This weekend marks 5 years since George Floyd was killed by Officer Derek Chauvin of the Minneapolis Police Department. Expect to see some news stories in the coming weeks wrestling with the question of why police killings have not become any less frequent, despite the wave of reforms that were introduced in the wake of the “Defund” movement. In fact, police killings have continued on an upward trend, with 2024 witnessing the greatest number of people killed by police since 2013, according to Mapping Police Violence.
Background In his latest commentary on our research note, Jacob Kang-Brown (JKB) raises six concerns (some old, some new). For what it’s worth he also makes clear his point of view regarding the “question of policing”:
From my point of view, the question of policing is not just one about reducing violent crime or gun crime, but is, rather, about understanding the harms of policing, i.e. police violence, the criminalization of poverty, and wealth-based pretrial detention (emphasis added).
BOTTOM LINE: Yes, there was a merge error in our research note, “When Police Pull Back”. However, correcting it did not render all our key findings nonsignificant as Jacob Kang-Brown claimed. In his replication, Jacob calculated our spatial lag variable differently, thereby reintroducing the endogeneity problem we designed our analysis to avoid. We are correcting, not retracting, the research note.
What happened? We made an honest mistake. We own that.
Many U.S. cities witnessed both de-policing and increased crime in 2020, yet it remains unclear whether the former contributed to the latter. Indeed, much of what is known about the effects of proactive policing on crime comes from studies that …
A list of the panels I'm involved in at the November 2022 meeting.
Recently, a couple local journalists reached out to me about an apparent surge in shootings and homicides in Omaha. My first instinct when I get those calls around this time of the year is that it’s probably seasonal variation. But maybe not. So before I schedule an interview, I like to pull the data and have a quick look, if possible. Fortunately, OPD has been posting incident-level crime data on its website since 2015.
At the 2022 ACJS Conference, my colleagues and I present an ongoing project on the relationship between police discretionary behaviors and crime in Denver.
Rather than continue listing conference presentations ad nauseum on my CV, I’ve decided to archive them here. For some of these, you can download the presentation by clicking the “Slides” link that appears after the presentation title. Note that a * indicates the co-author is a graduate student.
➡️ Jump to: American Society of Criminology, American Sociological Association, Southern Criminal Justice Association
Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences 60th Annual Meeting: National Harbor, MD Mourtgos, Scott*, Ian Adams, & Justin Nix (2023).