MESSAGE
| DATE | 2015-03-22 |
| FROM | Rick Moen
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| SUBJECT | Re: [NYLXS - HANGOUT] Stop and frisk
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Quoting Ruben Safir (mrbrklyn-at-panix.com):
> http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/stop-frisk-violated-rights-judge-article-1.1424287
My calendar no longer says 2013. What about you?
> The failure to enforce the Broken Windows Policy, which is completely
> different, came straight from the top....
The 'Broken Windows' metaphor is straight from the 1982 article of that
name by social scientists James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling,
leading to a metric tonne of rhetoric including the metaphor's non-sequitur
invocation under your favourite mayor Mr. Guiliani starting 1993, to
justify (among other things) stop-and-frisk in various targeted parts of
NYC.
Lots of people including you claim City Hall's multifaceted Broken
Windows Policy that claimed to be following Wilson and Kelling's logic
(though often they were not) credited Mayor Guiliani with causing the 1990s'
falloff in crime.
Guess what? That's provably _not_ what caused the 1990s falloff.
Conservative economist Steven Leavitt and journalist Stephen Dubner
proved through process of logical elimination that it was the
aftereffects of Roe v. Wade in the early 1970s. The young adults who
would have been the core of a continuing crime wave in the 1990s weren't
born at all starting in 1973 because of freer access to legal abortion.
This is heavily covered in Leavitt and Dubner's two books, but
adequately addressed here:
http://freakonomics.com/2005/05/15/abortion-and-crime-who-should-you-believe/
The two of them, FWIW, powerfully offended ideologues on both the left
and the right. Right-wingers were offended by the notion that various
strenuous law'n'order measures actually didn't work at all.
Left-wingers were offended by the notion that socially marginal people
often grow up to be criminals.
Making people angry is not the same as making a valid argument, but it's
somehow satisfying that Leavitt and Dubner, by making an airtight
scientific argument, managed to make enemies of two equal and opposite
camps of ideologues.
Anyway: Broken Windows Policy in NYC? Snake-oil as stated.
Pseudo-science.
You're welcome to dislike that fact. Go right ahead. You know you want
to.
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