Retiring NY Police Chief Kelly Takes One Last Swing At The FBI -- And His Critics -- On His Way Out The Door

from the buh-bye dept

New York City Police Chief Ray Kelly is nearly nothing but history, but that hasn't stopped him from doing his best to secure his legacy before calling it a career. (And exiting with $1.5 million worth of personal bodyguards paid for by the city city's residents…)

In an interview with the New York Times, Kelly defended the NYPD's stop-and-frisk program, first stating that he was "polling well" and following that up with the usual defense that crime numbers had declined over the past decade. Of course, neither he nor his interviewer bothered to point out his tenure coincided with a period of steep decline in violent crime nationwide nor did they mention the fact that Judge Scheindlin, in her decision finding the program unconstitutional, stated basically that the ends don't justify the means. Crime numbers would probably drop further if the NYPD performed warrantless house-to-house searches, but that still wouldn't make it justifiable.

But Kelly went further than shrugging off criticism of the city's most notorious law enforcement program, targeting the FBI for its apparent inability to prevent domestic terrorist attacks.

The interview turns to 2002 and those post-attack days when Mr. Kelly returned to the commissioner’s office. One of Mr. Kelly’s professors at Harvard, Graham Allison, studied nuclear terror and released prospective blast maps for New York City.

Mr. Kelly did not need to see blast maps. He lived in Battery Park City, within sight of ground zero.

He smiled grimly. “It was gloom and doom,” he said. “Our prime lesson is that we couldn’t rely on the feds alone.” [...]

For his part, Mr. Kelly could not resist another jab at the F.B.I. and its failure to tell the Boston Police Department everything suspicious that it knew about one of the men who later bombed the Boston Marathon.

“We want information right away,” he says. “I think in retrospect the mayor in Boston and the police commissioner in Boston feel the same way based on what they knew or didn’t know relative to the Boston Marathon bombing.”

In a way, he's right. The failure of government agencies to share information on suspected terrorists failed to prevent the 9/11 attacks as well as contributed to the Boston bombers eluding detection until it was too late. (But our NSA provided "valuable" intel suggesting the Boston bombing was an isolated attack.)

But more troubling is the underlying assertion that the NYPD can do a better job on its own. Under Ray Kelly, the NYPD became known for its pervasive surveillance of Muslims and their places of worship. Thousands of reports were generated and hundreds of informants were deployed to infiltrate these communities. This is the NYPD's other shame -- widespread rights violations and little to nothing to chalk up in the "results" column.

Kelly employed a former CIA official to run this program who leveraged the post-9/11 attack climate of fear to convince a judge to strip civil liberties protections granted by a previous court decision (the "Handschu Agreement"). Using this weakened "agreement," the NYPD began placing Muslims under surveillance while they engaged in First Amendment-protected activity. The means used to acquire intel were so questionable, the CIA itself was unable to use anything the NYPD provided because the methods deployed violated several of the CIA's own rules. If the CIA find "evidence" collected by a local law enforcement agency unusable, there's obviously some serious flaws in the methods deployed to gather intelligence.

Kelly may have been frustrated by the lack of interagency sharing, but his decision to make the NYPD a law unto itself was the wrong response. And again, there's no indication that this widespread surveillance and infiltration prevented terrorist attacks. Kelly seems to feel the lack of terrorist attacks speaks for itself -- and justifies the ongoing civil liberties violations performed by his department.

Filed Under: crime, fbi, nypd, ray kelly, stop and frisk

Massive Man-in-the-Middle Attacks Have Been Hijacking Huge Amounts Of Internet Traffic And Almost No One Noticed

from the this-is-a-problem dept

Recently, at the debate between former NSA (and CIA) boss Michael Hayden and reporter Barton Gellman, one of the statements Hayden made has stuck with me. He talked about this "wonderful" "accident of history and technology that put most of the world's web traffic inside the United States." He used this to suggest that it was our right and duty to therefore use that traffic to spy on everyone possible. I'm thinking about that statement, because (1) it was no "accident" of history or technology that resulted in that, but rather a concerted effort based on where the internet was first built and (2) because there's no reason why it needs to remain that way. And that second point is extra important when you realize that with a little effort, it's not that hard for determined individuals, organizations or governments to divert that traffic through other countries.

And, it turns out, that's exactly what's happening. Someone (or a group of someones) has been running a number of giant man-in-the-middle attacks, effectively routing a lot of traffic through Belarus and Iceland, as described in great detail by Renesys (and again in slightly more laymen's terms by Arik Hesseldahl).

Whoever is doing it, is almost certainly up to no good. It seems likely that the attacks are for criminal purposes, rather than government espionage, but it certainly could be done either way. Renesys gives a few examples of the hijackings, starting with a brief one in February of this year, in which global traffic was redirected to an ISP in Belarus, where the traffic had no reason to be. Renesys gives a single example of a trace showing a packet supposedly going from Guadalajara, Mexico to Washington, DC... but with quite the detour:

Here’s an example of a trace from Guadalajara, Mexico to Washington, DC that goes through Moscow and Minsk. Mexican provider Alestra hands it to PCCW for transit in Laredo, Texas. PCCW takes it to the Washington, DC metro area, where they would normally hand it to Qwest/Centurylink for delivery.

Instead, however, PCCW gives it to Level3 (previously Global Crossing), who is advertising a false Belarus route, having heard it from Russia’s TransTelecom, who heard it from their customer, Belarus Telecom. Level3 carries the traffic to London, where it delivers it to Transtelecom, who takes it to Moscow and on to Belarus. Beltelecom has a chance to examine the traffic, and then sends it back out on the “clean path” through Russian provider ReTN. ReTN delivers it to Frankfurt and hands it to NTT, who takes it to New York. Finally, NTT hands it off to Qwest/Centurylink in Washington DC, and the traffic is delivered.

Here's that same traceroute in graphic form from Renesys: This is hardly the only example. I highly recommend reading the entire Renesys report. It notes how this happens, and how this had been a "theoretical concern," but is now happening "fairly regularly." It also notes that these attacks leave a very visible footprint -- and lots of large providers should be monitoring this, but aren't.

This is absolutely true, but it again brings me back around to Hayden's glee at this "accident of history." A reasonable person, actually concerned with basic online security would have (or should have) looked at that same claimed "accident of history" and realized that this was a clear threat that needed to be dealt with, rather than an opportunity. But that's not what happened. So, despite the NSA claiming over and over again that it's focused on protecting Americans and American businesses, its desire to spy on everyone also means that they've done little to nothing to prevent this kind of attack from happening now. Yes, it's great for the NSA when tons of traffic goes through the US to be spied on -- but it's also great for criminals, terrorists and enemies of the US when that traffic can be easily made to travel through other countries as well -- and that's now apparently being done on a regular basis.

It seems like a reasonable question to ask -- as current NSA boss Keith Alexander keeps talking up the need for better "cybersecurity" -- why he hasn't actually been focused on better securing and encrypting the entire internet. Of course, we all know the answer for that: doing so would make his other job (spying on everyone) much harder. It's yet another reason why it's dangerous to have Alexander in charge of both the NSA and US Cyber Command, when the two are clearly at cross purposes.

Filed Under: crime, hijacking traffic, man in the middle attacks, nsa, surveillance
Companies: renesys

'Predictive Policing' Company Uses Bad Stats, Contractually-Obligated Shills To Tout Unproven 'Successes'

from the zoom-in-on-questionable-stats-and...-ENHANCE dept

We're not quite at the stage where pre-crime divisions are being formed by forward-looking law enforcement agencies. Not yet. But we're on our way.

SF Weekly has a very thorough report on PredPol, another entry in the "predictive policing" field. According to its website, PredPol's software ("developed by a team of PhD mathematicians and social scientists" from a variety of California universities) algorithmically determines where crime is likely to occur and cranks out a map highlighting 500' x 500' "boxes" that are possible criminal hotspots -- places officers should patrol more heavily.

PredPol is currently being deployed by a number of law enforcement agencies worldwide.

The company has sold its proprietary software here and abroad, from Kent County in England to Seattle, Wash., and here in the Bay Area to cities including Richmond, Los Gatos, Morgan Hill, and Santa Cruz.

San Francisco's PD, despite having an early invitation to test drive the software, has yet to sign a contract with PredPol. Two things are preventing this from moving forward.

From the beginning, the effectiveness of PredPol had been a sticking point in the negotiations.

SFPD's [CIO Susan] Merritt was skeptical. In a series of e-mails from July 2012 to August 2013, Fowler laid out the technical specifications for the software and the types of crimes PredPol claims to predict. "The crimes we predict are burglary [residential, commercial, auto], auto theft, theft, robbery, assault, battery, and drug crime," Fowler wrote on July 23, 2012. "This goes significantly beyond your current ... mapping tools," he added. Affixed to [Donnie] Fowler's e-mail signature was the claim that PredPol's predictions are "twice as accurate as those made by vet cops..."

Merritt pressed Fowler about whether the program could handle violent crime. "Homicide is a priority in the department — and if it is not there it would just beg the question why not," she wrote. Fowler admitted at the time that PredPol wasn't predicting homicides and gun violence.

The skepticism is well-deserved. For one, PredPol simply hasn't been around long enough to truly compare post-PredPol crime stats with pre-PredPol crime stats. It was still being tested in Santa Cruz and Los Angeles as of fall 2011, and has only been live in certain cities since the beginning of 2012. But that hasn't stopped it from using mostly worthless year-to-year local crime data as "proof" of its crime fighting power.

A page on its site titled audaciously "Proven Results," PredPol uses a couple of nearly context-free charts to tout its "success."

This chart, titled "Proven Accuracy," contains nothing to indicate what the divisions on the y axis represent, and while it touts its accuracy in the title, the sidebar says only this:

Predicted twice as much crime as experienced crime analysts in 6 month randomized controlled trials.

With nothing specified on the axis, PredPol could be simply outperforming analysts with a 20%-10% "accuracy." And, as the lines proceed down the x axis, the 2-to-1 ratio shrinks, suggesting the more predictions PredPol makes, the less accurate it is. By the time the lines exit the chart, we're looking at only a 9-6 [whatever] PredPol "advantage." (Not only that, but the "2x" indicated is actually 3x, at least as far as I can tell from the unlabeled y axis.)

The second chart is nearly as bad.


Here it uses crime stats (oddly, "Crimes per Day") from the Foothills Division of Los Angeles to claim a "13% reduction" in crime using year-to-year data. Looking at the chart shows that the $50,000 (and up) system reduced crime by one (1) crime per day (approximately) over that time period. Not only that, but the data only covers up to May 2012.

Crime stats published by the Foothills Division tell a different story. While PredPol claims this reduction is a success, additional statistics show the software has had a negligible effect on crime rates. At this point, according to PredPol's own chart, the software has been running since late 2011, so any stats for 2012 and 2013 would be relevant. Some stats will have to be ignored as PredPol has only specialized in certain crimes since its beginning ("The crimes we predict are burglary [residential, commercial, auto], auto theft, theft, robbery, assault, battery, and drug crime...")

Aggravated assault has seen a pretty steep drop, going from 310 in 2011 to 276 in 2012 and, finally, 242 year-to-date, an overall drop of 22% since PredPol's addition to the force.

Other stats aren't quite as cheery. Burglaries have dropped from 668 to 544 over that same time period (down 19%), but only viewing the two-year comparison ignores the fact that numbers have climbed since 2012, when only 494 burglaries occurred, a 10% increase over last year.

From 2011 to 2013, auto theft dropped all of 2%, from 712 to 700, a negligible difference. Unfortunately for PredPol, this is also a 10% increase over 2012 (634). Burglary/theft from motor vehicles has risen 5% over that time period (with a small dip in 2012). "Personal/other Theft" has declined 10% over two years and 16% in the last year.

While there are a couple of improvements, much of what's here (increases and decreases) can be chalked up to normal statistical fluctuations. It's not enough to completely rule out PredPol's usefulness as a crime predictor, but it's certainly not enough to be declared a "proven result" on its website.

Along with L.A.'s Foothill Division, Santa Cruz (where the pilot program took place) is also repeatedly highlighted on PredPol's "Press" page. And once again, there's nothing that conclusively shows PredPol's worth as a predictive tool.

2012 to 2011 comparisons show an increase in criminal activity year-to-year (raw total: 697, up from 580 -- a 20% jump), which would have occurred in the second year of PredPol's deployment. There has been a drastic reduction in crime so far in 2013, but attributing that drop to PredPol also means attributing the 20% jump. A broader look at total crime statistics for the entire Santa Cruz area shows crime rates have fluctuated (sometimes greatly) with regularity over the past decade, suggesting past "solutions" have failed to produce predictable results. PredPol is presenting itself as just such a solution, but the data -- even data pulled from the PDs it touts on its website -- fails to bear that out.

As with any algorithm, more time in service means more data, and more data should mean better results. Optimistically, the recent decline in crime in Santa Cruz could be seen as an indicator that PredPol's software is improving. But PredPol shows no such confidence in its ability to curb criminal activity. Sure, it presents itself on its public-facing website as an indispensable, cutting edge addition to any law enforcement agency's set of crime-fighting tools, but the way it contractually obligates its customers to toot its horn for it (rather than wait for evidence of actual success) tells a completely different story.

PredPol has required police departments that sign on to refer the company to other law enforcement agencies, and to appear in flashy press conferences, endorsing the software as a crime-reducer — despite the fact that its effectiveness hasn't yet been proven.

Turning customers into marketers via contractual obligations isn't the act of a confident company. Even PredPol's own marketing veers into some shady gray areas.

PredPol distributes news articles about predictive policing's supposed success in L.A. to dozens of other police departments, implying that the company's software has been purchased and deployed by the LAPD.

Statements from the LAPD say the opposite.

[I]t isn't clear exactly whose software LAPD has been using. PredPol's name does not appear anywhere in L.A.'s predictive policing records, though LAPD personnel say they are using PredPol's software, and Malinowski's contact information has appeared in PredPol's sales literature distributed to other cities. In response to a public records request for contracts between L.A. and PredPol, the LAPD says no such agreements exist.

But this pitch, as shady as it is, still works.

PredPol gave the mayor and city council of Columbia, S.C. — Fowler's hometown — a "confidential" briefing packet assembled by PredPol's Brantingham. Inside were slides and graphs illustrating L.A.'s supposedly successful use of predictive policing to reduce crime.

This bit of marketing smoke netted two new contracts for PredPol -- which led to even more obligatory PR work.

Swayed by the same claims, the city of Alhambra, just northeast of Los Angeles, purchased PredPol's software in 2012 for $27,500. The contract between Alhambra and PredPol includes numerous obligations requiring Alhambra to carry out marketing and promotion on PredPol's behalf. Alhambra's police and public officials must "provide testimonials, as requested by PredPol," and "provide referrals and facilitate introductions to other agencies who can utilize the PredPol tool." And that's just for starters.

Under the terms of the contract, Alhambra must also "host visitors from other agencies regarding PredPol," and even "engage in joint/integrated marketing," which PredPol then spells out in a detailed list of obligations that includes joint press conferences, training materials, web marketing, trade shows, conferences, and speaking engagements.

In addition to feeling used by PredPol's marketing demands, agencies using PredPol's software have also expressed concerns about how its reliance on "boxes" is diverting resources away from other needed areas -- shifting too much focus onto wherever the algorithm decides today's hot spots are. As much as some agencies may value the addition of predictive software to their arsenals, the worry remains that the "boxes" will receive an outsized amount of policing while the larger, unmarked areas go underserved.

While PredPol is nowhere near the point it can start targeting individuals before they commit crimes, the fact that a proprietary (and unproven) algorithm has the power (with the right marketing) to reroute police patrols is worrying, especially when no hard evidence has been presented that indicates there's anything to PredPol's claims. What's happening here doesn't necessarily infringe on anyone's rights, but when combined with other questionable tactics (say, stop and frisk), it could result in pockets of abuse directly stemming from PredPol's algorithmic "boxes."

At best, it's a marginally useful addition to the many tools PDs already deploy. But it's certainly not the game changer PredPol's presenting it as and its habits of presenting selective, limited data as proof and utilizing contracts that turn customers into unwilling shills isn't exactly a confidence booster.

Filed Under: crime, police, predictive policing, shilling
Companies: predpol

Federal Judge: NYC Stop And Frisk Violates The 4th Amendment

from the yeah,-no-kidding dept

For anyone who might not know already, New York City's infamous stop and frisk program is the completely useless policy of the police department to go around randomly molesting anyone they deem to be suspicious, or more correctly described as brown-skinned. It appears that everyone who isn't a member of the NYPD or the current mayor of New York hates this program as much as I do, including AG Eric Holder and the NY City Council. Still, that didn't keep Chuck Schumer from trying to export this interracial softcore porn policy to the federal level by recommending Police Chief Ray Kelly as the head of the Department of Homeland Security. Kelly's resume, however, may take a bit of a hit.

That's because a federal judge recently declared that the stop and frisk program violated tens of thousands of people's constitutional rights, which is the kind of thing that most folks frown on.

In a decision issued on Monday, the judge, Shira A. Scheindlin, ruled that police officers have for years been systematically stopping innocent people in the street without any objective reason to suspect them of wrongdoing. Officers often frisked these people, usually young minority men, for weapons or searched their pockets for contraband, like drugs, before letting them go, according to the 195-page decision.

These stop-and-frisk episodes, which soared in number over the last decade as crime continued to decline, demonstrated a widespread disregard for the Fourth Amendment, which protects against unreasonable searches and seizures by the government, according to the ruling. It also found violations with the 14th Amendment.

Now, it's worth noting that Scheindlin didn't order that the program be stopped immediately or set a time and date for Mayor Bloomberg's lobotomy, which I found disappointing, but instead has appointed an outside legal counsel to oversee the police department and ensure that any random stopping and frisking of citizens is done constitutionally. That means no stops without reasonable suspicion. The problem, however, has been how police officers thus far have fudged their own reports on why they were stopping people.

While the Supreme Court has long recognized the right of police officers to briefly stop and investigate people who are behaving suspiciously, Judge Scheindlin found that the New York police had overstepped that authority. She found that officers were too quick to deem as suspicious behavior that was perfectly innocent, in effect watering down the legal standard required for a stop.

Obviously no outside legal overseer is going to be able to witness any sizable number of these stops, meaning there is a high likelihood that officers will continue to manufacture suspicion that is unfounded. In addition, it's well known that police officers consider themselves members of a fraternal organization, with all of the implications such a membership carries with it. How accurate a picture this outside counsel will get of these stops moving forward is an open question with a likely problematic answer.

That's why, while we should all be pleased that Judge Scheindlin ruled against stop and frisk, I think it would have been far better to scrap it entirely and make police play by the rules that are already prescribed by our constitution.

Filed Under: 4th amendment, crime, discriminatory, michael bloomberg, nyc, nypd, privacy, ray kelly, search, shira scheindlin, stop and frisk

UK Announces New Crime Unit Focusing Solely On IP Crimes

from the here-we-go dept

Just a few weeks ago, we noted that the UK government appeared to be working uncomfortably closely with the entertainment industry, going so far as to have lobbying groups do a kind of real-action ride-a-long for arrests of UK citizens. This, after the UK entertainment industry made it their reprehensible goal to censor websites it doesn't like without even the appearance of due process. There seemed to be something of storm cloud brewing over the UK internet, leaving many to wonder exactly how torrential (get it?) the downpour would be.

Well, if the first few raindrops are any indication, it'll be as misguided as it is costly. You see, the UK thinks the next great step for their nation's police force is an Intellectual Property Crimes unit.

"Intellectual property crime has long been a problem in the world of physical goods, but with the growing use of the internet, online intellectual property crime is now an increasing threat to our creative industries. These industries are worth more than £36 billion a year and employ more than 1.5 million people," Lord Younger said.

"Government and our law enforcement agencies must do all they can to protect our creative industries and the integrity of consumer goods. By working with the City of London Police, who have recognised expertise in tackling economic crime, we are showing how committed this government is to supporting business and delivering economic growth."

And hey, why not? After all, it's only costing the British taxpayer roughly $4 million to have their police force act as the American entertainment industry's Stasi. Four-mil-do may not sound like a big number, but when you're $1.5 trillion in debt, every bit counts. And if they just peered over at their long-time-friends and habitual wine-drinking neighbors in France, particularly with how monumentally futile the Hadopi experiment was, maybe they'd decide they could use that money for something more productive. You know, like burning it for a couple moments of warmth.

But no, they say. This is all about jobs and protecting the innocent computers of the citizens.

[Commissioner of the City of London Police, Adrian] Leppard said the new unit would not only safeguard jobs, but would also ensure citizens’ “computer safety” by ensuring they were not exposed to unauthorized copyrighted content.

“Creative industries such as music are a vital part of our economy, providing jobs and investment. Copyright is the engine that makes these industries tick and that is what makes the work of this new Intellectual Property Crime Unit so valuable and important.”

See, the problem is that we've heard the dramatic death-moans of the UK entertainment industry in the past, and they've been shown to be bullshit. You don't create jobs through protectionism, you create them through innovation. And keeping people from being "exposed to unauthorized copyright content?" I can't tell if that is supposed to indicate that UK citizens are being actively sought out by movie files, or if the Commissioner is simply acknowledging that he's going to deny the citizens he serves what a large number of them want, which is access to filesharing sites.

It would be entertaining to watch how this all fails miserably if it weren't being propped up on the backs of tax money paid by my English comrades. But fail it will, not because there isn't great content in the UK, but because the industries concerned would rather play blackshirt than just compete.

Filed Under: copyright, crime, intellectual property, law enforcement, uk

DailyDirt: ATMs Are Ripe For Picking...

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Thieves are getting more clever about stealing money from ATMs. It used to be that people mostly just had to worry about getting robbed while getting cash at an ATM. In 1998, Joseph Zingher, a Chicago businessman, even patented a "reverse PIN system" called SafetyPIN that would alert police when a cardholder at an ATM entered their PIN in reverse. The idea was that if someone was being forced to withdraw money at an ATM, they could silently alert the police with this "panic code." Unfortunately for Zingher, he was never able to convince the banking industry to adopt his SafetyPIN system. Now, people have to worry about ATM card skimming and other high-tech theft methods. Here are a few examples of some recent ATM theft methods.

• Like something out of the movie Ocean's Eleven, cybercriminals working with "cashing crews" in more than two dozen countries managed to steal $45 million from thousands of ATMs in just a few hours. First, the hackers raised the withdrawal limits on several prepaid debit card accounts, then the account information was distributed and encoded onto magnetic-stripe cards. In NYC alone, a team of 8 people withdrew $2.4 million from a few thousand ATMs. [url]
• Thieves glued the cancel button on several ATMs in Spokane, WA. Their hope was that a customer would make a mistake or try to cancel a transaction, and then realize they can't because the cancel button is stuck. If the customer left in frustration, the thieves could unglue the button and then steal the bank card or continue the transaction. [url]
• A hacker serving a five-year sentence in Romania has invented a device that prevents ATM skimming thefts. The add-on device rotates ATM cards so that skimming devices (as they're currently designed) can't read them. [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.

Filed Under: atm, crime, criminals, fraud, robbery, schemes, skimming, theft, urban legend

DailyDirt: Cheaters Sometimes Prosper...

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

If you're going to commit a crime, there's a certain amount of logic to trying to pull off the biggest crime you can. Why risk going to jail over a relatively small amount of money? If you can get away with a multi-milion dollar heist, you only have to do it once (if you're not too greedy). And if you get caught, you might have the resources to escape the authorities. Here are just a few examples of some scams that might have demonstrated that crime can pay.

• In 2012, Italian police arrested 8 people related to a scheme involving $6 trillion (yes, trillion) in fake US Treasury bonds. According to US authorities, these kinds of documents are part of a growing trend of "fictitious instrument fraud" where fake securities are used as collateral in a scam aimed at unwitting investors. [url]
• How often do traders misplace a decimal point on purpose? David Miller would have made a killing buying 1.625 million shares of AAPL (instead of 1,625 shares!) if the stock beat its estimates, but Apple's shares actually fell... oops. [url]
• The London interbank offered rate (aka Libor) is a global benchmark for financial instruments worth over $300 trillion -- and it's part of one of the largest and longest-running banking scams in history. Traders at several large banks colluded to manipulate Libor for years... because bankers were trusted to report honest numbers. hmm. [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post.

Filed Under: banking, cheaters, crime, fraud, libor, scams
Companies: apple

Unintended Consequences, Lead And Crime

from the the-world-works-in-bizarre-ways dept

If you haven't yet, you owe it to yourself to read Kevin Drum's recent article for Mother Jones about the possible link between crime rates and leaded gasoline. The article makes a rather convincing case that the massive growth, and then subsequent decline, in crime over the last six decades or so was influenced quite strongly by the fact that automobile gasoline had lead -- and then went unleaded due to environmental concerns. The article cites numerous studies that all seem to suggest the same thing -- and carefully tries to get past the "correlation is not causation" issue by looking at multiple studies that tackle the same question from different angles (different time periods, locations, population types, etc.) to try to eliminate other possible explanations. One of the parts that struck me as most interesting was the data on big cities as compared to other regions:

Like many good theories, the gasoline lead hypothesis helps explain some things we might not have realized even needed explaining. For example, murder rates have always been higher in big cities than in towns and small cities. We're so used to this that it seems unsurprising, but Nevin points out that it might actually have a surprising explanation—because big cities have lots of cars in a small area, they also had high densities of atmospheric lead during the postwar era. But as lead levels in gasoline decreased, the differences between big and small cities largely went away. And guess what? The difference in murder rates went away too. Today, homicide rates are similar in cities of all sizes. It may be that violent crime isn't an inevitable consequence of being a big city after all.

The article has not gone entirely without criticism. Drum has distanced himself from the claim of the key researcher he relies on in the piece that 90% of the rise and fall of crime (not 90% of crime) is attributable to lead, suggesting that 50% might be a more reasonable number. Separately, Ronald Bailey has reasonably taken Drum to task for blithely making statements about "blindingly obvious" things concerning IQ and ADHD that turn out to be... not true. When you take those things out of the equation, some of the report relies on "aggressiveness" and "impulsivity," but as Bailey notes, there is no national data series on aggressiveness or impulsivity. And, having seen way too many "studies" on video games / violent media causing greater "aggressiveness" and "impulsivity," but always failing to show that those traits actually lead to more crime, it pays to be somewhat skeptical.

That said, the data is very interesting, and certainly worth much more research and better understanding. At the very least, it's a reminder of our complex ecosystem and economy, where understanding cause and effect is often incredibly complicated, and the end results may be quite surprising. It is all too easy to jump to conclusions about cause and effect (and, yes, we are just as guilty of this as others at times) -- but the real world is an impossibly complex mixture of inputs and variables, that rarely succumb to simple explanations that follow the initial "most obvious" rationale.

Filed Under: crime, lead, statistics, unintended consequences

Protip: After Committing Drunken Hit And Run...Don't Brag About It On Facebook

from the still-just-saying dept

You know those really sweet movies revolving around mastermind criminals? The ones where bumbling police have no shot at catching the guy/girl/team? Maybe it's the worst James Bond ever (barely edging out Timothy Dalton) stealing some artwork while fornicating with the Lethal Weapon girl. Or else it's half of Fight Club, the one interesting character from ER, and most of the remaining acting world robbing everyone on the planet in the most mind-numbingly convoluted manner possible. The lesson here is that criminals are freaking smart. So smart, in fact, that attempting to stop them is only playing into their hands, twisting police and federal agents around into pretzels wrapped more tightly than the knots on the ropes with which the criminals repelled out of the banks. You just can't stop crime, because criminals are too good.

It turns out that Hollywood (shockingly) is wrong. Criminals are stupid. More specifically, they stupidly like to brag about their crimes, such as the woman who robbed a bank and then created a YouTube video about it. And now we can add an idiotic, drunk driving teen to the list, who side-swiped a couple of cars on New Years Day and then rushed to Facebook to post about it.

Jacob Cox-Brown, 18, of Astoria, Ore., about 100 miles west of Portland, was with friends when, police say, he posted the status update on his Facebook page: "Drivin drunk... classsic ;) but to whoever's vehicle i hit i am sorry. :P"

In an interview with ABC affiliate KATU-TV in Portland, Cox-Brown says the post was meant as a joke. But his friends who spotted the update didn't see the humor behind it. Instead, one friend sent a private message to an Astoria police officer's personal Facebook account while another friend called police Sgt. Brian Aydt.

Acting like such an assclown that even the people that know you turn you in to the police... classic! Seriously, if I had to decide which was better evidence that this young man doesn't deserve a driver's license, either the fact that he drank and drove or that he thought it would be okay to say so on a public social media platform after hitting two cars... well, I mean both are horrible, but I think the latter is dumber and I don't want someone that dumb behind the wheel of anything.

No, not even that travesty of an automobile.
Image source: CC BY 2.0

Look, let's make this simple: don't drink and drive. But, if you do drink and drive, make sure you're the kind of moron that posts about it on social media. Better yet, just drive to the nearest police department, park your car on their front lawn, and pass out at their front door. You'll be saving us all a great deal of trouble.

Filed Under: crime, driving, drunk driving, social media
Companies: facebook