Rebuilding Place in the Urban Space

"A community’s physical form, rather than its land uses, is its most intrinsic and enduring characteristic." [Katz, EPA] This blog focuses on place and placemaking and all that makes it work--historic preservation, urban design, transportation, asset-based community development, arts & cultural development, commercial district revitalization, tourism & destination development, and quality of life advocacy--along with doses of civic engagement and good governance watchdogging.

Sunday, February 11, 2018

Um, no, DC doesn't have one of the highest rates of police shootings (flyer posted on traffic control box, 6th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue NW)

Actually, DC doesn't have one of the highest rates of police shootings (flyer posted on traffic control box, 6th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue NW)

This style of flyer is posted pretty frequently across the city. There is no identification on the flyers of the group putting them up.

I took the photo, forgot about it, and then when uploading some photos today, looked up some data. While of course, one killing is too many, and DC has a fair amount of violent crime, which means it's more likely that there will be some police killings, according to the most recent data I could find, from the Mapping Police Violence website (2015 data), DC ranks 46th of the nation's 60 largest cities.

Is that "one of the highest rates"?

Probably not. It definitely is a misuse of data.

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5 Comments:

At 11:49 PM, Blogger Hayden Higgins said...

FWIW, it's also a misuse of data to compare killings with shootings :) it's unlikely but possible that there are a lot of officer-involved shootings in DC, but not many killings.

keep up the great work! dig the blog

 
At 4:42 PM, Blogger Richard Layman said...

Urg. Thank you for making that point. I missed it myself!

 
At 5:59 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

I have been seeing a lot of these sorts of signs up off Georgia Avenue in recent weeks.

 
At 2:59 PM, Blogger Richard Layman said...

I have another one that I realized I photographed before. This is from E. Capitol and 8th Streets SE:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/rllayman/26377398778

 
At 3:02 PM, Blogger Richard Layman said...

Ah, it makes sense that you've seen these on Georgia Avenue. When I clicked through the bit.ly URL this is what I got:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1oKHjHM5h-WAjoVnwEV9kQVihvrYLoyOehsfSu5gUbgw/edit

 

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