Results for “police” 716 found
Is Haiti safe again?
I mean sort of safe. "Haiti safe." Reed Lindsay reports:
Today, Haiti’s reputation is undeserved, say security analysts and
officials from the U.N. peacekeeping mission. They argue that Haiti is
no more violent than any other Latin American country. "It’s
a big myth," said Fred Blaise, spokesman for the U.N. police force in
Haiti. "Port-au-Prince is no more dangerous than any big city. You can
go to New York and get pickpocketed and held at gunpoint."
He may not be a totally objective and disinterested observer. How about this:
Reliable statistics are scarce in Haiti, but U.N. data indicate that the country could be among the safest in the region. The U.N. peacekeeping mission recorded 487 homicides in Haiti last year, or about 5.6 per 100,000 people.
A
U.N.-World Bank study last year estimated the Caribbean’s average
homicide rate at 30 per 100,000, with Jamaica registering nearly nine
times as many – 49 homicides per 100,000 people – as those recorded by
the United Nations in Haiti.
In 2006, the neighboring
Dominican Republic notched more than four times more homicides per
capita than those registered in Haiti: 23.6 per 100,000, according to
the Central American Observatory on Violence. Even the United
States would appear to have a higher homicide rate: 5.7 per 100,000 in
2006, according to the U.S. Justice Department.
I believe these numbers; at some margin even murder is a normal good. But most convincing, I think, is this:
Viva Rio, a Brazilian-based violence reduction group that came to Haiti
at the request of the U.N. mission’s disarmament program, has found
Port-au-Prince’s armed groups more receptive than those in Rio de
Janeiro’s slums.
Elsewhere in the country poor Haitians are eating cakes of dirt, and William Griffiths points me to this:
While
millions of Haitians go hungry, containers full of food are stacking up
in the nation’s ports because of government red tape – leaving tons of
beans, rice and other staples to rot under a sweltering sun or be
devoured by vermin.A government attempt to clean up a corrupt port system that has helped
make Haiti a major conduit for Colombian cocaine has added new layers
of bureaucracy – and led to backlogs so severe they are being felt 600
miles away in Miami, where cargo shipments to Haiti have ground almost
to a standstill.
Gun Buyback Misfires
Oakland’s recent gun buyback was especially ridiculous. The police offered up to $250 for a gun "no questions asked, no ID required." The first people in line? Two gun dealers from Reno with 60 cheap handguns. Fortunately the buyback did manage to get some guns off the street, too bad they were turned in by a bunch of senior citizens from an assisted living facility. Whew, the streets are safe at last.
Even putting aside the obvious nonsense, gun buybacks simply don’t work. In technical terms the supply of guns to Oakland is perfectly elastic so buybacks won’t reduce the number of guns in Oakland. Here is an analogy from my op-ed in the Oakland Tribune.
Imagine that instead of guns, the Oakland police decided, for
whatever strange reason, to buy back sneakers. The idea of a gun
buyback is to reduce the supply of guns in Oakland. Do you think that a
sneaker buyback program would reduce the number of people wearing
sneakers in Oakland? Of course not.All that would happen is that people would reach into the
back of their closet and sell the police a bunch of old, tired, stinky
sneakers.Gun buybacks won’t reduce the number of guns in Oakland. In fact, buybacks may increase the number of guns in Oakland.
Imagine that gun dealers offered a guarantee with every gun:
Whenever this gun gets old and wears down, the dealer will buy back the
gun for $250.The dealer’s guarantee makes guns more valuable, so people will buy more guns.
But the story is exactly the same when it’s the police offering
the guarantee. If buyers know that they can sell their old guns in a
buyback, they are more likely to buy new guns. Thus the more common
that gun buybacks become, the more likely they are to misfire….The guns bought in this buyback are destined to be melted down to create a monument. It’s a shame that this monument will be the only lasting effect of the buyback.
Why are so many lawyers politicians?
Johan Richter, a loyal MR reader, writes to me:
As the primary elections are coming up is is interesting to note that so many of the contenders are lawyers, something that is also true of the members of Congress, where I believe half are lawyers. Why are so many US politicians lawyers? It seems odd considering that A) Legal training seems unnecessary for performing the main job of a politician, regardless of whether one takes that to be courting public opinion or governing the country. And there is hardly any deficit of lawyers in Washington to ask for advice if legal knowledge turns out to be needed. B) Being a lawyer isn’t very prestigious as far as I know. Being a military, doctor, police officer, businessman or perhaps even a academic would surely be regarded by many voters as more respectable professions than being a lawyer. C) Other countries don’t have nearly the same over-representation of lawyers in their parliaments as the US does.
I thought Google would yield a paper on this question but I can’t find it. My guess is that lawyers are good at fundraising and good at developing personal contacts. This helps explain why fewer politicians are lawyers in many other countries; money is more important in American politics. A lawyer also has greater chance to exhibit the qualities that would signal success in politics, such as the ability to persuade and the ability to speak well on one’s feet. Not to mention that many lawyers have ambition.
Natasha, who is a lawyer, adds that law generates an outflux of people to many other fields, not just politics. There is also a path-dependence effect, by which a previous presence of politicians in law breeds the same for the future. What else do you all know about this?
Addendum: I’ve posted a version of this query over at Volokh.com as well; I expect they will have something to say about the question.
Second addendum: Over at VC, Shawn says:
You will also find that Real Estate and Insurance agents are
disproportionately represented in politics, at least at the more local
levels.These professions (along with practicing law) provide the career
flexibility for would be politicians to put their jobs on hold or scale
them down a few degrees while pursuing elected office or serving is
such an office.This flexibility also is what attracts people who wish to be career
politicians, so that they have a job to fall back on between election
seasons that won’t trap them into long term obligations, keeping them
from the next election cycle or serving if elected.These careers also give would be politicians a good place to get recognition and network within their communities.
Third addendum: Bob Tollison writes to me: "McCormick and I devote a chapter 5 to why lawyers
dominate legislatures in our book– Politicians, Legislation and the
Economy, Martinus Nihoff, 1981. Lawyers are better at combining being in the
legisture with making outside income. Hence, lawyers dominate low legislative
pay states because seats have a higher present value. Women dominate high pay
states."
Markets in everything
A prostitute is more likely to have sex with a police officer than to get officially arrested by one.
That’s from the new Levitt-Venkatesh paper, hat tips to Matt Yglesias and Kerry Howley, both of whom add interesting commentary.
Department of Human Rationality
According to the San Francisco Chronicle, police found a shoe and blood in an area between the gate and the edge of the animal’s 25- to 30-foot-wide moat, raising the possibility that one of the victims dangled a leg or other body part over the edge of the moat…
One zoo official insisted the tiger did not get out through an open door and must have climbed or leaped out. But Jack Hanna, former director of the Columbus Zoo, said such a leap would be an unbelievable feat and ”virtually impossible.”
Instead, he speculated that visitors could have been fooling around and might have taunted the animal and perhaps even helped it get out by, say, putting a board in the moat.
Ron Magill, a spokesman at the Miami Metro Zoo, said it was unlikely a zoo tiger could make such a leap, even with a running start.
The story is here. And I agree with what Robin Hanson is probably thinking: it was signaling behavior. Maybe from the tiger too.
Update: Here is one story, here is more, some of you rail in the comments but the initial interpretation is looking correct. Note also that the tiger, after killing the first boy, went 300 yards to track down the other two boys and not anyone else.
Blogging Death in LA
The LATimes has a blog, The Homicide Report, that covers murders in LA. Here is one entry:
Timothy Johnson, 37, a black man, was shot multiple times at 939 E.
92nd Street in Watts at about 3:23 a.m. Sunday, Nov. 25, and died at
the scene. Police officers had received a "shots fired" call and found
him. He had been visiting friends in the area.He had gone to a party that night, then had stopped on his way home
to socialize with friends outside. His shooters came by walking or
driving. He was hit multiple times. When officers arrived, he was
alone, dead on the ground, and the people who had been outside with him
had disappeared. A pit-bull puppy chained in the yard was curled on his
body.
The comments begin as you might expect from families and friends.
… The life of an African American Man in LA has proven to be a fight
till the death. I am struggling now as I sit here looking at your
picture. All the years we spent growing up together, supporting each
other and just loving one another. I Love you!! You were my cousin by
birth but my brother at heart.Love Kim
Posted by: Khaleelah Muhammad | November 28, 2007 at 04:50 PM
but then a darker story is revealed:
To all the people speaking glowing words about this man … im sure
some of you know and for those that dont, this man was a killer and it
was known by LAPD that he has blood on his hands. Trust me he got what
he deserved and what i prayed for. He now has to meet GOD face to face
and face the people that HE has killedPosted by: Satisfyied Person | November 29, 2007 at 11:03 AM
Many entries excerpted in the LATimes can be found here, all of the comments (start at the bottom and work up) are here.
Faux Indian government
A fake government office has been discovered in northern India that collected taxes, provided civic services and even handed out birth and death certificates, a report said Monday.
An office was set up outside Jhansi town in Uttar Pradesh state and 20 people were employed to carry out jobs such as street sweeping.
I liked this part:
"He later seems to have decided to carry on with the office as it did not appear to be a loss-making proposition," an unnamed police officer was quoted by Times of India saying.
The scam only came to light after some employees complained about salary problems to superiors in the actual government department, the report said.
"We were shocked to hear this as we ourselves were not aware that our department had a branch office," R. Kulkshreshtra, an official with the Jhansi Municipal Corperation, told the newspaper.
Here is the story, here is another. Thanks to Sarah Jeong for the pointer.
Or if you’re interested in Indian outsourcing, try this, courtesy of Peter Clark.
Non (Anti?) Sequitur of the Day
Speaking on why it would be a terrible mistake to overturn Washington DC’s 31-year old ban on handguns, Assistant police chief Alfred Durham said today:
The ban on handguns is a matter of life and death because 80% of the murders in DC are caused by handguns.
Violence: A Micro-sociological Theory
That’s the new book from Randall Collins. The main argument is that people are not as predisposed to violence as we might think. Collins cites a wide array of evidence, from military behavior in the field to, most intriguingly, video studies of the micro-expressions of violent perpetrators. People are more naturally tense and fearful, sometimes full of bluster but usually looking to avoid confrontation unless they have vastly superior numbers on their side. The prospect of violence makes people feel weak and scared. The greatest dangers of violence arises from atrocities against the weak under overwhelming conditions, ritualized violence enacted in front of supportive audiences, or clandestine terrorism or murder.
"Violence is not primordial, and civilization does not tame it; the opposite is much nearer the truth." Similarly, most political violence does not follow from centuries-old grudge matches, but rather from recently fabricated, dynamically dangerous social ritual interactions. Violence can appear on the scene rapidly but it can vanish as well, so there is hope for Iraq.
In reality most violent encounters end almost immediately, contrary to TV and the movies. Someone runs away or a single punch ends the struggle. The actual gunfight at O.K. Corral took less than thirty seconds, whereas the famous movie scene extends for ten minutes.
In combat it is just as dangerous to be a medic as a soldier, but medics experience far less combat fatigue. Collins argues this is because killing is in so many ways contrary to human nature.
This book has soo many interesting parts, including the micro-dynamics of the Rape of Nanjing, how British soccer stadium designs were (but now less) conducive to violence, how demonstrations can turn into violent confrontations with the police (lines break down and micro-situations of overwhelming power arise), which children and schools are most conducive to bullying, why basketball has fewer fights than football or hockey (no padding), the dynamics of a mosh pit, and how hired assassins motivate themselves, among many other topics.
You economists all spend so much time studying voluntary interaction, surely you can devote one book’s worth of effort to the study of violence, and yes I mean violence at the micro level.
I don’t agree with everything in this book. I think Collins too quickly downplays the importance of evolutionary biology (most fights are between young males), and it is not always clear if he has a systematic theory or instead a catalog of causes of violence.
Here is the book’s home page, including chapter one. Here is a page on Collins. Here is an interview with Collins. He is now working on a theory of sexual interactions.
Quite simply, Collins is one of the most important writers and thinkers today.
I know many of you have a bit of book fatigue from MR, but that is because it has been such a splendid year for the written word. Violence: A Micro-sociological Theory is one of the most important social science books of the last few years. I’ll go even further and say the same is true for any random one hundred pages you might select from the volume; it is also a wonderful for browsing.
It’s due out January 10, you can pre-order at the links.
Private Fire Prevention
Here’s an interesting story:
In Idaho, when the Castle Rock wildfire started with a lightning
strike, broke out and started to rapidly spread, hundreds of high-end
homes were immediately evacuated. At that point a national insurance
company which caters to America’s wealthy decided that it needed to act
quickly. The insurance company sent a private crew of firefighters to
Wood River Valley, near Castle Rock, to protect 22 homes that it has
insured for millions of dollars.…The insurance company
provided a fire truck and two man team to douse the insured homes with
Phos-Chek, the same fire retardant dropped from U.S. Forest Service
aircraft.
Insurance services like this have a long history not just in fire fighting but also in crime-fighting. In 18th and 19th century Britain long before the advent of government police, members of the public organized themselves into prosecution associations – essentially insurance clubs that would pay for the investigation, detection and prosecution of crime. You can still see a faint imprint of this lost system today when insurance companies hire detectives to investigate large property crimes. See The Voluntary City for more.
Social cooperation
People from northern New Jersey are brought up believing this sort of thing happens frequently:
LOGAN, W.Va., Sept. 11 – A 20-year-old woman was held captive for more
than a week in a mobile home, where she was raped, stabbed and tortured
by at least a half-dozen people, the police said…[There are further truly gruesome details, which I will spare you, but see the link if you must]
Six people, including a mother and her son and a mother and her daughter, have been charged in the case.
The bottom line?
The Brewster family and their trailer has a history of violent crime, the police said.
All monies are commodity monies
Millions of Indian coins are being smuggled into neighbouring Bangladesh and turned into razor blades. And that’s creating an acute shortage of coins in many parts of India, officials say.
Police in Calcutta say that the recent arrest of a grocer highlights the extent of the problem. They seized what they said was a huge coin-melting unit which he was operating in a run-down shack…
"Our one rupee coin is in fact worth 35 rupees, because we make five to seven blades out of them," the grocer allegedly told the police.
In some cases the temporary solution is a private money:
To deal with the coin shortage, some tea gardens in the north-eastern state of Assam have resorted to issuing cardboard coin-slips to their workers.
The denomination is marked on these slips and they are used for buying and selling within the gardens.
Here is the story. The pointer is from www.geekpress.com.
Markets in everything: driver’s license points
It is the latest ruse on the roads of France: drivers are avoiding
disqualification by trading licence points on the internet. Complete strangers are taking the rap for speeding offences in return for up
to €1,500 (£1,000), and police admit they are powerless to intervene. Even
pensioners who have not driven for many years are getting in on the act.
The market is growing:
French officials were unable to estimate the scale of points fiddling. Across
the border in Spain, the Autopista.es
online motoring site, estimates the black market in points there is worth
€30 million a month.
One seller explains he does abide by ethical standards:
“I don’t have a bad conscience,” he [the seller] told le Parisien. “I only offer my
services to people with small excesses of speed. And I always ask to see a
copy of the ticket. I would never sell my points to a road hog.”
Here is the full explanation. The pointer is from Kurt Muehmel.
Can this work? High state-level fines for driving offenses
Say you are driving 78 mph on the Capital Beltway and a state trooper
tickets you for "reckless driving — speeding 20 mph over." You will
probably be fined $200 by the judge. But then you will receive a new,
additional $1,050 fine from the Old Dominion, payable in three
convenient installments. So convenient that you must pay the first one
immediately, at the courthouse.
Coming to Virginia, July 1. Imagine all the people braking as they cross the Potomac coming from Maryland. The argument against, of course, is simply that traffic cannot work at 55 mph and this puts too much discretion into the hands of police. Or will some poor offenders simply flee and set off a police chase? (If you can’t pay the fine you lose your license.) The goal of the fines is to fund state-level public works and perhaps the precedent is not ideal either.
Addendum: Larry Ribstien piles on.
What I’ve been reading
1. House of Leaves, by Mark Danielewski. This experimental novel, written with varying typefaces, page layouts, and interjected footnotes, is a fun mock of the academization of literature. It has a large cult following but can be enjoyed by the general reader. Don’t be intimidated by the heft, a third of the pages are essentially blank. It felt great making so much progress so quickly.
2. The Grid: A Journey Through the Heart of Our Electrified World, by Phillip F. Schewe. Better than no book at all, but this important topic still awaits its definitive treatment.
3. The Triumph of the Thriller: How Cops, Crooks, and Cannibals Captured Popular Fiction, by Patrick Anderson. A good guide and overview, the author argues that Raymond Chandler is overrated relative to say Macdonald or Kehane.
4. Vasily Grossman, Life and Fate. This Soviet-era masterpiece, which covers the Battle of Stalingrad, bored me. I have no complaint about its quality, I simply felt the time in my life is past to further digest those themes in an emotionally meaningful way.
5. Michael Chabon, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union: A Novel. This comic detective story is based on an alternative reality in which Israel loses the 1948 war and the surviving Jews settle in Alaska. It’s the first book of his I’ve liked, though I don’t think it has much substance.
6. Don Boudreaux recommends ten books.