop-and-frisk situations. When the city’s corporation counsel settled the case in January 2004, the agreement required the police to disclose data on such encounters through 2007.
Why? Because they haven't been reporting the statistics on a regular basis. I understand the policeman's POV which is that they're supposed to be on the streets policing instead of stopping to fill out paperwork on every action they initiate. It's a manual process that I'd loathe doing. However, a significant enough polity has demonstrated that they don't trust police judgment as much as they do paperwork and oversight of that paperwork (a new system that's obviously not functioning properly). So here's the mitigating paragraph, that is if you trust NYT paragraphs about police paperwork.
Paul J. Browne, the chief police spokesman, said later that the department’s analysis of the numbers showed that while 55.2 percent of the stop encounters last year involved blacks, 68.5 percent of crimes involved suspects described as black by their victims (or by witnesses, in the case of homicides). Hispanics, he said, made up 30.5 percent of those stopped and 24.5 percent of suspected offenders. For whites, he said, the numbers were 11.1 percent and 5.3 percent, respectively.
So it looks like Hispanics are getting the butt end of the stick and blacks and whites are getting away - racial-profiling-wise. The NYT shows that cops have made over half a million such stops last year and that complaints about the stops doubled. Arrests have doubled and summonses have increased fourfold. Then again, that's if you trust statistics written by cops that you don't trust.
Maybe it's worth it maybe not, but I sure would like to get my hands on that data. I mean, in my business, half a million records is a drop in the bucket. I could turn around charts on that bad boy in half a day. If anyone can figure out a way to get it to me, I'll set it up sweetly.
In the meantime we'll have to deal with more speculation about the morality of this or that statistic. It's always something like that. What I'd like is an analysis of false positives and some idea how well the city is processing these summonses and what they're all about. I mean are we stopping people looking for weapons and drugs and finding weapons and drugs or giving them jaywalking tickets instead? The devil is in the details, and we out here in the 'sphere don't have 'em. Surely the NY Civil Liberties Union, the City Council, the PD, Eliot Spitzer, and everybody else will have their opinions about the data... if we can trust their opinions about statistics gathered by police we don't trust...
How about getting us some of those UF-250 in a tab delimited format, eh?
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