Mostly Nothing commented recently that Minneapolis is a couple hundred cops short. Here's a supporting bit of info
The report follows the Minnesota Supreme Court ordering Minneapolis to hire more police. Two years ago, city residents claimed the city was violating its minimum police requirement of 731 to about 634 after an MPD officer killed George Floyd while in custody, and rioters caused $500 million of damage in and after May 2020. By 2021, the MPD had lost nearly 300 officers.
I recently saw this infographic about Chicago losing cops, too.
Then comes this video from NYC. Note that the dude fighting the cop will be sent to family court because he's only 16. Effectively, he's going to get off with a slap on the wrist for brawling with the police officer.
This individual has been RELEASED 🤦♂️
— NYC PBA (@NYCPBA) July 25, 2022
Lynch: “If New Yorkers want to know why the chaos in the transit system is not improving more quickly — this is why. The criminals underground know they can get in a brawl, choke a cop and be back out in hours…” 1/2
pic.twitter.com/w1vvHOWHyx
Like Minneapolis, Chicago and many other blue cities, NYC has a real problem with an understrength police force. Given that video and the lack of support for the police from the DA and the blue politicians, what kind of masochist would join or remain in the NYPD?
When do cops start leaving because cops are leaving? If your army experiences enough desertions, you get desertions because of the previous desertions. I'd bet it's happening now in several blue cities.
This is a result of the evolution of an idea - that law enforcement is the problem, not the criminals. It may have started out as prison reform, but it's snowballed into systemic racism and police injustice. Bad ideas don't turn into disasters right away. It takes time for them to degenerate into catastrophe.
We had a house guest from Chicago recently who said that the downtown lakefront area, once the hip, glittering place to go on a weekend night, is now a dangerous place to be. Here's a good summary of recent attacks.
CHICAGO - Chicago's iconic Michigan Avenue is facing an uphill battle. Many stores on the Magnificent Mile shuttered their doors amid the pandemic, but now retailers continue to face the threat of mass thefts.
Retailers on Michigan Avenue are seeing neighboring vacancies and in some cases, repeat robberies.
Just last week, two luxury stores on Michigan Avenue were robbed.
On Thursday, Mar. 31, Burberry was targeted once again when four unknown suspects entered the store during business hours and made off with an unknown amount of luxury handbags. The store has been targeted several times in recent months.
It's no secret that California, New York and Illinois are seeing their populations decline as people flee to other states such as Texas and Florida. I've seen conservative pundits gloat about this and shake their fists about the need for more jails and more punishment, but what I'm wondering about is what happens in a city that has effectively no police force.
For Chicago, the chart below shows that they've had a roughly 13% drop in the number of cops, or about 1500 since their peak in January of 2020. That's not massive, but it is substantial. According to this article, in the last year, Chicago lost 753 cops and hired 214. The result is ugly.
"The first thing we do to try to make up the lack of staffing is go to 12-hour shifts and no days off - and having unrested officers that are not caring for the own wellbeing is really, really difficult," (a police and security expert) said.
That's going to encourage desertions. When do you get to anarchy and what does it look like? Are we there now with those smash-and-grab raids?
10 comments:
"Like Minneapolis, Chicago and many other blue cities, NYC has a real problem"
A question: what are the "non-blue" large cities? I got to wondering about this, and found this list of the 100 largest cities with the partisan affiliation of their mayors:
https://ballotpedia.org/Party_affiliation_of_the_mayors_of_the_100_largest_cities
Out of the 37 cities with populations of 500,000 or more, only 5 have Republican mayors (Jacksonville, FL; Fort Worth, TX; Oklahoma city, OK; Fresno, CA; and Mesa, AZ), and the other 63 cities on the list only show an additional 20, so less than a third of what's left.
Are those 5 largest "red" cities doing much better than the "blue" ones?
The "neighborhoodscout.com" site gives a "crime index" showing how safe you are from violent crime compared to other cities (with 100 meaning that you are safer there than in 99% of other cities, and 1 meaning that 99% of cities are safer than you, so higher numbers are better). The scores are:
Jacksonville - 11
Fort Worth - 12
Oklahoma city - 5
Fresno - 9
Mesa - 23
Out of those, it only looks like Mesa is doing tolerably well. It doesn't look like being "red" lets you do much better than the "blue" cities. They are doing better than Minneapolis (2), but about the same as Chicago (10) and New York (19).
I don't think the problem is party affiliation. The problem is likely inherent to big cities in general.
Yeah, I always feel like it's a cheap shot to use that adjective. I'm not surprised at your results, either. Because this is a stream of consciousness thing, I might get bugged by my writing, but I usually don't go back and make substantive edits once the cursor is a paragraph or two away.
The problem of which city is safest is still too coarse to use. It all depends on the part of town. Here in San Diego, our neighborhood is safe. I'm not sure I'd say the same for downtown around the ballpark.
While I agree the problem is politics not political parties, it is the political parties creating the politics. In the case of Minneapolis, it is 1 party rule, and has been for 50+ years. The place is a disaster and the rulers their have never had anything close to a middle leaning liberal idea. Everything is way out there.
The republicans have abandoned the 7 county metro area. They don't even try. And Matt Birk, former NFL center and Harvard grad, is the lt. gov candidate for the republicans are running a fantastic campaign for the reigning democrat idiot in office. Like 2016 and 2020 Presidential elections, the majority are given no choice.
There maybe a few bad cops in every PD, but as near as I can tell there are no good politician that can get any kind of hold. Kendall Qualls is a level headed right-leaning moderate and was soundly trounced in the republican primary for Governor.
On a happy note, yesterday our old house sale closed. We are officially out of the 7 county mad-house of Minnesota. And we are loving small town life. There was a concert in the park on Thursday night. Last night we went to the town ball baseball game, and next Tuesday night, is a block party to go meet the neighbors. Every night we take a walk down by the lake. We have about 100 sunset photos over the lake.
Life is better the further you get from the country's tallest buildings.
Oh, on safety. There are still parts of St Paul that I will go to, at the right time of day. Probably the majority of it.
I will not go anywhere in Minneapolis. Day or night. And haven't since well before George Floyd. I don't even want to drive through on the highway, if I can avoid it. Usually I can.
Tim,
Hope you see this... took me a long time to analyze the data (being a grandpa certainly eats into my free time).
As I looked at the Crime percentile values you reported for the 5 "R" Cities I was able to immediately see that they told me absolutely nothing. Now had the percentiles been only for the top 100 cities, that would have been meaningful, but a quick check of that data source clearly indicated that those percentiles were for a MUCH larger collection of cities than just the 100 biggest. [If you'd reported the percentiles for all the "D" cities you would have seen that there were 4 cities that ranked 2 (Seattle, Denver, Albequerque, and Kansas City), 4 more at 3 (Houston, Nashville, Partland, and Detroit), 2 at 4 (Baltimore and San Francisco), 4 more at 5 (Dallas, Indianapolis, Louisville, and Milwaukee) and even 1 city that achieved the perfectly awful rating of 0 (Memphis) - so all 15 of these cities are equal to or worse than the worst R city rank.]
I checked three ways to see if there was measurable 'difference' between the R and D cities. First I just computed the average Crime Ranking <R> = 12 and <D> = 8.3, seems the R's are 'on average' less dangerous, but are within the standard deviations - sigmaD alone is 8.2, so take that for what it means. Next, I tried to see how likely it would be to get an average as large as the 5 R cities drawing 5 values at random from the entire pool of the biggest cities. That works out to 16% +/- 4%. So again indicative, but not prove worthy. Finally, I bit the bullet (crime data / bullet - get it?) and went to the entire list of 100 biggest cities and did a multivariable linear regression using Rank of city size and Political Party (this was a simple +1/-1). The fit was tolerable (given the scatter in the data), the three parameters came out as very uncorrelated with individual values of Slope = 0.15 +/- 0.003, intercept = 6.5 +/- 0.2 and the party Factor -1.5 +/- 0.1 (note that since I used D = 1 and R = -1, this means that all other things being equal you need to SUBTRACT 1.5 from the predicted Crime Percentile for the D cities and add 1.5 to the R cities making the D's "on average" 3 lower (more crime ridden) than it would have been under an R government (in reasonable agreement to the average difference for the 'biggest of the big cities' of 4).
Based on the slope value it is clear that 'bigger city' by itself means more crime (in agreement with your statement and common sense). It also means that you need to reconsider your conclusion that "[i]t doesn't look like being "red" lets you do much better than the "blue" cities."
I must say that NY and Chicago's ranking are inexplicably high. How they've done that I cannot imagine. It would be an interesting thing to try to investigate.
Ohioan: Thanks for taking the time to go through the statistics. It sounds like you found that there is a small correlation to party affiliation of the mayor, but that the raw correlation with city size is bigger. I do kind of wonder whether the apparent effect of party affiliation might just be due to the fact that Republican mayors are notably more common in the smaller cities, though. At least, that was what it looked like just eyeballing the numbers. In that case, they would be in charge of cities that are naturally safer in the first place, which would make them look better without them having to actually do anything different.
Tim,
No. You completely misjudged what the analysis says. Two key points:
1) The averages for the Cities over 1/2 million showed a difference of about "4" in the crime percentiles. Doing the full analysis for the full top 100 cites (down to a population of 223,109) results in an average difference of "3". This indicates that the difference is independent of the city size.
2) To generate an average difference of 3 based on the city's size requires a change of 20 in the size ranking. This is a strong correlation (no doubt about that). But the party difference is robust across the entire data set and is uncorrelated to the slope (corr coeff = 0.0001).
I believe that a proper re-phrasing of you comment would be:
It sounds like you found that there is a significant correlation to party affiliation of the mayor, even though there is a significant raw correlation with city size. In fact, the thought that the effect of party affiliation might just be due to the fact that Republican mayors are notably more common in the smaller cities, is simply not borne out by the data. Indeed, while exactly what is causing the difference is not yet understood, they really do seem to have measurably safer cities.
Now I would concede that it would be really interesting to see if there is a temporal aspect of the party [i.e., if you switch R to D or D to R, how fast (if at all) does the crime ranking respond to such a change (or perhaps do we see that a change in crime tends to drive a change in party?)].
Just as an aside, I have to admit that I actually expected the mayor's party to be weakly correlated or uncorrelated to the crime ranking. It seemed to me that the 'mayor's party' would be way to blunt a measure to be something that would show a significant correlation. I would also say that I would never assume that this is a causal relationship (a temporal correlation might help illuminate if this is causal). It seems far more likely that whatever forces cause worse crimes also lead people to vote D and vice versa.
I don't know that is the Mayor per say. I see it as the DA office and the Attorney General of the state. Specifically how much they are breaking their oath of office by not defending the constitution.
As shown in this article, the NY DA lets a career criminal out without so much as a stern talking to, but the average citizen who is just trying to make his way through life, is thrown in jail when the career criminal attacks him.
The reason these places are hell-holes is because of soft on crime politicians make it clear to the criminals, that they are welcome to do anything they want in the city, and the politician will blame the cops. Minneapolis is run by thugs, whom Mayor Frye, the DA, and the entire city council, toss rose pedals down on the ground for them to walk on.
I'm sick of the people of this country suffering because of the stupidity of the left. And I think we need to suffer some from the stupidity of the right. Since there is zero chance of any governance from the middle (majority).
Ohioan: Sorry I didn't follow your original analysis correctly. I've always preferred graphs when looking at statistics.
Tim - No problem. I’m also very visual when analyzing data (there three graphs in the Excel spreadsheet I was using). But there just isn’t any way to put decent figures into comments (or at least I don’t know how to do it).
Post a Comment