Texas Governor Rick Perry, giving advice last Friday to one of the largest graduating classes of new DPS troopers ever:
You might pay heed to a hunch and check a truck more closely the way one of your fellow troopers recently did…and stopped $3 million worth of cocaine from reaching our communities.
Don’t forget to make a pretext stop first though… that ‘hunch’ may not hold up for reasonable suspicion to detain.
Via Jeff Beckham, the Austin American-Statesman has a feature where subscribers can search property crimes in any area of Austin, by zip code, or even by street. (It’s free, but yes, you may have to ‘sign up’ to use the link.)
The map was created to support reporter Tony Plohetski’s story on property crimes, which looked at more than 40,000 police reports and showed that “property crimes are rarely solved, and the success of solving a case largely depends on where the crime is reported.”
This is a great addition to the Statesman.com site and exactly the type of feature that local newspapers should employ. The only drawback is that these are 2006 numbers, and thus about eight months old.
I think there are potentially other drawbacks, besides the age of the data. In fact, while I can’t prove it, I doubt there are statistically significant differences between actual current and year old data.
Other drawbacks? Well, according to the ‘APD disclaimer’ on the site:
OK. Sounds like a standard “written by a civil lawyer” disclaimer.
But they could have just replaced it with the most famous quote from Mark Twain’s “Chapters from My Autobiography”:
Figures often beguile me, particularly when I have the arranging of them myself; in which case the remark attributed to Disraeli would often apply with justice and force: 'There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.'
On a criminal defense practice note, I wonder whether the numbers in this database might be crunched to possibly contest a police officer’s contention that one of the reasons he stopped the defendant was “because he was in a high crime area”. It’s almost a joke among defense lawyers that some cops are willing to testify that any area of Austin is “high crime”. Next time I see that in a police report justifying reasonable suspicion to detain, I think I’ll use APD’s own stats to see whether or not it’s true…
Ken Lammers over at CrimLaw posted about Richmond, Virginia's efforts to create Prostitute-Free Zones. Once again, what at first seems like a good idea, and certainly makes for good political grandstanding, turns out to be a poorly thought out idea. Some quotes from the Richmond Times-Dispatch story on the subject:
"Getting a conviction on prostitution is somewhat difficult -- even making an arrest," 3rd District Councilman Chris A. Hilbert said. "You can't make that initial arrest any easier, but banishment for someone's mere presence in these zones could help to curb the problem and prevent people from coming back and harming these neighborhoods...We ought to be focused on not just getting tough on crime, but getting smart on crime."
Apparently, the police can't always develop reasonable suspicion to detain "known prostitutes" who are merely existing in certain areas, so the Councilman believes we should get rid of the basic idea in criminal law, called reasonable suspicion to detain, that the police have to have some sort of justification to stop and investigate you for criminal activity.
As to getting smart on crime, how about this: let's ban certain people from various neighborhoods in a particular city. Wait a minute, that's not fair to the other parts of the city. Let's ban them from the entire city. But wait, prostitution is illegal county wide. This known prostitute, who is not currently violating the law should be banned from the entire county. Oh wait, Prostitution is illegal all across the state... and the country...
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