My wife and I are voters for Democrats for 50 years....until this year.
A big reason we switched was because of progressives' views of policing and police.
My wife was in a group of five women who were the first female police officers in Seattle, so probably the entire state, in 1975. She did amazing things in her career in law enforcement. I literally stop people on the street to brag on her.
So, being the boring academic that I used to be, I sat down last fall and wrote a blog entry about policing and her experience. It is very long (I told ya I was a boring academic), but I do believe it was thorough, based upon research (I believe every point I make has data cited that support it) and comes to the same conclusions as does Mr. Moskos (aside: RARELY are there articles on policing by people who were police, as Mr. Moskos was, and as my wife was).
Mr. Moskos: It would fun to sit down with you and watch you and my wife talk...I promise to shut up.
Here is our blog entry. It's a non-monitized blog---mostly it's about our travels and grandchildren. We don't have advertisements or subscriptions.
Great article. Glad you posted it. Never been a police officer myself but I would up supervising a police department. Since my experience was all in the world of finance, I needed to learn something about police. So I did a bunch of training with them-both hard and soft skills-and spent hours and hours talking to officers and commanders. Made some long term friends in the process too. I could add my observations to your commentary but they are pretty much identical.
I, too, am a data nerd and try to parse out real meaning from various sources. And yes, Randy Balko is completely full of it. I also share your love of the high desert (and have actually been to Pine and the surrounding area) and spend months each year living in a pickup camper. Can't dance though.
Since you brought up Sir Robert Peel and seem to reference Principle #7, I thought I would provide the entire text.
"To maintain at all times a relationship with the public that gives reality to the historic tradition that the police are the public and that the public are the police, the police being only members of the public who are paid to give full-time attention to duties which are incumbent on every citizen in the interests of community welfare and existence."
Unfortunately, as far as we have gotten from his principles for police, it has been even worse for citizens. Consider the recent ordeals of Daniel Penny and Kyle Rittenhouse for doing exactly what Peel suggested. While both were acquitted in the end, it was after extreme peril in the legal system. People who might be inclined to intervene to help out noticed this. There are enough tactical and informational perils to intervening without adding legal peril. It is, of course, much worse in Peel's homeland where you can be arrested for even talking about crime or for trying to rescue someone from drowning. This whole conversation would get you arrested for "hate speech" over there.
If you are victimized and someone asks you, in this day and age, you are not going to answer if the aggressor is is in a protected (elevated) community. We have been taught not to call the police on black people, in particular. Or, if a person might be an immigrant. Or a thousand other things that will get you shamed or ignored. People dont want to cone out and say this because we've been taught that some truths are impolite. So, of course we aren't going to be honest about safety issues.
Thanks, that was interesting. Listened all the way through.
Weird that out here we have such low levels of crime, even things hard to ignore like murder. Our county has 300,000 people so it's not all cows. In a county of 4,000 square miles though I guess we have room so we don't step on each other's toes. We're old fashioned in our attitude towards law enforcement too.
I became interested in crime stats in 2020. In my mid-sized city, there were suddenly shootings every weekend. I observed this pattern in the five small and mid-sized cities within 2 hours of me, plus (unsurprisingly) Chicago and other major cities whose news I follow. But national media kept reporting that the crime spike was an overblown moral panic. My pet peeve was comparisons of the present surge in gun violence to the 1990s, when yes NYC and LA had more murders, but cities like mine and Peoria, Illinois had practically none. So I got the best data available for small and mid-sized cities (which often aren't included in analyses of urban gun violence), plus all the larger ones, and started running my own simple descriptive analyses. I found that the crime surge was real (duh), but also that it had impacted US cities of all sizes in all regions. I got one academic paper published and the rest of my analyses are up on my free substack, the 1000 cities project. I stopped publishing regularly when the crime surge receded and the NYT finally acknowledged it had been real. I decided my work was finished. However, I recently got the data from 2024 for my 1000+ cities and will be analyzing it in the upcoming weeks. Gun homicides and shootings are down nationally, so I'll highlight interesting trends in where things have improved the most and least, where they are still worse than pre-pandemic levels, etc. I cannot promise to produce a lot of content immediately, but some here might find the substack interesting. The link is in my handle. I earn no money off of it, nor do I intend to.
My wife and I are voters for Democrats for 50 years....until this year.
A big reason we switched was because of progressives' views of policing and police.
My wife was in a group of five women who were the first female police officers in Seattle, so probably the entire state, in 1975. She did amazing things in her career in law enforcement. I literally stop people on the street to brag on her.
So, being the boring academic that I used to be, I sat down last fall and wrote a blog entry about policing and her experience. It is very long (I told ya I was a boring academic), but I do believe it was thorough, based upon research (I believe every point I make has data cited that support it) and comes to the same conclusions as does Mr. Moskos (aside: RARELY are there articles on policing by people who were police, as Mr. Moskos was, and as my wife was).
Mr. Moskos: It would fun to sit down with you and watch you and my wife talk...I promise to shut up.
Here is our blog entry. It's a non-monitized blog---mostly it's about our travels and grandchildren. We don't have advertisements or subscriptions.
https://livinginthebedofapickup.blogspot.com/2024/08/why-we-wont-vote-for-harris-her-anti.html
Great article. Glad you posted it. Never been a police officer myself but I would up supervising a police department. Since my experience was all in the world of finance, I needed to learn something about police. So I did a bunch of training with them-both hard and soft skills-and spent hours and hours talking to officers and commanders. Made some long term friends in the process too. I could add my observations to your commentary but they are pretty much identical.
I, too, am a data nerd and try to parse out real meaning from various sources. And yes, Randy Balko is completely full of it. I also share your love of the high desert (and have actually been to Pine and the surrounding area) and spend months each year living in a pickup camper. Can't dance though.
Wow! Would we have fun swapping stories.
p.s. love data nerds. AND you've been to our little hamlet of Pine! So cool. A Data nerd who has also lived months in a pickup camper!
Since you brought up Sir Robert Peel and seem to reference Principle #7, I thought I would provide the entire text.
"To maintain at all times a relationship with the public that gives reality to the historic tradition that the police are the public and that the public are the police, the police being only members of the public who are paid to give full-time attention to duties which are incumbent on every citizen in the interests of community welfare and existence."
Unfortunately, as far as we have gotten from his principles for police, it has been even worse for citizens. Consider the recent ordeals of Daniel Penny and Kyle Rittenhouse for doing exactly what Peel suggested. While both were acquitted in the end, it was after extreme peril in the legal system. People who might be inclined to intervene to help out noticed this. There are enough tactical and informational perils to intervening without adding legal peril. It is, of course, much worse in Peel's homeland where you can be arrested for even talking about crime or for trying to rescue someone from drowning. This whole conversation would get you arrested for "hate speech" over there.
If you are victimized and someone asks you, in this day and age, you are not going to answer if the aggressor is is in a protected (elevated) community. We have been taught not to call the police on black people, in particular. Or, if a person might be an immigrant. Or a thousand other things that will get you shamed or ignored. People dont want to cone out and say this because we've been taught that some truths are impolite. So, of course we aren't going to be honest about safety issues.
That’s some wild hyperbole there. Those types of reports are made tons and tons and tons of times daily.
Thanks, that was interesting. Listened all the way through.
Weird that out here we have such low levels of crime, even things hard to ignore like murder. Our county has 300,000 people so it's not all cows. In a county of 4,000 square miles though I guess we have room so we don't step on each other's toes. We're old fashioned in our attitude towards law enforcement too.
I became interested in crime stats in 2020. In my mid-sized city, there were suddenly shootings every weekend. I observed this pattern in the five small and mid-sized cities within 2 hours of me, plus (unsurprisingly) Chicago and other major cities whose news I follow. But national media kept reporting that the crime spike was an overblown moral panic. My pet peeve was comparisons of the present surge in gun violence to the 1990s, when yes NYC and LA had more murders, but cities like mine and Peoria, Illinois had practically none. So I got the best data available for small and mid-sized cities (which often aren't included in analyses of urban gun violence), plus all the larger ones, and started running my own simple descriptive analyses. I found that the crime surge was real (duh), but also that it had impacted US cities of all sizes in all regions. I got one academic paper published and the rest of my analyses are up on my free substack, the 1000 cities project. I stopped publishing regularly when the crime surge receded and the NYT finally acknowledged it had been real. I decided my work was finished. However, I recently got the data from 2024 for my 1000+ cities and will be analyzing it in the upcoming weeks. Gun homicides and shootings are down nationally, so I'll highlight interesting trends in where things have improved the most and least, where they are still worse than pre-pandemic levels, etc. I cannot promise to produce a lot of content immediately, but some here might find the substack interesting. The link is in my handle. I earn no money off of it, nor do I intend to.