
NYC cops did a work stop, yet crime dropped - lhopki01
https://arstechnica.co.uk/science/2017/09/nyc-cops-did-a-work-stop-yet-crime-dropped/
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lr4444lr
The article deflates its own headline:

 _During the slowdown, police continued to respond to calls, and the arrest
rate for major crimes (murder, rape, robbery, felony assault, burglary, grand
larceny, and grand theft auto) remained constant. But the arrest rate for non-
major crime and narcotic offenses dropped, as did the number of stop-and-frisk
events._

So the crime that dropped was that which the cops stopped pursuing because
there were no calls about it. No action means no official, recordable data.

There's a lot of shady and shoddy data in the social "science" around crime.
As has been said more generally, torture the data enough and it will tell you
whatever you want to hear. IMHO, the best indicator to look at is murder rate,
because there is a body which has to be dealt with and accounted for in the
stats, despite any political pressures.

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omginternets
>in the social "science" around crime

This is likely to provoke strong reactions from people who think you're
against social science as a whole, but you raise an important point: much of
what passes for academic social science is political activism in disguise.

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dsfyu404ed
Especially the closer you get to certain topics (like crime).

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breadmaster
The _reports_ of crime dropped.

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tnzn
Yeah and the whole point of the article is to discuss why. Thanks for your
contribution anyways

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lunchables
The headline says "crime dropped". It's clearly misleading, parent is just
correcting it.

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zzzcpan
"Researchers are now arguing about what this tells us."

Don't we have like tons of history showing us that police doesn't actually
exist to fight crime? Not much to argue about, unless you believe in
government propaganda.

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jessaustin
One question seems to have been left unexplored: why did the stoppage stop?
Could it have been that police themselves observed by the drop in crime how
superfluous or even deleterious their usual contributions to society must be?
"We've got to get back to work, or else there will be much less work to get
back to!"

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scarface74
What was the purpose of this article? It didn’t give a definitive conclusion
either way nor did it give enough information to discuss intelligently.

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_pmf_
That's Huffington Post level of reporting.

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egberts1
Yeah, crimes dropped because cops aren’t reporting in to work, thus not
reporting to file crime rates. — in other news, the water is wet.

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CoolGuySteve
Is arstechnica broken for anyone else? Every time I scroll down, the page
slowly scrolls back up.

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sogen
Browser? Have seen some odd behavior since I updated to safari 11

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CoolGuySteve
Chrome on windows

