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When Police Kill
When Police Kill is the 2017 book by criminologist Franklin Zimring. Some insights from the book.
Official data dramatically undercount the number of people killed by the police. Both the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ Arrest-Related Deaths and the FBI’s Supplemental Homicide Reports estimated around 400-500 police kills a year, circa 2010. But the two series have shockingly low overlap–homicides counted in one series are not counted in the other and vice-versa. A statistical estimate based on the lack of overlap suggests a true rate of around 1000 police killings per year.
The best data come from newspaper reports which also show around 1000-1300 police killings a year (Zimring focuses his analysis on The Guardian’s database.) Fixing the data problem should be a high priority. But the FBI cannot be trusted to do the job:
Unfortunately, the FBI’s legacy of passive acceptance of incomplete statistical data on police killings, its promotion of the self-interested factual accounts from departments, and its failure to collect significant details about the nature of the provocation and the nature of the force used by police suggest that nothing short of massive change in its orientation, in its legal authority to collect data and its attitude toward auditing and research would make the FBI an agency worthy of public trust and statistical reliability in regard to the subject of this book.
The FBI’s bias is even seen in its nomenclature for police killings–“justifiable homicides”–which some of them certainly are not.
The state kills people in two ways, executions and police killings. Executions require trials, appeals, long waiting periods and great deliberation and expense. Police killings are not extensively monitored, analyzed or deliberated upon and, until very recently, even much discussed. Yet every year, police kill 25 to 50 times as many people as are executed. Why have police killings been ignored?
When an execution takes place in Texas, everybody knows that Texas is conducting the killing and is accountable for its consequences. When Officer Smith kills Citizen Jones on a city street in Dallas, it is Officer Smith rather than any larger governmental organization…[who] becomes the primary repository of credit or blame.
We used to do the same thing with airplane crashes and medical mistakes–that is, look for pilot or physician error. Safety didn’t improve much until we started to apply systems thinking. We need a systems-thinking approach to police shootings.
Police kill males (95%) far more than females, a much larger ratio than for felonies. Police kill more whites than blacks which is often forgotten, although not surprising because whites are a larger share of the population. Based on the Guardian data shown in Zimring’s Figure 3.1, whites and Hispanics are killed approximately in proportion to population. Blacks are killed at about twice their proportion to population. Asians are killed less than in proportion to their population.
A surprising finding:
Crime is a young man’s game in the United States but being killed by a police officer is not.
The main reason for this appears to be that a disproportionate share of police killings come from disturbance calls, domestic and non-domestic about equally represented. A majority of the killings arising from disturbance calls are of people aged forty or more.
The tendency of both police and observers to assume that attacks against police and police use of force is closely associated with violent crime and criminal justice should be modified in significant ways to accord for the disturbance, domestic conflicts, and emotional disruptions that frequently become the caseload of police officers.
A slight majority (56%) of the people who are killed by the police are armed with a gun and another 3.7% seemed to have a gun. Police have reason to fear guns, 92% of killings of police are by guns. But 40% of the people killed by police don’t have guns and other weapons are much less dangerous to police. In many years, hundreds of people brandishing knives are killed by the police while no police are killed by people brandishing knives. The police seem to be too quick to use deadly force against people significantly less well-armed than the police. (Yes, Lucas critique. See below on policing in a democratic society).
Police kill more people than people kill police–a ratio of about 15 to 1–and the ratio has been increasing over time. Policing has become safer over the past 40 years with a 75% drop in police killed on the job since 1976–the fall is greater than for crime more generally and is probably due to Kevlar vests. Kevlar vests are an interesting technology because they make police safer without imposing more risk on citizens. We need more win-win technologies. Although policing has become safer over time, the number of police killings has not decreased in proportion which is why the “kill ratio” has increased.
A major factor in the number of deaths caused by police shootings is the number of wounds received by the victim. In Chicago, 20% of victims with one wound died, 34% with two wounds and 74% with five or more wounds. Obvious. But it suggests a reevaluation of the police training to empty their magazine. Zimring suggests that if the first shot fired was due to reasonable fear the tenth might not be. A single, aggregational analysis:
…simplifies the task of police investigator or district attorney, but it creates no disincentive to police use of additional deadly force that may not be necessary by the time it happens–whether with the third shot or the seventh or the tenth.
It would be hard to implement this ex-post but I agree that emptying the magazine isn’t always reasonable, especially when the police are not under fire. Is it more dangerous to fire one or two shots and reevaluate than to fire ten? Of course, but given the number of errors police make this is not an unreasonable risk to ask police to take in a democratic society.
The successful prosecution of even a small number of extremely excessive force police killings would reduce the predominant perception among both citizens and rank-and-file police officers that police have what amounts to immunity from criminal liability for killing citizens in the line of duty.
Prosecutors, however, rely on the police to do their job and in the long-run won’t bite the hand that feeds them. Clear and cautious rules of engagement that establish bright lines would be more helpful. One problem is that police are protected because police brutality is common (somewhat similar to my analysis of riots).
The more killings a city experiences, the less likely it will be that a particular cop and a specific killings can lead to a charge and a conviction. In the worst of such settings, wrongful killings are not deviant officer behavior.
…clear and cautious rules of engagement will …make officers who ignore or misapply departmental standards look more blameworthy to police, to prosecutors, and to juries in the criminal process.
Police kill many more people in the United States than in other developed countries, even adjusting for crime rates (where the U.S. is less of an outlier than most people imagine). The obvious reason is that there are a lot of guns in the United States. As a result, the United States is not going to get its police killing rate down to Germany’s which is at least 40 times lower. Nevertheless:
[Police killings]…are a serious problem we can fix. Clear administrative restrictions on when police can shoot can eliminate 50 to 80 percent of killings by police without causing substantial risk to the lives of police officers or major changes in how police do their jobs. A thousand killings a year are not the unavoidable result of community conditions or of the nature of policing in the United States.
What should I ask Nathan Nunn — Twitter version of this query
I will be doing a Conversation with him, MR readers offered suggestions here, I will tweet a request for queries, please leave them in the comments section of this post. This post is only for people coming in from Twitter.
UK fact of the day
#COVID19 mortality in UK hospital patients has been falling steadily from >6% in March to ~1% now, with similar trends elsewhere. The reasons behind this pattern remain unclear, but #COVID19 Infection Fatality Rates will likely have to be revised downward. tinyurl.com/ybnlmkdz
That is from Francis Balloux. And again here is the source link. And please do not conclude the virus is becoming less dangerous, that is not a necessary implication of the above! Alternative explanations are given at the latter link. Most broadly, I will say it again: if your model does not have long-run elasticities as much greater than short-run elasticities, it is likely to be off in some significant ways.
Tuesday assorted links
1. Training the professional auctioneer, good story.
2. New economic history podcast.
3. Predictive performance of the IHME model: doesn’t beat the baseline forecast.
4. Early June case spikes from four different cities with four different reopening regimes. Hmm.
5. Why hasn’t coronavirus been worse in Haiti?
6. MR readership much higher than TLS readership. What a strange world we live in.
7. Dominic Cummings vs. NIMBY?
8. Ross is completely correct here (NYT).
How to Live in a World Gone Mad?
A long-time reader asks for advice:
I’ve been a MR reader for years. It sounds like you’re concerned about cancel culture and the associated political situation. I’m from eastern europe and caught the tail end of communism. What’s happening now in the US terrifies me. It seems like every week I learn that someone I respect is being tried in a court of public opinion for crimes that didn’t exist six months ago.
I’m in Silicon Valley, and realistically it’s impossible to operate here without lying. And I’m not right wing either, I’ve always considered myself a liberal! Some people seem to be dealing with it all right, but having to maintain a facade really eats at me. I effectively have to self-quarantine in a political closet. I hate it. I never could have imagined that I would need to choose between truthful expression and career/friendships in America. There’s always some finesse in human interaction of course, but this is so qualitatively different it may as well be another country altogether.
Do you have any advice for how to act, survive, and thrive in this political climate? I don’t know how to navigate this at all.
Social media has messed with our minds. The madness of crowds used to be limited by geography, time, and transaction cost–all of which have been lessened by social media. As a result, the crowds are now bigger and madder. And our brains, which are finely tuned to listen to the crowd (meaning the tribe or village ala Dunbar’s number), are overwhelmed when the crowd is in the thousands or millions. We should discount signals which come at the cost of a tweet but we can’t and so the pressures to conform are intense. If your job isn’t protected, stay off social media or at least use a pseudonym. Even if you do nothing today, the crowd may come after you years later so you can never feel safe.
I wish I had better answers. Readers?
Monday assorted links
1. Deaths are still falling. Including in some key states. Don’t take this for granted (at all), but be accordingly suspicious of those who are not dealing with this fact in some manner.
2. Dick Cavett interviews James Baldwin.
3. China is now starting to use a vaccine on its military.
4. Miami fact of the day (NYT): “One-third of all patients admitted to the city’s main public hospital over the past two weeks after going to the emergency room for car-crash injuries and other urgent problems have tested positive for the coronavirus.”
5. Five-day course of Remdesivir will be priced at $2,340. One-third more for insurers, cheaper in other countries.
6. Will higher ed just snap back?
7. Claims about virus mutation, and increased infectiousness (speculative, but at the very least an important caution about all the premature moralizing you are seeing. I at least know I don’t know enough to judge this one, do the other commentators you are reading?).
Sunday assorted links
1. Ross Douthat on fast-forwarding to 2030 (NYT).
2. DC region doing an actually fairly good job of containing coronavirus (so far).
3. Current immigration policy will be making us poorer.
4. People missing the early call on coronavirus.
5. “Thus, the happiness advantage favoring high-SES adults has expanded over the decades.“
Why and how does DARPA work?
Program Managers
At the end of the day the ARPA Model depends on badass program managers. Why is this the case? PMs need to think for themselves and go up and down the ladder of abstraction in an unstructured environment. On top of that they need to be effective communicators and coordinators because so much of their jobs is building networks. There’s a pattern that the abstract qualities that make “great talent” in different high-variance industries boils down to the ability to successfully make things happen under a lot of uncertainty. Given that pattern, the people who would make good DARPA PMs would also make good hedge fund analysts, first employees at startups, etc. so digging into people’s motivations for becoming a PM is important. More precise details about what makes a PM good prevent you from going after the exact same people as every other high-variance industry. When ‘talent’ isn’t code for ‘specialized training’ it means the role or industry has not been systematized. Therefore, despite all the talk here and elsewhere about ‘the ARPA Model’ we must keep in mind that we may be attributing more structure to the process than actually exists.
DARPA program managers pull control and risk away from both researchers and directors. PMs pull control away from directors by having only one official checkpoint before launching programs and pull control away from performers through their ability to move money around quickly. PMs design programs to be high-risk aggregations of lower-risk projects. Only 5–10 out of every 100 programs successfully produce transformative research, while only 10% of projects are terminated early. Shifting the risk from the performers to the program managers enables DARPA to tackle systemic problems where other models cannot.
That is one excerpt from a new and excellent essay by Benjamin Reinhardt, one of the best pieces of this year, via Patrick Collison.
Note also that DARPA underpays staff, does not hire individuals with a significant web presence, deliberately stays small, and makes it easy to reallocate funds on the fly. The program managers do not work there for any longer than four or five years, by design.
Can Philosophy Make People Generous?
Schwitzgebel and Rust famously found that professors of ethics are no more ethical than other professors. Peter Singer being perhaps a famous exception to the rule. In follow-up research Schwitzgebel and psychologist Fiery Cushman tried to find philosophical arguments to change people’s willingness to donate to charity. They were unable to find any. But perhaps they just weren’t good at coming up with effective philosophical arguments. Thus, they challenged moral philosophers and psychologists to a contest:
Can you write a philosophical argument that effectively convinces research participants to donate money to charity?
By a philosophical argument they meant an argument and not an appeal to pity or emotion. No pictures of people clubbing baby seals. The contest had 100 entrants which were winnowed down in a series of tests.
The test had people read the arguments and then decide how much of a promised payment they would they like to give to charity. An average of $2.58 was contributed to charity (of $10) in the control group (no argument). The best argument increased giving by 54% to $3.98. Not bad.
Here’s the argument which won:
Many people in poor countries suffer from a condition called trachoma. Trachoma is the major cause of preventable blindness in the world. Trachoma starts with bacteria that get in the eyes of children, especially children living in hot and dusty conditions where hygiene is poor. If not treated, a child with trachoma bacteria will begin to suffer from blurred vision and will gradually go blind, though this process may take many years. A very cheap treatment is available that cures the condition before blindness develops. As little as $25, donated to an effective agency, can prevent someone going blind later in life.
How much would you pay to prevent your own child becoming blind? Most of us would pay $25,000, $250,000, or even more, if we could afford it. The suffering of children in poor countries must matter more than one-thousandth as much as the suffering of our own child. That’s why it is good to support one of the effective agencies that are preventing blindness from trachoma, and need more donations to reach more people.
Now here’s the kicker. The winning argument was submitted by Peter Singer and Matthew Lindauer. Singer is clearly screwing with Schwitzgebel’s research!
You can read some of other effective arguments here. I don’t think it’s an accident that the winning argument was the shortest and also the least purely philosophical. I’m not saying Singer and Lindauer cheated, but compared to the other arguments the Singer-Lindauer argument is concrete and by making people think of their own children, likely to arouse emotion. That too is a lesson.
We are living in a (very temporary) dining paradise
Of course current arrangements are terrible for restaurants, and pretty soon they will be bad for your dining too, as more restaurants close up for good. But right now we live in a window of opportunity.
The owner and/or best chef is in the restaurant at a higher rate than usual — where else can he or she go?
Menus have been slimmed down, so there are fewer dishes, which means fresher ingredients and less delegation of cooking tasks.
Most menus have new dishes, not otherwise available, often in the direction of comfort food, which is a comfort because it tastes good!
They are cooking just for you, yum.
Show up for lunch at 11 a.m. or for dinner at 4:30 p.m. Please only eat outside. Bring a mask as well. And please don’t linger at the table, so that others may follow in your footsteps.
Note which places have good outdoor dining arrangements, and which have nice park benches right nearby. (Don’t drive the food back home as it becomes soggy and non-optimal for human consumption.) You won’t end up with that many options to choose from.
Nonetheless I’ve had some very good and special meals as of late.
Saturday assorted links
1. Another shoutout to Progress Studies School (for high school students, though not only).
3. The work of one Fast Grants winner, toward understanding how Covid takes over cells and in turn designing a drug cocktail for defense.
4. Isaac Chotiner interviews Marc Lipsitch.
5. Election coming up in Singapore (The Economist).
Why the sudden uptick in cases?
From Nate Silver, I am smushing together his tweet storm:
Something to think about: re-openings have been occurring gradually since late April in different states/counties. If you had a metric averaging out how open different states are, it would likely show a fairly linear pattern. So why is there a nonlinear increase in cases now?
Obviously some of that gets to the nature of exponential growth. An R of 1.3 isn’t *that* different than an R of 1.1, but played out over a few weeks, it makes a lot of difference. Still, a more complete story probably includes premature re-openings coupled with other stuff.
What other stuff? Two things seem worth pointing out. First, there seems to be some correlation with greater spread in states where it’s hot and people are spending more time indoors with the AC on. That *is* a bit nonlinear; there’s much more demand for AC in June than May.
And second, the conversation around social distancing changed a lot in early June with the protests and Trump making plans to resume his rallies. And COVID was no longer the lead story. Not blaming anyone here. But the timing is pertinent if people felt like “lockdowns are over”.
Here is the link, including a good picture of how the demand for air conditioning rises.
Covid-19 India prize (post with fixed links)
It goes to the COVIN Working Group for their paper “Adaptive control of COVID: Local, gradual, and trigger-based exit from lockdown in India.”
As India ends its lockdown, the team, led by Anup Malani, has developed a strategy to inform state policy using what is called an adaptive control strategy. This adaptive control strategy has three parts. First, introduction of activity should be done gradually. States are still learning how people respond to policy and how COVID responds to behavior. Small changes will allow states to avoid big mistakes. Second, states should set and track epidemiological targets, such as reducing the reproductive rate below 1, and adjust social distancing every week or two to meet those targets. Third, states should adopt different policies in different districts or city wards depending on the local conditions.
This project provides a path that allows states to contain epidemics in local areas and open up more of the economy. Going forward the team plans to help address shocks such as recent flows of laborers out of cities and estimate how effective different social distancing policies are at reducing mobility and contact rates.
This project has 14 authors (Anup Malani, Satej Soman, Sam Asher, Clement Imbert, Vaidehi Tandel, Anish Agarwal, Abdullah Alomar, Arnab Sarker, Devavrat Shah, Dennis Shen, Jonathan Gruber, Stuti Sachdeva, David Kaiser, and Luis Bettencourt) across five institutions (University of Chicago Law School and Mansueto Institute, MIT Economics Department and Institute for Data Systems and Society, IDFC Institute, John Hopkins University SAIS, and University of Warwick Economics Department).
Draft of the full paper is here. And for the visualizations see their website https://www.adaptivecontrol.org
Congrats to all the authors of the paper and their institutions. And here are links to the previous Emergent Ventures anti-Covid prize winners.
And I thank Shruti for her help with this.
Lead headline and sub-header for The New York Times
“Overlooked No More: Valerie Solanas, Radical Feminist Who Shot Andy Warhol
She made daring arguments in “SCUM Manifesto,” her case for a world without men. But her legacy as a writer and thinker was overshadowed by one violent act.”
The piece itself notes she argued for the wholesale extermination of men, that other people treated it as satire, but she defended its seriousness. And of course she shot and tried to kill Warhol and came very close to succeeding. The nature of her other contributions is far from clear, although toward the end of her life she was eating from a dumpster bin in Phoenix.
Later, she moderated her views, and the NYT piece ends with this:
…the author, Breanne Fahs, writes about an exchange between Solanas and her friend Jeremiah Newton. Newton asked Solanas if her manifesto was to be taken literally. “I don’t want to kill all men,” she replied. But, using an expletive, she added: “I think males should be neutered or castrated so they can’t mess up any more women’s lives.”
Loyal MR readers will know that this is not a media-bashing site, nor is it a NYT-bashing site. I remain proud to have written there for ten years, and I remain a loyal subscriber, as I have been since I was ten years old.
But…come on. If you work for The Times, I hope you are in some way able to raise your voice against what can only be described as a grotesque embarrassment, not to mention a contradiction of Black [Men’s] Lives Matter. Maybe the headline will be gone or changed by the time you read this, but the saddest part is that this seems to be part of a pattern, not just a one-off mistake. I’ve known many people at the NYT, at various levels, and each and every one has seemed like a good (and talented) person to me. I can only conclude that something has gone very very badly wrong in the editorial control process.
Addendum: Timothy Noah comments.
Friday assorted links
1. Covid patients in intensive care in Sweden. And my pandemic predictions from early April. Recommended.
2. Almost 1 in 3 pilots in Pakistan have fake licenses.
3. An Italian guy who thinks quantum mechanics is totally wrong (NYT).
4. In this SuperFinal, Stockfish is actually slightly ahead of the AlphaZero semi-clone.
5. The NYT battle over Scott Alexander.
6. New results on T-cell immunity.
7. Covid-19 cases and local partisanship. And more here and the crude polemic version (Krugman is about the most “off” person you can read on this topic).