Every City with a Violent Crime Problem Should Have a ‘Most Potentially Dangerous’ List
The “controversy” surrounding Cincinnati’s “1,500 most dangerous criminals,” which the Cincinnati Enquirer (NOT the compilers) re-dubbed “a list of 1,500 likely murderers,” is totally bogus, as seen in the description of how it was compiled:
Neighborhood crime activist Chris Kearney created the list using a computer program to ferret out all people in Hamilton County who’ve committed a violent crime in the past 12 months and who also have a prior conviction for a gun or drug crime. He came up with those as predictors after analyzing recent homicides.
In other words, Kearney combed through public data. Any blogger or reporter with a little programming knowledge could have done the same thing and published it, perfectly legally.
Jim Borgman’s likening of the group’s efforts to McCarthyism is an absolute disgrace.
Rather than questioning the propriety of Kearney and the bipartisan group of politicians behind him doing this, the community should be thanking them — and wondering why the Police Department or the Safety Division didn’t do this years ago.
I also wonder: How many of those hyperventilating over a dangerous criminals list compiled from public data have previously had absolutely no problem with the efforts by agenda-driven Ohio reporters to make public the names of all concealed-carry permit holders, which the Legislature clearly intended to keep from public scrutiny?
Tom, have you considered how many people this list misses? Such as people whose first violent crime will BE a murder? Compiling such a list evokes a false sense of security, Tom. Just because the info is out there TO compile, doesn’t mean that compiling it supplies us with anything helpful. You are a thorough cautious person IMO when you predict economics etc. I would expect you to be just a bit more stringent in your expectations of such a list as well as the people putting it together - NO insult intended, but rather, a compliment to how I think you critique.
Comment by Jill — April 30, 2007 @ 8:47 am
Jill, sorry for taking so long to respond. Crazy day.
I don’t see this as any different, in a more positive situation, from a baseball manager looking at his bullpen and deciding who is most likely to get the next few batters out. He’s not going to consider the other starters, as they never do relief. He’ll tend to pick the relievers that are the most successful based on what they’ve done before. Yeah, that kid who just came up from the minors might be good, but he hasn’t shown anything in the bigs yet.
Similarly, but negatively, the cops need to know, based on publicly available past history of violent crime, who is more likely than the average citizen to get involved with violent crime again. Of course this approach won’t pick up newbies, but it’s better than naively assuming that everyone is a newbie, even those with a violent past.
I don’t get your false sense of security argument. Nobody’s saying that the 1500 will be the only causes of violent crime, but it’s pretty safe to assume that this 0.6% or so of the city’s above-14 population will collectively be responsible for a LOT more than 0.6% of the city’s violent crime. Current police practices in Cincy seem almost seem to assume the absurd, and those who want to ignore readily available public info seem to almost be demanding that we assume the absurd.
I don’t know for sure, but it would make sense that Giuliani turned around NYC’s desperately bad crime situation in part by using lists like these, or by compiling similar information. He definitely targeted high-crime areas down to the street-corner level. It only follows that he would have also concentrated on the violent criminals who live in those areas by going through public records and other data sources to identify them.
Comment by TBlumer — April 30, 2007 @ 10:31 pm