-

 Hello, world!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

What's going on in Sunnyvale?

-
The big news on local TV today is the "59% rise in violent crime" in Sunnyvale. That caught my attention, because a) it sounds like another bogus use of statistics and b) as we've seen in Los Altos next door, crime has been generally low and not shooting up. The news report alluded to "California DOJ" data, but failed to actually point to it. Have no fear, gentle reader, for we have trod where KTVU fears to go: straight to the data. The DOJ does, in fact, provide this data, although it takes a little work to get to. You can download it here, if you are interested: https://openjustice.doj.ca.gov/exploration/crime-statistics   Next you have to filter that down to only show Sunnyvale. Excel, Google Sheets, and LibreOffice all have a way of doing that, using "filters." Once you set them up, you get a little pull-down menu for each column, and you can select only the values you want. That's what I did, for each of the 5 cities shown below. Then I plott...
Read more

ALPR data being shared with anti-abortion states

-
Despite guidance from California Attorney General Rob Bonta, quite a few California police departments are sharing automated license plate reader (ALPR) data with out-of-state law enforcement agencies. ALPR systems, like the one that Los Altos is installing from Flock Safety, take pictures of every car going by, digitize their license plate, and record their presence. Police say this helps identify stolen vehicles, which are often used in crimes -- in principle, this should reduce crime, although the evidence that it actually works is very thin. This is a problem if someone from an abortion-restricted state travels to California for reproductive health care. By law , (AB 1242) police in California cannot assist out-of-state law enforcement in prosecuting people for coming here for an abortion. And by law (SB 34) California police cannot share any ALPR data with out-of-state agencies, according to our AG.  And  yet 71 police agencies did just that, and dozens still do. Many ...
Read more

Quick look at the 2022-23 data

-
One of the simplest things we can do is to simply count up all the police stops in all of the Los Altos data, and count them by race. Here's what you get when you do that with the Los Altos RIPA data:   Total Stops Stops per hundred per year Relative per capita rate Transient population required to equalize stops         White 1843 6.9 1.00 17735 Hispanic/Latino/a 1137 55.9 8.06 10941 Asian 798 7.6 1.10 7679 Middle Eastern or South Asian 587 14.9 2.15 5649 Black/African American 191 87.8 12.68 1838 "Total Stops" is easy, that's just all the stops the police made. Unsurprisingly, most of the people stopped by the police in Los Altos are white -- because most of the people in Los Altos are white. Suppose we try to normalize that by the population of each race in Los Altos. It's not as easy as it might seem to get those numbers, because not everyone has the same divisions of race. I used a combination fo the 2020 US Census data and the World Population Review . So...
Read more