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John Pfaff Profile picture
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Apr 7 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Posted at 3:40 pm, about the ongoing delays with the overdue #NYBudget-slash-everything-else bill.

Genuinely unsure if this is a good sign or a bad one: abc7ny.com/new-york-state…

Regardless, this isn't the sort of issue that should be passed as its written!
This stuff was unacceptable when Congressional Republican wrote their 2017 tax bill in secret, and it's unacceptable here.

We should see the proposals and actually discuss them.

ESPECIALLY since, with bail reform, we actually have data that can inform us abt what will happen.
I mean, put aside the premise of the current bail reform-reform, which is built on the utterly untested and somewhat untestable claim that bail reform has made things "worse."

At the very least, we could use our data to estimate how many and what sort of cases would be affected.
But if the bill gets finished at 5:10 and voted on at 5:11, there's no way to even try to get a sense of what it will do to the people it will impact.

Deeply, deeply disappointing.

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More from @JohnFPfaff

John Pfaff Profile picture
Apr 7
This strikes me as a good ex of why per capita comparisons aren't always the right one.

The exposure to alcohol and drugs are lower in prison than outside of it (even if still available). So a lower per-capita risk of death may still reflect a higher per-UNIT consumed risk.
Same issue with claiming that, say, robbery declined in 2020. Per CAPITA robberies did, yes.

But so many fewer ppl were out and about that a recent study by @AaronChalfin suggests risk per hour out and about ROSE.
Or during the 1970s, per capita incarceration rates rose, but per CRIME incarceration rates fell... which may explain some of the 1980s backlash.

Or during the 2010, per capita prison pops fell, but per CRIME rates often ROSE. Wasn't quite the (mild) success we claim.
Read 4 tweets
John Pfaff Profile picture
Apr 6
The last thing we need is another true-crime TV show.

If we have to have one, the VERY last thing we need is one abt murder, the most salient--but rarest--of crimes.

But also? Its framing shows how skewed the popular understanding is of homicide:

theroot.com/someone-they-k…
The show is framed on zooming in on the interesting and puzzling cases where the victim knew the person who killed them.

Also known as: ~80% of homicides w relationship data.

Stranger danger isn't the dominant danger, but it is by far the most attention-grabbing.
Even if we assume all "unknowns" are "strangers"--and it makes sense the unknowns would skew that way--we get to ~50% of all homicides where the victim and the killer knew each other.

The way we cover homicide in news and TV has given ppl a real bad sense of its reality.
Read 4 tweets
John Pfaff Profile picture
Apr 5
So... the use of state-level partisan composition strikes me as problematic, bc crime is mostly local, and crime POLICY is mostly local too. And even in red states, cities tend to be blue(r).

We can get a better look at this using the Major Chiefs data.

news.yahoo.com/republican-con…
Here are homicide rates for cities that had either a clear D or R mayor in 2020 and 2021.

R-led cities clearly tend to cluster at the lower end of things.

Now, to be clear, this doesn't lend itself to an easy causal story! ImageImage
R-cities, for example, may be more sprawling, perhaps causally linked to conservativeness (or other things that correlate with that).

Compare Jacksonville and St. Louis. Sprawling cities will always have lower crime rates, given the geographic concentration of crime. ImageImage
Read 7 tweets
John Pfaff Profile picture
Mar 4
"Process is the Punishment" datapoint of note:

Part of the goal of NYS's bail reform was to increase the use of "desk appearance tickets": when arrested, large #s of defendants were supposed to be released prior to arraignment, not detained by the police.

It hasn't happened. Image
Of those charged with misdemeanors in NYS from 1/1/20 (when bail reform adopted) to 6/31/21, only ~30% of those arrested for misdemeanors got DATs. In NYC, it drops to barely ~20%.

Almost all misdemeanor arrests still produce immediate lockups. Those are real costs.
Interestingly, the distribution of offenses that get custody vs. DATs do not... look all that different. So it doesn't seem like it is driven by type of misdemeanor arrest. ImageImage
Read 5 tweets
John Pfaff Profile picture
Mar 4
This paper looks at a really important Covid question with implications well beyond Covid:

Was the 2020 decline in things like robbery more the product of fewer people to rob?

Results from NY, LA, Chi suggest yes: risk per hour outside rose, but less than hours outside fell.
Thanks to things like cellphones, we can move away from asking "crimes per person" and instead look at "crimes per hour exposed," even down to the Census block.

(Privacy experts are surely sweating reading that, and understandably so, but at least the research a silver lining?)
At least one corollary to this paper is that we likely UNDERstate the magnitude of the crime decline of the 1990s, since that was associated with a rebound in civic life--more hours on the street, more chance of victimization, yet a fall in even the crude crime rates.
Read 5 tweets
John Pfaff Profile picture
Feb 28
We’ve hit that unpleasant infliction point #onhere, I think.

With everything bogged down, Twitter-as-effective-breaking-news site has slowed down too.

And into the void? Well, in rushes the pontificating punditocracy.
Huge, bold confident predictions, four days in, of What This All Means for the Next Forty Years.

Which is usually the opposite of what the next guy #onhere is saying This Must Imply for the Next Fifty.

It’s okay to admit we don’t know where things are heading.
When journalists ask me where crim legal reform will be in ten years, I tell them I have no f-ing clue, and neither does anyone else they talk to, however confident they sound.

And crim legal reform is 1/100th as complex and path-dependent as … the Global Political Order.
Read 4 tweets

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