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In the midst of the ongoing Chick-fil-A mess, now seems like a good time to take a look at hate and bias crime. If you haven’t already read it, you really should start with last week’s post about Chick-fil-A. It deals with some of the free speech issues. To reiterate: hate speech is generally, […]
July 3, 2012 by CrimeCents
What with World Elder Abuse Awareness Day and the Karen Klein story, elder abuse is suddenly in the spotlight. Unfortunately, there is no national data source that gives a quantitative overview of elder abuse. The two biggest sources of crime data in this country – the FBI’s UCR data and the National Crime Victimization Survey […]
May 17, 2012 by CrimeCents
Alright, I admit, that headline is a bit sensational. The science itself isn’t all bad, it’s how it gets used and the failure of the criminal justice system to be sensible about science that leads to science being misused. So what’s gone wrong? Stated conclusions far exceed the reasonable limits of the science. If you […]
May 11, 2012 by CrimeCents
First, a quick primer on the difference between jails and prisons. Jails are short-term correctional facilities and pretrial detention. Jail holds those who have been convicted, will be convicted, and will be acquitted. It holds those who have been arrested but not arraigned, it holds those who pose a danger to others. Prisons, on the […]
CrimeDime had a great month. Not only did we redesign the site, we also watched CrimeDime grow with many new visitors and followers. Thanks to our readers for helping to make this a great site with interesting discussion in the comments. In case you missed it, here’s what we covered in April. April includes National […]
April 25, 2012 by CrimeCents
The Federal Bureau of Investigation makes the Uniform Crime Report (UCR) data publicly available, and has even introduced a web-based tool to search the data in 2010. But Google’s Public Data service may offer the best option to quickly customize and display UCR crime data. You can even embed the charts in your website, but […]
April 24, 2012 by CrimeCents
I say “crime victim.” Without thinking, what popped into your mind? If you had a mental image, what was it? Chances are, the person that you immediately thought of is female, white, middle class, maybe a little girl, maybe a soccer mom. Yet the data don’t support that image, which is created by media and […]
April 20, 2012 by CrimeCents
In the last several years, we’ve seen many states pass medical marijuana legislation, the growth of support for legalizing marijuana, and a whole lotta money wasted on marijuana arrests. The following graphs are created from 2010 FBI UCR arrest data (the most recent available), except where noted. There were an estimated 13.1 million arrests in […]
April 6, 2012 by CrimeCents
Does it strike you as odd that the FBI uses the term ‘loot’? It does me. I mean, it’s such a goofy word, loot. It conjures up five-year-olds pretending to be pirates on the playground, right? Is this some kind of weird Kindergarten Cop reference? No? You don’t find it funny? Just me then, again. […]
August 6, 2012 by CrimeCents
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