Crime Rates During the Occupy Oakland Encampment

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Friday February 24, 2012 · 2:31 PM PST

2012/02/24 · 14:31

From: Jordan, Howard
Sent: Monday, October 31, 2011 12:13 PM
To: Harmon, Reygan
Cc: Santana, Deanna; Orologas, Alexandra
Subject: FW: City of Oakland Weekly Crime Report: 24-30 Oct 2011

Fyi. Not sure how you want to share this GOOD news with MJQ. It may be counter to our statement that the Occupy Movement is negatively impacting crime in Oakland.

Howard A. Jordan
Interim Chief of Police
Oakland Police Department

This is the Oakland Police Chief’s now-infamous email to the mayor’s office regarding a large drop in the weekly crime rate, at the same time the city was claiming the Occupy encampment was causing a spike in crime. This email is damning in itself, because it implies the city knowingly invented a false excuse for its violent eviction of Occupy Oakland on October 25th.

But many within the movement have taken this email as evidence that the Occupy encampment was itself responsible for the drop in crime—while critics have suggested it was a statistical blip that had nothing to do with Occupy Oakland. To get a better view of the issue, we need to go beyond Jordan’s email—we need to look at the weekly crime rates before, during, and after the encampment, and how those rates compare to previous years. This can tell us whether the falling crime rate was a typical fluctuation or something more significant—but it can’t directly tell us the cause. For that I’ll add a few of my own observations as a longtime resident of downtown Oakland.

Abou Ben Adhem

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Saturday February 11, 2012 · 5:19 PM PST

2012/02/11 · 17:19

I've seen several detailed online accounts of what unfolded in Oakland on January 28, but relatively little about the developments within Occupy Oakland that led up to it. I’ve also seen a lot of misconceptions about why the action was proposed and what its intended outcome was, and I’d like to clear them up.
First, a disclaimer: This is from the perspective of someone who regularly attends General Assemblies, but who did not directly take part in the planning for the event. I voted for the initial proposal, I sat in on parts of some Move-In Assembly meetings and had some casual conversations with people in that assembly, and I participated in the marches on the 28th. But there are many others better informed than I am, and I hope they’ll correct me if I’ve gotten anything wrong or left out significant details.

Abou Ben Adhem

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Monday December 18, 2006 · 1:36 PM PST

2006/12/18 · 13:36

I made an off-the-cuff suggestion on Hunter's Daily Kos 4.0 Suggestions Thread regarding changing the Diaries-and-Comments site structure of Daily Kos. The idea's been growing on me ever since; and I think it bears fleshing out in a separate diary.

See, the current structure of Daily Kos is like this: Each story or diary acts as a "seed"; and the comment threads for each diary conceptually form a "tree". Each diary+comments tree grows for a while, until the diary scrolls off the list. Then the discussions end; the branches die out; new diary seeds are planted, and the old, abandoned diaries and their comment trees are filed away into the near-oblivion of the archives.

But with just a few changes (detailed below), that underlying structure could be radically transformed: Instead of a series of discrete trees with limited lifespans, we could have a continuous, evolving "grapevine" of interconnected discussions. This would solve a number of persistent site complaints as a side effect; and it could be done without radically changing the site's interface or giving up any of the advantages of the current diary+comments system.

Poll

25 votes Show Results

This idea is

25 votes Vote Now!

This idea is

Good

12 votes

Bad

4 votes

Ugly

9 votes

dKosopedia is the plug for our memory hole.

Abou Ben Adhem

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Thursday November 30, 2006 · 6:44 AM PST

2006/11/30 · 06:44

It's been a year and a half since the ability to add easy links to dKosopedia was added to this site; I don't think there's been a story or diary specifically discussing this feature since then. So to recap: You can create a link from any word or phrase to the dKosopedia article of the same name, by simply putting double brackets around it. For instance, [[George W. Bush]] becomes George W. Bush. (Notice the special styling to indicate that it's a dKosopedia link.)

So why is this a good thing? When should you do it? And what is dKosopedia, anyway?

Poll

10 votes Show Results

dKosopedia is...

10 votes Vote Now!

dKosopedia is...

something I've already been using.

4 votes

something I intend to start linking to.

4 votes

something I intend to contribute to.

0 votes

a worthless toy for geeks and vandals.

0 votes

a place to stash our pie for later consumption.

2 votes

Why We Can't Be Trusted

Abou Ben Adhem

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Wednesday July 05, 2006 · 12:39 PM PDT

2006/07/05 · 12:39

In theory, the internet, blogging, and "people-powered media" should have made the professional news media obsolete. With ubiquitous internet access, information about any event can be produced directly by those witness to it; and that information can be accessed without intermediaries by anyone interested in reading or viewing it. The main reason this has so far failed to happen is that news consumers have no way of assessing the credibility of unknown or anonymous news sources.

Consider: Any one of us has a limited number of other people whom we know well enough to accept as reliable sources of information. We trust information that comes from these people first-hand; and we usually trust information these people relay to us second-hand, from people they trust and will vouch for in turn. But if someone tells us something that got passed to them from a source they don't know themselves, we generally regard it as hearsay and rumor. In effect, our reliable news sources are limited to those from whom we are at most one degree removed.

Below the fold: the role of the media, why this is a problem, and how we can fix it Read More

Site Fix: RSS feeds for diarists

Abou Ben Adhem

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Saturday December 03, 2005 · 10:19 PM PST

2005/12/03 · 22:19

I've noticed for some time that the RSS links for individual diarists are broken -- they just lead to a FeedBurner error page saying "This feed is making a 'clunking' sound. This publisher's content was recently unavailable so FeedBurner cannot present it at this time." After a month or so of periodically checking to see if the problem had been fixed, I finally read the fine print on FeedBurner's error message: "Detail: There was a problem retrieving the feed: Error getting URL: 404 - Parameter required".

I looked at the feed URL, and sure enough, the user name parameter wasn't labeled as such:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/dailykos/user?Armando

So I tried adding a label:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/dailykos/user?user=Armando

And bingo! A valid feed!

Could somebody please make this change to the template for the diaries page so that it generates valid URLs!

dKos+dKosopedia search bookmarklet

Abou Ben Adhem

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Sunday November 20, 2005 · 3:58 PM PST

2005/11/20 · 15:58

Have you ever wished you could simultaneously look up a term in this site's tag list and on the dKosopedia?

Or that, when you come across a political term on another site, you could quickly pull up that term's dKosopedia entry and related Daily Kos diaries?

Well, I did, so I wrote a little javascript bookmarklet that does just that. (script and instructions below the fold...)

Note: I'm not a javascript pro, and I've only tested it in Safari and Firefox. It doesn't work correctly in Firefox -- the dKosopedia frame overwrites the diary frame due to a redirect. Feel free to make improvements/suggestions! Read More

Reflecting Values vs. Effecting Values

Abou Ben Adhem

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Saturday October 08, 2005 · 11:24 AM PDT

2005/10/08 · 11:24

It's certainly the case, as Armando and many others have pointed out, that liberals and conservatives see the legislative enforcement of values as having different scopes -- conservatives tend to want laws enforcing personal, private morality, while liberals want laws enforcing public, institutional morality. But I believe this is merely a symptom of an even deeper philosophical divide concerning the ultimate purpose of legislation:

Conservatives see legislation as a direct expression of their values -- sort of like a state-enforced personal code of conduct. It doesn't matter what effect a law has, as long as it embodies some sort of moral principle. Liberals, on the other hand, see legislation as a tool for actually realizing their values -- they judge laws by their effectiveness and expected consequences.

This is why liberals and conservatives have such different views on issues like contraception and affirmative action: Read More

Disproving Creationism: The Parable of the Creator

Abou Ben Adhem

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Friday August 12, 2005 · 12:52 PM PDT

2005/08/12 · 12:52

In the 17th century, the philosopher Spinoza attempted to derive the nature and attributes of God using logic alone. The God Spinoza described, however, was very different from God as portrayed in the Bible. One thing Spinoza was able to demonstrate (though he didn't spell it out in so many words) is that the concept of God as an infinitely powerful, omniscient being is logically incompatible with God as an "intelligent designer".

Unfortunately, he presented his work in the form of Euclidian-style geometrical proofs, complete with definitions, axioms, corollaries, etc. The end result wasn't very accessible, and has been largely neglected or derided since (although Albert Einstein endorsed it, among others).

Anyway, here's my attempt to adapt that aspect of Spinoza's work to the form of a Biblical parable, so Creationists can follow along (needless to say, it's a vast oversimplification of Spinoza's thinking): Read More

Better than impeachment

Abou Ben Adhem

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Thursday June 30, 2005 · 4:58 PM PDT

2005/06/30 · 16:58

So Zogby's latest poll shows a surprising amount of popular support for impeaching Bush. And a lot of people here have been pushing for the same thing, arguing that impeachment proceedings would be a good opportunity to expose all of Bush's failures and lies. But I think that popular support like this actually weakens the political value of impeachment: It shows that the case against Bush has already effectively been made, and that it's time to start shifting blame onto the Republicans in Congress.

Here's the frame we use to do it:

Bush's failures stem in large part from Congress' failure to exercise its constitutional role of advising and overseeing the administration. An executive branch run amuck is the inevitable consequence of a legislature that has abandoned its obligation to act as a balancing power.

If we can succeed in framing Bush's failures in this way, it will be the Republicans in Congress pushing for impeachment in an attempt to exonerate themselves.

Signs of female subjugation under every rock.

Abou Ben Adhem

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Monday June 06, 2005 · 2:30 PM PDT

2005/06/06 · 14:30

First.

I am a man. "Women's issues" don't necessarily take precedence over every other progressive issue for me. I think a lot of Kos' abortion-related diaries have been unfairly branded as misogynistic. And I couldn't have cared less about the pie ad.

Even though I'm not part of the "women's studies set", I found Kos' initial response to the ad complaints to be as asinine as nearly everyone else, and I was glad to see him back off.

But.

I think his apology, where he tried to limit his criticism to "a small, extremist set looking for signs of female subjugation under every rock", really exposes the underlying problem here.

Because I do consider myself a part of that set.

(more below) Read More

Abortion vs. Capital Punishment

Abou Ben Adhem

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Wednesday May 11, 2005 · 5:38 PM PDT

2005/05/11 · 17:38

In Don't Think of an Elephant, Lakoff discusses the apparent philosophical inconsistency of opposing war and capital punishment, on the one hand, and supporting abortion rights and euthanasia, on the other. He resolves the inconsistency by deriving the left and right positions on these issues from underlying metaphors of family structure. But there's a simpler, more persuasive element cutting across all these issues: Government intervention.

When there's a question of whether or not a particular person/fetus should live or die, the consistent liberal position is that the government shouldn't involve itself. Rather than (or in addition to) arguing the individual merits of capital punishment, abortion rights, euthanasia, etc., we should be pushing this point. (Ironically, it's an argument that ought to particularly appeal to small-government conservatives.)

Newer
Older

RSS

Crime Rates During the Occupy Oakland Encampment

Occupy Oakland's Move-In Day: background and broader context

The Infinite Thread (DK4.0 suggestion)

dKosopedia is the plug for our memory hole.

Why We Can't Be Trusted

Site Fix: RSS feeds for diarists

dKos+dKosopedia search bookmarklet

Reflecting Values vs. Effecting Values

Disproving Creationism: The Parable of the Creator

Better than impeachment

Signs of female subjugation under every rock.

Abortion vs. Capital Punishment