Thanks to the work of the Tribune News App team in posting how to generate maps, I put together a map of 187 intersections with red light cameras.
Here is a link to the KML data, please let me know if anything needs to be updated.
[From L.A. Consequential - Opinionator Blog - NYTimes.com]
In a column in the NY Times, Tim Egan’s writes about the crime drop in LA. The LA murder rate is down 50% from 2 years ago. Omaha, Nebraska has a higher murder rate than LA.
Los Angeles is on a pace for about 230 murders this year, in a city of nearly 4 million people. And the department clears — solves and prosecutes — more than 80 percent of the homicides, well above the national average for big cities.
So what is the explanation for the drop in crime? As Egan notes, there are lots of possible factors:
A high-tech mapping strategy, where police move on crime hot spots in something close to real time, was pioneered in New York and mastered here (give praise to William Bratton, who oversaw the departments in both cities, for that effort); the stuffing of prisons with career criminals also gets much of the credit; the role played by legalized abortion, according to the authors Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner in their book “Freakonomics,” in preventing a generation of unwanted children from being born; and the settling down of the drug trade, the source of so much violence during the formative years of narcotic fiefdoms, to such a degree that in many parts of the city there are now more medical marijuana dispensers in Los Angeles than Starbucks outlets (regulated retailers creating an ecosystem of nonviolence).
Interestingly, LA has accomplished this without a reliance on surveillance cameras. Unlike Chicago, where cameras are given prominence, I believe cameras play a tiny role in the LA police strategy. While this is quite anecdotal, it does pose the question of whether cameras are the most effective tool for fighting crime. LA’s successful strategy has focused on using Compstat and hiring more police officers in the last few years.
[From Ex-New York Police Officials Question Crime Data Integrity - NYTimes.com]
As crime statistics have grown in importance in policing, there is always a worry that they are being massaged. There is tremendous pressure on the police to constantly reduce crime based on crime statistics. Viewers of The Wire are familiar with how crime statistics were manipulated in that show. A recent survey of New York Police Department captains and higher-ranking officers indicated some issues with manipulating crime statistics:
The retired members of the force reported that they were aware over the years of instances of “ethically inappropriate” changes to complaints of crimes in the seven categories measured by the department’s signature CompStat program, according to a summary of the results of the survey and interviews with the researchers who conducted it.
In interviews with the criminologists, other retired senior officers cited examples of what the researchers believe was a periodic practice among some precinct commanders and supervisors: checking eBay, other Web sites, catalogs or other sources to find prices for items that had been reported stolen that were lower than the value provided by the crime victim. They would then use the lower values to reduce reported grand larcenies — felony thefts valued at more than $1,000, which are recorded as index crimes under CompStat — to misdemeanors, which are not, the researchers said.
Others also said that precinct commanders or aides they dispatched sometimes went to crime scenes to persuade victims not to file complaints or to urge them to change their accounts in ways that could result in the downgrading of offenses to lesser crimes, the researchers said.
[From Chicago homicides drop for 2009 - chicagotribune.com]
Here are the stats:
2003 – 598
2004 – 448
2005 – 448
2006 – 467
2007 – 445
2008 – 510
2009 – 453
While cameras were mentioned last year as a strategy to drive down crime, they received no credit in the Tribune article. The CPD highlighted its city gang teams, use of informants, and analyzing crime data as the best explanations for the reduced crime.
[From Governing through Crime: Crime Decline Conundrum]
Why is crime going up? or down? is a timeless issue and one that has many answers. In Chicago, Wesley Skogan has talked about how larger demographic trends are affecting crime in big cities and the role of gangs on Chicago’s crime rate.
Jonathon Simon over at Governing through Crime also adds his thoughts. Commenting on the latest drops in crime big cities, he speculates on the top three factors underlying the crime drops:
1. Bottoming out of the de-industrialization of American cities that began in 1946 and continued through the 1980s. Even if new economic engines of prosperity have not exactly re-emerged in many cities, the process of losing existing assets has run its course.
2. Demographic diversification of urban neighborhoods through immigration and in-migration of suburbanites fleeing unsustainable lifestyles.
3. Better trained and motivated police forces.
A few weeks ago, I was contacted by a representative of William Kelly, who is the host of a Chicago TV show, Sportsaholic. Bill was mugged and beaten to the ground in front of his Gold Coast/Streeterville residence. He noticed some blue light cameras and was hoping they could help identify his attackers. After almost two weeks, Bill was finally able to review the tape. The camera was too far away and not at the correct angle to capture his attackers. This led Bill Kelly to characterize the camera system as wasteful. After all, from what he saw, the camera system was was not terribly useful.
As a scholar on cameras, I try to take a big picture view. This leads me to wonder how many others have had similar or disimilar experiences as Bill. How many crimes are solved by cameras? We don’t have this kind of data, because most police departments don’t collect it. Jeff Roush over at Fighting Crime From Above argues that we need more data on cameras. This leads him to recommend more data in the following four areas:
I agree with Jeff and I would urge everyone to try to push for the collection of this data. It is the only way we can move from anecdotes to a more through scientific understanding of how cameras affect crime.
From Economist.com :
A great article on crime in big cities, including Chicago. Its a must read, especially for those following crime trends in the cities and the impact of surveillance technology on crime. The article is based on the research of Wesley Skogan, a criminologist at Northwestern University. Here are some quotes from the article on the methods that help to reduce crime:
The big cities’ methods may sound obvious, yet they are surprisingly rare. Many police forces are not divided into neighbourhood units. Oakland’s struggling force, for example, is organised into three daily shifts, or “watches”, which makes it hard to hold anybody accountable for steadily rising crime in a district. Even when smaller police forces track emerging hot spots, they often fail to move quickly enough to cool them down.
. . .
However shrewdly the cops are deployed, they might not have cut crime so dramatically if social trends had not also been moving in the right direction.
The most obvious change is that, thanks in part to high property prices, all three cities are shedding young people. Together they lost more than 200,000 15-to 24-year-olds between 2000 and 2005. That bodes ill for their creativity and future competitiveness, but it is good news for the police. Young people are not just more likely to commit crimes. Thanks to their habit of walking around at night and their taste for portable electronic gizmos, they are also more likely to become its targets.
Another change is that poor Americans have been displaced by poor immigrants—who, as studies have repeatedly shown, are much better behaved than natives of similar means. This trend is symbolised by the disappearance of blacks. Roughly half of America’s murder victims and about the same proportion of suspected murderers are black. In five years America’s three biggest cities lost almost a tenth of their black residents, while elsewhere in America their numbers held steady.
The key issue for this blog is what is not mentioned in the article, surveillance cameras. In fact, in a draft article on Wesley Skogan’s web site, he specifically notes that there is no evidence of the effectiveness of smarter police techniques, such as cameras. (I have known about this article for a while, but decided to hold this back until Skogan was ready to go public – I will leave to the reader to find the actual article).
This is a clear slap to the face of Chicago’s PR machine for cameras. Once again cameras are found not to reduce crime. Nevertheless, Chicago will undoubtedly tout the efficacy of the camera network on questionable and publicly unavailable data.
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