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Brenden Beck

@brendenbeck.net
1.1K followers 478 following 212 posts

Sociologist at the Rutgers School of Criminal Justice studying policing, city budgets, suburbs, and housing. brenden.beck@rutgers.edu

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Reposted by Brenden Beck
City & Community @cicojournal.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
#OnlineFirst Why are household surveillance technologies like Ring cameras so popular despite historic declines in crime? A new paper by @maxlubell.bsky.social answers this question using a geocoded dataset of Ring Neighbors posts. Read more here: journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/....
journals.sagepub.com
Sage Journals: Discover world-class research
Subscription and open access journals from Sage, the world's leading independent academic publisher.
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Brenden Beck @brendenbeck.net · 01/10/2026
They did the tweet
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weeder @weeder.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
God, grant me the courage to change the things I can and incredible new powers to change the things I can't.
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Brenden Beck @brendenbeck.net · 25/09/2026
The TV list is good! Only omission is Taskmaster.
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pmamtraveller.bsky.social @pmamtraveller.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
Yemeni Anthropomorphic Stele (3rd–1st Century BCE)
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Victor Ray @victorerikray.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
I spent the morning reading John Levi Martin's absolutely brutal takedown of the Vanderbilt report's assessment of politicization in sociology. I recommend it and hope it gets as much attention as the initial (crap) Vanderbilt report. A Reader’s Guide to the Rubin Report osf.io/preprints/so...
osf.io
OSF
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Brenden Beck @brendenbeck.net · 21/09/2026
I heard Malcolm Gladwell on the radio pushing to hire more cops. Where will recruits will come from? Depts struggle to keep the officers they have. ICE is lowering their standards to get just 10,000 new hires. And Gladwell wants to find *500,000* more officers. This will not be easy.
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BeijingPalmer @beijingpalmer.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
the degree of both autonomy and corruption inside tiny police departments in the U.S. is ridiculous.
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David Schleicher @profschleich.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
❗New Article❗ The Great American Property Tax Freakout! Since 2024, many states have radically reshaped their property tax systems.The changes are an example of a national trend of carving out influential groups from taxation, in this case a majority group: homeowners papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....
papers.ssrn.com
The Great American Property Tax Freak Out
There has been a lot of news over the last two years, so it is understandable that neither the mass media nor the legal academy has focused on what is happening
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ceej @ceej.online · 12/06/2024
My wife, a prodigious sleep-talker, failed to disclose her affliction when we started dating, which led to the fright of my life the night she sat bolt upright in bed and in a low flat monotone loudly declared that “THIRTEEN BABIES REMAIN UNFATHERED.”
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Brenden Beck @brendenbeck.net · 02/09/2026
My apartment building had a problem with package theft. Some wanted to put up cameras or call the police, but we just started looking out for others' packages. Messaging the group chat when there was a delivery and holding onto packages for others. Now: no theft, cost us $0, no one got arrested.
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Brenden Beck @brendenbeck.net · 02/09/2026
On the Daily, I heard the founder of Flock say he started the company after a spate of gun thefts from parked cars in his neighborhood. I don't know if that's the real origin story, but, if so, how is blanketing a city with cameras easier than telling people to take their guns inside?!
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Brenden Beck @brendenbeck.net · 19/08/2026
And we defunded social services of course metropolitics.org/Defunding-So...
metropolitics.org
Defunding Social Services – Metropolitics
Cities around the United States are bracing for federal funding cuts to social services. Yet, as Brenden Beck explains, cities have long been cutting social-service spending while increasing police…
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oh no @ili.bsky.social · 19/08/2026
en esta economía??????
nyt cooking melissa clark seis leches cake january 21, 2020
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Brenden Beck @brendenbeck.net · 18/08/2026
Links: archive.ph/HeJQw firstthings.com/why-im-done-...
archive.ph
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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.
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Brenden Beck @brendenbeck.net · 18/08/2026
I finally read the WSJ's article about "liquidating sociology" and there are a couple good points. We probably could stand to talk about social improvement and stability more, but it also contains some head-scratchers like...
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Brenden Beck @brendenbeck.net · 18/08/2026
I really liked his "reverse centaur" analogy that we are making ourselves bodies for AI heads.
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Brenden Beck @brendenbeck.net · 18/08/2026
I listened to @doctorow.pluralistic.net on On the Media predicting that the AI bubble will burst and cause a recession. Maybe! But it reminded me of the old joke "Marxists have predicted five out of the last two economic crises."
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John Pfaff @johnpfaff.bsky.social · 17/08/2026
Yet another city seeing homicides plummet to historic lows. And the article is long, in-depth, and posted on the front page of the website. It's a case of significant crime decline getting prominent treatment (with a mention before the first ad of the national decline). It's genuinely good to see!
nytimes.com
Murder Drops to Historic Lows in Baltimore
After decades of notoriously high murder totals, Baltimore and the people whose work entails dealing with the city’s most violent crimes are adjusting to a new reality.
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jon ben-menachem @jbenmenachem.com · 17/08/2026
Since the speed camera discourse has invoked our recent study, I figured I’d also flag how we threaded the needle on this issue—we can have traffic enforcement without allowing cops to use the cameras to stalk their exes. www.vitalcitynyc.org/nyc-speed-ca...
Critics have raised valid concerns about the surveillance implications of expanding automated enforcement. Indeed, in many jurisdictions, law enforcement's use of automated license plate readers has intensified domestic violence and
cyberstalking by police. Additionally, the ever-expanding surveillance capabilities of federal immigration enforcement raise civil liberties concerns, particularly as other New York law enforcement databases feed into
ICE systems.These concerns can be remedied by requiring frequent deletion of traffic safety data, banning the application of facial recognition technology and implementing firm firewalls between civil traffic
enforcement and local or federal law
enforcement databases. Such efforts could be given real teeth through civilian oversight mechanisms.
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Brenden Beck @brendenbeck.net · 17/08/2026
Central cities with more gentrification have less segregation, but the inverse is true for suburbs. Gentrification is associated with more segregation there. The article has important nuance. It's well worth a read for all urbanists.
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Brenden Beck @brendenbeck.net · 17/08/2026
Researchers are studying gentrification less recently, partly because they/we turned their attention back to more wide-spread forms of spatial inequality like segregation and suburbanization. In a new article, Hwang and colleagues do an *amazing* job of synthesizing the three phenomena. They find...
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William B. Fuckley @opinionhaver.bsky.social · 09/08/2026
The cure to male loneliness crisis sending young men on journeys. You used to be bundled off on an expedition with a 20% chance of killing you and a 20% of making you see or do horrors. You’d come back and write a cryptic journal and drink heavily. Can’t do this anymore, because of woke.
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Brenden Beck @brendenbeck.net · 13/08/2026
I'm struck that AOC & Mamdani's statements disavowing "woke 1" don't mention police violence. Deaths from police encounters are as frequent today as they were in 2020, but the issues has lost a lot of salience. AOC et al. could remind the public of the context.
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Brenden Beck @brendenbeck.net · 10/08/2026
There's understandable worry that using speed cameras will disproportionately target Black & Latino neighborhoods, but as this new research makes clear, there's also disproportionately in the traffic collisions that speed cameras are meant to reduce.
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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.)...
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Yonah Freemark @yonahfreemark.com · 06/08/2026
That’s enough to fund 11 years worth of $2000 monthly housing vouchers for all 5300 individuals facing homelessness in DC right now.
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Norm Charlatan @normcharlatan.bsky.social · 06/08/2026
Matt Damon at the end of The Odyssey [getting in his boat]: I Odyssey about a girl.
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Brenden Beck @brendenbeck.net · 28/07/2026
I reviewed for DDRIG in '20 and '24. I found the other committee members and the ASA staff to be thorough, capable, and fair. The review work required ~50 hours of time and our meetings focused on methods, feasibility, and impact. I don't know about NSF's approach, but ASA's seemed apolitical.
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Brenden Beck @brendenbeck.net · 28/07/2026
Homicides of white and wealthy people get more press attention. In this excellent new study, @jbenmenachem.com interviews journalists to understand why. Short version: journalists often recognize the inequity but feel constrained by resources and demands for novelty. doi.org/10.1111/1745...
doi.org
Which deaths count? Debating homicide coverage amidst newsroom scarcity
Past research documents disparities in which homicides receive news coverage and how victims are portrayed, yet the organizational processes producing these patterns remain understudied. This paper a...
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WeRateDogs @weratedogs.com · 22/07/2026
This is Chubbers. He is catching a wave. But more importantly, catching a vibe. 14/10 (IG: nataliepaigebentley)
a yellow lab smiles at us from the middle of a blue-green wave in the ocean. his front paws are mid-paddle. soft seafoam has formed on the beach. the lab is glad you're watching. he wanted you to see him having the time of his life.
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Brenden Beck @brendenbeck.net · 22/07/2026
My high school was similar, but also spatially segregated. We had two cafeterias, one served free or reduced-price lunch and the other was run by the business club and sold full-price Subway, pizza, Mrs. Fields, etc.
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Tony Cheng @tonykcheng.bsky.social · 20/07/2026
New w/ @shelleyliu.bsky.social in Science Advances We show that a police trust-building proj: - raised police trust among non-Black respondents - lowered it among Black respondents - cut non-Black support for BLM + racial equity policies doi.org/10.1126/scia... Funding: @RussellSageFdn
Screenshot of a Science Advances article page titled 'When trust building looks like surveillance: Public polarization toward Chicago policing' by Tony Cheng and Shelley Liu, published July 17, 2026 in Vol 12, Issue 29. The abstract states: researchers used a preregistered survey experiment in Chicago to examine responses to the police department's 'Sentiment Dashboard.' Results show the dashboard increased trust in police among non-Black respondents but reduced trust among Black respondents, especially when framed as monitoring. Among non-Black respondents, dashboard exposure also reduced support for the Black Lives Matter movement and racial equity policies unrelated to policing, such as diverse hiring and climate justice. The findings suggest state legitimacy initiatives may widen racial divides and weaken coalitions for structural reform.
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Nicholas Grossman @nicholasgrossman.bsky.social · 18/07/2026
The US built the greatest talent magnet ever, attracting the smart, skilled, and striving. They’d come to study, then stay and build things here, or leave with positive impressions and fruitful connections. Helped make the US wealthy and powerful. Then America chose to throw it away. And for what?
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Brenden Beck @brendenbeck.net · 17/07/2026
Thanks!
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Brenden Beck @brendenbeck.net · 17/07/2026
What app is this? I’d love an AQI forecast.
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Brenden Beck @brendenbeck.net · 15/07/2026
the police play a not-insignificant role in those deaths. As we consider the best ways to reduce unnecessary police killings, deaths following police pursuits are increasingly part of that consideration.
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Brenden Beck @brendenbeck.net · 15/07/2026
City and state policies on police pursuits vary. New York City recently limited the cases in which its officers could give chase to only “the most serious and violent crimes.” In a country with 40,000 traffic fatalities every year...
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Brenden Beck @brendenbeck.net · 15/07/2026
The extensive press coverage of the St. Augustine death is one indication that journalistic coverage is shifting, too. The San Francisco Chronicle was a Pulitzer finalist for its excellent coverage of deaths during police chases. www.pulitzer.org/node/jennife...
pulitzer.org
Pulitzer Finalist: Jennifer Gollan and Susie Neilson of the San Francisco Chronicle
For an immersive and revelatory series that exposed the soaring death toll tied to police pursuits and detailed the near-total immunity that shields officers who initiate deadly chases.
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Brenden Beck @brendenbeck.net · 15/07/2026
This study from April found that 6,352 people died in 5,425 crashes during police pursuits between 2009 and 2023. That’s about one-third the number of people who die from police shootings, and the number of pursuit deaths has been increasing every year since 2017. jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...
jamanetwork.com
Police Pursuit Fatality Rates in the US and Future Research Directions
Research on fatal police encounters in the US has largely focused on fatal police shootings,1 with less attention to deaths resulting from vehicle pursuits. Consequently, substantial knowledge gaps re...
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Brenden Beck @brendenbeck.net · 15/07/2026
I think that is starting to change. Journalists and academics are beginning to count vehicle deaths alongside gun and neck-restraint deaths, worthy of inclusion in our articles and studies.
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Brenden Beck @brendenbeck.net · 15/07/2026
The thinking was that, in contrast to shooting someone or putting them in a chokehold, a death due to a vehicle collision had murkier causation. How responsible were police for the death?
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Brenden Beck @brendenbeck.net · 15/07/2026
In the post-2020 wave of research on police violence, researchers largely ignored fatalities due to police pursuits. When studying police killings, I and most other scholars omitted data on car-crash deaths from our analyses.
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Brenden Beck @brendenbeck.net · 15/07/2026
Yesterday a man was fatally struck by a tractor trailer while fleeing ICE agents. This tragedy, in Florida, highlights a change in my thinking (and maybe scholarship and journalism writ large) around fatal law enforcement interactions. Thread. www.nytimes.com/2026/07/14/u...
nytimes.com
Man in Florida Fatally Hit by Truck While Fleeing ICE, Official Says
Details were unclear on Tuesday about what exactly happened at a gas station in St. Augustine before the man was killed.
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Brenden Beck @brendenbeck.net · 09/07/2026
As Zoom meetings, sprawl, and working from home have proliferated, even this city booster has been surprised by how sticky urban centers have proven. The most profit-driven firms recognize the importance of dense meat space. www.thecityreporter.nyc/2026/07/09/b...
thecityreporter.nyc
Big Business is Leasing Record Office Space in Mamdani’s New York
Some of the biggest names in banking, law and artificial intelligence are expanding their footprints in Manhattan and Brooklyn office towers.
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Brenden Beck @brendenbeck.net · 08/07/2026
Veep (2012)
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Brenden Beck @brendenbeck.net · 01/07/2026
Thanks for all the convos!
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Razzball @razzball.bsky.social · 26/06/2026
my kind of Jubilee, the Japanese national team vs. 100 kids
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John Pfaff @johnpfaff.bsky.social · 25/06/2026
Rural areas increasingly dominate the grim homicide rate "leaderboard." Now, that's a tad unfair--they surely dominate safest places too, bc places w small pops have much more volatility (1 extra homicide can swing a rural rate, not NYC's). But still: urban/rural homicides rates are converging.
Half of U.S. counties with highest rates of gun homicides are
rural
Top 50 U.S. counties with the highest annualized firearm homicide rates, 2021-2024
Use pagination to browse, click column headings to sort, or search within the table.
Search in table
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Annualized Gun Homicide
County
Urbanization
Rate
1
St. Louis city, MO
large metro
77.94
2
Washington County, MS
rural
68.60
3
Holmes County, MS
rural
67.48
4
Hinds County, MS
small metro
67.22
5
Leflore County, MS
rural
66.90
6
Orleans Parish, LA
large metro
55.69
7
Coahoma County, MS
rural
53.47
8
Dallas County, AL
rural
49.23
9
Petersburg city, VA
large metro
47.71
10
Baltimore city, MD
large metro
46.81
11
Allendale County, SC
rural
46.35
12
Tunica County, MS
large metro
43.68
13
Wilkinson County, MS
rural
41.56
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