iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

This CCJ poll of experts on what is causing the homicide decline is super useful. I was struck that over half of the experts said that "increase in police staffing" was a possible cause, though, since police staffing has mostly not increased. counciloncj.org/whats-drivin...

130

Brenden Beck @brendenbeck.net · 18/08/2026

The article implies Christian Smith left academia because his colleagues were too ideological (left pic), but when he left Notre Dame in February he said it was because the school was insufficiently Catholic (right pic). That seems like he wants *different* ideology, not *less* ideology.

Smith quit the ASA around the same time, demoralized by what he saw as a lack of self-awareness among his colleagues, whose work focused on the world’s wrongs while failing to recognize their own. Professors teach from textbooks he describes as “thinly veiled political progressivism watered down to pathetic mush.” This past January, he resigned from University of Notre Dame, where he was a professor of sociology for 20 years.

The central problem at Notre Dame is that these fine words are not acted upon in a remotely consistent and thoroughgoing manner. Various programs, centers, and institutes scattered across campus, and a certain number of individual faculty members, do work hard to engage the Catholic intellectual tradition. But at the institutional level, with the university as a whole, Notre Dame’s leaders are equivocal about that Catholic mission and make decisions and pursue practices that undermine it.

140

Brenden Beck @brendenbeck.net · 09/08/2026

Molly Young is so good mollyyoung.substack.com/p/a-velcro-b...

The best way to get good at attention as an adult, of course, is to increase your boredom threshold to the point where paying attention becomes its own riveting end. This is one reason nuns and monks live in seclusion and fill their days with tedious chores. For a non-nun living in a world of nonstop provocation and arousal, the practice of boredom is grueling and lonesome and probably futile. (But maybe it’s also that way for nuns. I haven’t talked to one in a while.)...

000

Brenden Beck @brendenbeck.net · 10/05/2026

Cheaper and more effective?! No thanks. www.nytimes.com/2026/05/10/o...

An excerpt from the linked article that says: "Women’s court also saves the state significant money. The cost to incarcerate someone in Hawaii is $253 per day. Conservatively, that’s more than $2.7 million a year for just 30 women. Women’s court, to be clear, doesn’t function just on the basis of its annual $705,000 budget; it has multiple community partners, each of which has its own costs, particularly for drug treatment and housing. But there are savings downstream in keeping families together, and in offering stability to children so they don’t wind up in foster care or as defendants in court themselves someday. As a potential model, Mohala Wahine is almost certainly more effective than a hyper-retributive system in which we take broken people, break them further and then send them right back to where they were broken in the first place."

020

Brenden Beck @brendenbeck.net · 08/04/2026

Halfway through this article arguing that San Francisco's new "tough love" mayor improved disorder and drug overdoses in the city, the author reveals that the improvement happened under the previous mayor. www.nytimes.com/2026/04/06/o...

1029162

Brenden Beck @brendenbeck.net · 11/02/2026

There's a great new report out from @prisonpolicy.org tracking changes in criminal justice system spending. More money for policing and immigration enforcement, less for prisons and courts since 2017. @jkangbrown.bsky.social www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/mone...

12416

Brenden Beck @brendenbeck.net · 22/07/2025

This sentence, in an NYT op-ed about local gov't responses to federal cuts, is wrong. Cities don't make across-the-board cuts, they cut social services more deeply than police. Source (if you'll forgive the self promotion): onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Highlighted text reading: "Budget shortfalls aren’t new, and neither is the playbook that leaders usually follow. They make across-the-board cuts to programs."

110

Brenden Beck @brendenbeck.net · 22/07/2025

The stark racial difference in support for police persists.

000

Brenden Beck @brendenbeck.net · 22/07/2025

American's confidence in the police dipped this year.

A graph showing American's Confidence in the Police, 1993-2025. The survey asked "How much confidence do you, yourself, have in the police — a great deal, quite a lot, some or very little?" The graph line peaked in 204 at 64% and declined more or less steadily to 45% this year.

111

Brenden Beck @brendenbeck.net · 21/07/2025

I looked at NYC's 311 call data (their non-emergency hotline) recently and calls listing the location as "subway" have been declining.

A graph showing that 311 complaint calls about the NYC subway increased in 2022 to about 2,500 per month then declined to about 1,300 per month in mid 2025.

090

Brenden Beck @brendenbeck.net · 07/07/2025

This very good NYTimes article about how few crimes the police solve includes two competing visions of who commits violence. Is it "bad guys" or "regular guys"? www.nytimes.com/2025/07/06/u...

Text reading: "“It’s a vicious cycle,” Brian Forst, a criminologist at American University, told me. “When the bad guys see that the police are not there to deter crime and catch criminals, they remain on the streets to do more bad stuff. And the rest of the community is less deterred from crime. They think, ‘Why not? I’m not going to get caught.’”"

Text reading: "John Skaggs, a retired detective from Los Angeles, told her that the gang members he dealt with were often “regular guys” who joined gangs and acted violently for self-protection."

110

Brenden Beck @brendenbeck.net · 19/06/2025

You can see how the Census Bureau is scrubbing any mention of race or ethnicity from its webpages in the alert that notifies me about new datasets.

A screenshot of text showing changes from "Hispanic Origin Housing" into "Housing" and other sentences with "Hispanic" and "Race" removed.

020

Brenden Beck @brendenbeck.net · 30/01/2025

Should cities spend $$$ on police or social services if reducing crime is the goal? I summarize the research on this question in this now-un-paywalled article. www.annualreviews.org/content/jour...

04114

Brenden Beck @brendenbeck.net · 09/01/2025

I don't know about last year, but LA cut their fire budget 28% between 2007 and 2022. For reference, they increased their police budget 36% during that time.

000

Brenden Beck @brendenbeck.net · 08/01/2025

Some say LA cut their fire dept. budget last year to pay for an LAPD budget increase. Others (@hayesdavenport.bsky.social) say that wasn't the case. I don't know about last year, but through 2022 LA steadily grew their police budget (+112% since '80), while their fire budget languished (+13%).

A graph showing LA's inflation-adjusted expenditure per capita on police and fire since 1980. The police line increased steadily while the fire dept. line is flat. Data source: Census of Governments. Plot by Brenden Beck.

12411

Brenden Beck @brendenbeck.net · 04/01/2025

What always confuses me about this debate is that "legal system" and "justice system" are used with the same frequency. They seem interchangeable to me. books.google.com/ngrams/graph...

A Google Ngram graph showing that "legal system" and "justice system" occur roughly with the same frequency in English-language books.

000

Brenden Beck @brendenbeck.net · 09/12/2024

Thanks for this. I pulled the NYC data. NYC spent (and spends) a lot more on soc services than the typical city, and the '75 crisis hit both police and soc services similarly (~30% declines), but their recoveries were much diff. Police rebounded quickly, soc services never recovered.

120

Brenden Beck @brendenbeck.net · 06/12/2024

Over the past 30 years, and especially since 2008, U.S. cities have been steadily shifting money away from social services like housing and parks and putting it toward policing. Why is this?

619958

Brenden Beck @brendenbeck.net · 26/11/2024

As @mattyglesias.bsky.social and others promote cracking down on "disorder", it's worth remembering the Sampson study that asked Chicagoans to rate how disorderly their city's neighborhoods were. The researchers systematically observed disorder, compared that to perceptions of disorder, and found...

Text that says: "the concentration of Latinos (and immigrants) are associated with sig- nificantly greater perceived disorder. Some twenty-five individual-level covariates were adjusted and thus cannot plausibly explain these large disparities. The effect of race/ethnic composition on perceived disorder is also independent of multiple and highly reliable measures of observed disorder. Moreover, there are no significant differences between blacks and whites or immigrant generation in the nature of the prediction of perceived disorder from percent black (or concentrated immigration),"

1187

Brenden Beck @brendenbeck.net · 10/11/2024

Two-tiered justice. Source: manhattanda.org/d-a-bragg-an...

A screenshot of text that reads: "Currently, New York State law does not consider wage theft to be property theft, meaning prosecutors cannot charge larceny for stolen wages. Accordingly, individuals and companies that steal workers’ wages typically face charges of Scheme to Defraud, which is the lowest level felony under New York State law.

Under a bill introduced by Assemblymember Catalina Cruz and State Senator Neil Breslin, New York’s Grand Larceny statutes would be amended to include wage theft, enabling prosecutors to charge much more serious felonies, depending on the number of workers affected and the amount stolen. D.A. Bragg is joining Assemblymember Cruz, Senator Breslin, union leaders and worker advocates to call on the legislature to pass this crucial bill during the current legislative session."

000

Brenden Beck @brendenbeck.net · 11/10/2024

In 1965, we spent 7x more on K-12 education than we did on police. In 2022, we spent less than 5x more.

A graph showing the ratio of education to police spending with a steadily declining line.

000

Brenden Beck @brendenbeck.net · 01/10/2024

Project 2025! No joke. Of course, the second half of the paragraph includes non-sequitur (racist?) references to the demographics of who commits crime, but I was surprised by the "we need a survey to counter police statistics" framing they used to defend the NCVS.

The demographic information that crime victims
provide through the survey about who commits crimes against them enables such
reports as “Race and Ethnicity of Violent Crime Offenders and Arrestees, 2018,”98
which was published in January 2021 and finds that police are arresting those who,
according to victims, actually commit crimes.

010

Brenden Beck @brendenbeck.net · 01/10/2024

I bet even my fellow crime and police data heads can't guess the source of this quote.

The National Crime Victimization Survey, which is the nation’s largest crime
survey and predates the BJS (it dates to the Nixon Administration), is of particular
importance, and the department should prioritize and sufficiently fund it. This
survey provides the only comprehensive and credible alternative to police reports
for showing who commits crimes.

110

Brenden Beck @brendenbeck.net · 01/10/2024

Project 2025! For real. Of course, the second half of the paragraph includes racist allusions to the demographics of people who commit crime, but I was surprised by the "we need a survey to counter police statistics" framing they used to defend the NCVS.

000

Brenden Beck @brendenbeck.net · 23/08/2024

At the DNC, Josh Shaprio said he wanted to "invest in the police and in the community." Lately we've been investing more in the former and less in the latter.

000

Brenden Beck @brendenbeck.net · 21/08/2024

Ah. Yea, I agree. Police employment numbers are quite consistent though. I was looking at different years, but in this piece I used BJS data. Maybe if you rounded to nearest tenth and squinted hard you might see something that flat? academic.oup.com/bjc/article-...

000

Brenden Beck @brendenbeck.net · 21/08/2024

As Gov. Hochul mulls restarting congestion pricing in NYC, she says the planned $15 toll was too expensive. She cites London starting at £5 as a better approach, but adjusting for the exchange rate and inflation, London's congestion toll was...$13.74 in today's dollars. www.wnyc.org/story/august...

An exchange rate table showing one British Pound was equivalent to $0.625 on the day London introduced congestion pricing.

A screenshot of an inflation calculator showing the $8 that congestion pricing cost in 2003 is equivalent to $13.74 in today's dollars.

010

Brenden Beck @brendenbeck.net · 16/04/2024

When DC had persistently high crime last year, some people argued the city's lower arrest rate was to blame for its violence. Now that DC's crime rate is falling rapidly, will the same people argue that it is structural conditions--not arrest rates--that drive crime rates? I'm not holding my breath.

100

Brenden Beck @brendenbeck.net · 11/02/2024

I might not place too much faith in that 2022 ZipRecruiter survey. It was of 1,500 college grads. I can't imagine many were j-ism majors, so the survey is likely drawing from a small sample. When ZipRecruiter did the survey in 2023 they learned their lesson and didn't slice the data quite so thin.

020

Brenden Beck @brendenbeck.net · 09/02/2024

This website makes a word cloud out of researchers' journal articles. It is *fun* but also *revealing*. Criminologists that have posted their word clouds are more likely to have "police" as their top word whereas sociologists have "policing." Neither is better, but... scholargoggler.com

130

Brenden Beck @brendenbeck.net · 05/02/2024

Andrew Abbott returned fire in his review of Punishing the Poor

240

Brenden Beck @brendenbeck.net · 26/07/2023

New poll finds a record-low 43% of the U.S. public has confidence in the police. Police 3rd-ranked institution asked about, though. Why more confidence in police than "the criminal justice system" (43% vs. 17%)? news.gallup.com/poll/508169/histori…

000

Brenden Beck @brendenbeck.net · 11/07/2023

Crime rates are up? Bill Bratton is concerned about them. Crime rates are down? Bill Bratton is concerned with the *perception* of crime, not actual crime rates. Fortunately, he can decern how concerned people are.

030