Your Questions about the Frame

Midterm Topics to Keep in Mind

5 Facts about Crime

On our theme of using actual data to make arguments, here's a Pew Research Center study about crime rates in the US, in contrast to political discourse about them.

Another Week Like That

Woodard's 11-Nations map held up pretty well during the mid-terms.  Leaving aside the important effects of gerrymandering and voter suppression ("Why Wasn't the Blue Wave Bigger?"), the map predicts that Democrats, standing for social improvement through collective action and regulation, would have a harder time advancing in the Old South and Greater Applachia than in midwestern Yankeedom.  And that's what happened.  Wisconsin and Michigan reverted to their historic baselines, and Georgia and Florida didn't quite depart from theirs. One change to watch is that Far West, which has been solidly Republican for a few decades, is increasingly in play.

We also have had another mass killing, this one in a country-western bar in Ventura County halfway between Santa Barbara and Los Angeles. The shooter has now been identified, and fits a pattern we'll discuss next week.  If you're interested in this issue, consider this piece, What Explains U.S. Mass Shootings? International Comparisons Suggest an Answer.

Shedding Light on an Especially Violent Week of American Hate

The first question is always the same: can we understand insane acts like the several that made massive news this past week (two senior citizens killed for being black in a grocery store, pipe bombs sent to leading Trump opponents, 11 murdered in a Pittsburgh synagogue)? The course's answer is yes we can. More on that in lecture and section this week.

Two others are, why do people pick the wrong targets? Can detection-like inquiry reduce this problem?  This piece confirms the relevance of this problem in the pipe-bombing case. David Dayen, a prominent financial journalist (author of Chain of Title), starts with this:

Cesar Sayoc, the Donald Trump-loving Floridian who was taken into custody in relation to pipe bombs mailed to prominent Democrats, was foreclosed on in 2009 by a bank whose principal owner and chair is now Trump’s treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin.

Also relevant: this journalist's Twitter thread about the knowledge problems created by "both-sidesism," which, as we know, detectives like Sherlock Holmes scrupulously avoid.

Slides on Paper 1

Chicago Police

I mentioned Marlowe's description of police brutality and then the Chicago Police Department's perennial problems with this. Then I discovered the New York Times had an editorial that very day on the subject.   It starts like this:

Chicago erupted three years ago when the city belatedly released a video showing that a white officer had essentially executed a black teenager named Laquan McDonald and that the police and city officials lied about it for months. The public’s outrage drove the police superintendent and county prosecutor from their jobs. Last Friday, 12 jurors convicted the officer, Jason Van Dyke, of second-degree murder after less than eight hours of deliberation.

Take a look.