Thursday, January 08, 2015

C.D. Michel:Kamala’s Con – the California Attorney General’s Numbers Game

C.D. Michel gives us some useful information in this article. 

Never attribute to malice or conspiracy that which can be explained by incompetence. Trouble is, when it comes to gun control and the California Attorney General’s office, both are likely.

A San Diego newspaper recently reported that political comer Kamala Harris, Barack Obama’s eye candy, has finally gotten around to producing various legally mandated crime “reports;” but only after the media discovered and exposed that she wasn’t. Some might say “better late than never.” But in this case it isn’t.

Understanding crime and its sources is critical to understanding how to actually prevent crime. Crime prevention, as opposed to, say, passing feel good laws that do nothing except get a politician media coverage for name recognition building among low information voters. Incomplete reporting provides incomplete insight and invites mischaracterizing spin of insufficient data. For example, when a report belatedly put out by the well-funded California Attorney General’s office fails to include entire regions of the state where violent crime rates are highest, that report is D grade work at best. Handing it in late makes it worse.

In most states, there are two different types of crime laboratories; those run by the state government and those run by big cities. California is no different. Cities like San Francisco, Los Angeles and Oakland analyze their own crimes in their own labs. So relying only on the state labs’ numbers excludes violent gun crimes tracked by local labs in Oakland, Los Angeles, San Francisco … And if the big cities data is removed from reporting, the overwhelming majority of resulting crimes – the ones analyzed by the state crime labs – are rural and statistically infrequent. This includes crimes of violence, and crimes committed with guns. But that’s what the AG’s useless report did.

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